FREEDOM’S DAWN

THE LAST DAYS OF JOHN BROWN IN VIRGINIA

Louis DeCaro Jr.

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

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For grieving mothers and fathers

of black sons and daughters,

outrageously slain by armed thugs

or racists with badges

He intended to put the Declaration of Independence through from Harper’s Ferry to the Gulf of Mexico.

—JAMES REDPATH[1]

1. James Redpath to William Lloyd Garrison, 13 Jan. 1860, in “John Brown’s Intentions,” The Liberator, 20 Jan. 1860, 11.

His project is easily characterized as mad, as any other daring and hazardous exploit is apt to be called, particularly after it is seen to have failed.

—THEODORE TILTON[2]

2. Theodore Tilton, “A Personal Interview with Captain Brown’s Wife,” The Independent, 17 Nov. 1859, 1.

PROLOGUE

A HAND UNSEEN

In the middle of the nineteenth century a system of chattel slavery dominated the United States. Its precepts were white supremacy, black inferiority, and profits gained by stolen labor. Its operations were violent, dehumanizing, and thoroughly politicized. By nature, its appetite for expansion was insatiable, and its impact upon the soul of the nation was decadent and depraved.

By the late 1850s, the prospects of ending slavery were nil. The proslavery element was intent on expansion, and many proslavery leaders were looking for an excuse to break with the Union in order to pursue their own agenda. The majority of free-state people, including the moderate wing of the young Republican Party, were willing to tolerate the status quo, demanding only that slavery not expand. Conservatives in the North defended slavery and often did so because they desired the continuation of its financial benefits. Others were antislavery in opinion, but held to a gradualist and nonviolent approach that amounted to doing nothing while slavery was preparing for expansion by any means necessary. To make matters worse, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 gave the South unprecedented reach into the North, while the Dred Scott decision of 1857 declared that black people had no rights that whites were bound to respect.

In the North, a portion of antislavery people, called abolitionists, upheld black equality and called for immediate emancipation. However, most abolitionists were committed to a pacifist philosophy known as “moral suasion,” which involved noble arguments and passionate jeremiads, but no plan of action. Although some abolitionists had begun moving in the direction of political action in the 1850s, few if any actually considered real strategies for undermining slavery on a national scale. In fact, only one man had a feasible plan, and only one sought to implement it for the sake of suffering humanity. It is a matter of the historical record that this man was John Brown, and that he failed in his effort to initiate a liberation movement at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.

Probably in 1859, after Brown’s defeat and hanging, Edwin Morton, an abolitionist associate, wrote a short poem titled “The Archer,” describing the experience of a failed bowman. The archer, having bent his bow and “aimed the shaft with anxious eye,” now realizes that “a sudden breath from Heaven” has contravened, causing him to miss the mark. Yet the archer’s disappointment turns to joy when he sees that his arrow has found a “brighter mark” and that

A Hand unseen the trial crowned

And aimed it better than I knew.1

Although Morton does not reveal the story underlying this verse, it is hard not to read it as a reflection on John Brown, especially given his association with the old man of Harper’s Ferry fame. Not only was the poet a close assistant to Brown’s generous supporter, the abolitionist Gerrit Smith, but he also knew Brown well in his own right.2 Like the archer in Morton’s verse, Brown had taken careful aim and let fly the arrow of liberation, only to fail—and then found himself taken by slave masters, tried, and executed as a “foe of the human race.”

After Brown’s defeat in October 1859, it must have moved Morton quite deeply to watch the fallen liberator from a distance. Imprisoned, tried, and finally martyred on a Virginia gallows, Morton seemingly came to believe that the old man’s failure and death were divinely purposed to bring about the complete defeat of slavery. Of course, this was how Brown himself had come to understand his failure at Harper’s Ferry. “I have been whipped as the saying is,” he wrote to his wife from jail, “but am sure I can recover all the lost capital occasioned by that disaster by only hanging a few moments by the neck & I feel quite determined to make the utmost possible out of a defeat.”3

Nor would Morton have been alone in concluding that the “Hand unseen” that had frustrated Brown’s plans had also crowned him as a shining martyr who would light the path to freedom for millions of enslaved men, women, and children. Antislavery people quickly recognized, as did Morton, that Brown’s self-acknowledged “disaster” would benefit the abolitionist crusade, even as it elevated him to the heights of sainthood. After all, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous words about Brown’s gallows being “glorious like the Cross” was a prediction made while the old man was still incarcerated in Virginia in early November 1859. Brown was a “saint,” declared Emerson, “whose fate yet hangs in suspense.”4

But what “suspense” could there have been, particularly because Brown already had been found guilty and sentenced to death by the time of Emerson’s remarks, and by then was sitting in a jail cell in Charlestown, Virginia, awaiting execution? The answer is that in early November, Emerson and other friends and admirers of Brown were still hoping that either he might be freed in some bold rescue effort or at least that his death sentence might be commuted. In retrospect, neither prospect was well grounded, although during Brown’s incarceration they seemed as real possibilities to the hopeful antislavery people of the North.

In 1860, only months after the hanging, James Redpath, the abolitionist journalist and Brown’s first biographer, wrote that during the old man’s last days, “the highest talent of the nation was marshalling to the rescue of the conquering prisoner of Charlestown Jail.” Indeed, Redpath was among a circle of abolitionists plotting to attack the jail and liberate Brown and his men—a plan that failed not only because of a lack of finance but also because the old man himself had privately refused any notion of being rescued.5

There was also ample talk of Brown either being pardoned or having his death sentence commuted. On November 4, two days after the conclusion of Brown’s trial, a journalist in Richmond reported that Governor Henry Wise “was daily getting letters pouring in . . . urging the pardon of Brown, or a commutation of his sentence.” While many of these communications also included anonymous threats, there also were various appeals and arguments raised, not only from antislavery people, but also from conservatives in the North. Some had suggested that the politically ambitious Wise might even win the presidency in 1860 if he showed clemency to Brown.6 Of course, Wise was unwilling to do so; but in actuality, the Virginia governor alone did not have the authority to do so without the backing of the state’s General Assembly, something quite unlikely.7

Still, even some individuals in the South feared that executing Brown would backfire on the slaveholding interest. While motivated in part by his own presidential ambitions, Virginia Senator Robert Hunter thus predicted that if Brown were hanged, the North would “take advantage of it” and the power of the Republican Party would grow to the detriment of the South. “It will make us look implacable and insatiable for blood,” he declared, and this would give “the argument of martyrdom” to the foes of the South. “We may smile at the idea,” Hunter warned, but the North believed Brown a martyr—and the old man was making them “more and more believe . . . every day by his letters and speeches and his general bearing, and he will confirm and establish their belief in his death.”8

The conservative editor of the New York Herald chided Hunter’s interest in sparing Brown as a mere “Presidential hobby.” However, the senator’s remarks reveal the extent to which the defeated abolitionist had turned the tables on his captors, captured the attention of the North, and worried the South to distraction, if not paranoia.

Despite his tactical failure at Harper’s Ferry, now Brown was strangely victorious in the circumstances of his defeat. As Albert Fried put it, “No abolitionist, not even John Brown himself, could have written the scenario so masterfully. It’s as though another plan, invisibly superimposed on John Brown’s, was guiding it to fulfillment while appearing to abort it.”9

Freedom’s Dawn is inspired by this “masterfully” spontaneous historical episode, beginning with the end of the Harper’s Ferry raid, and ending with the beginning of the birth pangs of liberation resulting from John Brown’s execution. The story and history offered here is in many respects a counternarrative, and a number of assumptions and ideas about the incident are challenged and overturned. For instance, the hackneyed narrative about passive and nonchalant enslaved blacks at Harper’s Ferry is simply wrong and even deceptive. The journalism that gave rise to this myth came from proslavery reporters who served as the mouthpiece of slave masters and other influential white supremacists in the South and the North. This multigenerational deceit has been propagated not only by journalists and historians, often in ignorance, but also by those deeply invested in sustaining the slave masters’ version.

Yet even with some consideration, or reconsideration, of the Harper’s Ferry raid as necessary background, the main focus is upon Brown’s incarceration and last days, one of the most seemingly familiar yet unexplored aspects of his story. Brown’s biographers have sampled his jailhouse letters and sketched his last days, but none heretofore have made a careful study of his incarceration from available sources, in order to draw out a more substantial description of what actually may be the most dramatic and impacting episode of antebellum history.

The idea of this book was born out of my collecting and documenting Brown’s jailhouse correspondence and then constructing a chronology of his last days. I have been tracking and cataloging Brown’s letters for years, an endeavor that has given me a tremendous opportunity to observe his life and development over the nearly four decades covered by his surviving letters. However, I came to realize that the letters written from jail present a substantial story in itself, especially when read along with recorded statements and other remarks by Brown that begged for contextualization and narrative. When I set out to reconstruct this story, I found that there was a good deal of reportage and evidence that, frankly, has been overlooked for 150 years. When examined altogether, the correspondence and record provide many insights into his life and actions, including his oddly pleasant experience as a condemned man. Brown simply could not have anticipated that his defeat would result in him enjoying several weeks more of life in a secure and relatively comfortable setting, while being armed with a pen and given access to the mails. There is some evidence that he had always considered martyrdom a possibility in the event of failure, but there is no way that he could have foreseen the opportunity that would be afforded him in his incarceration to become both an oracle and an icon of the antislavery cause.

This is not only a narrative about Brown’s experience from defeat to execution, but a colorful tale brimming with the peculiar and the prominent personalities and incidents of an antebellum epic. From the angry mobs that easily would have lynched Brown if given opportunity, to the print war between two competing illustrated New York newspapers, and from the frustration of the Virginians over a very busy undercover New-York Daily Tribune reporter to the explosion of northern anti-Brown “union” meetings in the aftermath of his execution, I have endeavored to represent something of both the man and his times.

Most rewarding to me as a biographer, of course, is the deeper sense of John Brown the man that I recovered in this episode—not an opportunist who exploited his defeat by “reinventing” himself as a martyr but, rather, as one who, having failed to accomplish his plan, simply revealed himself as the man he actually was all along. Indeed, Brown was Morton’s archer—at first disappointed, but finally delighted to find that his arrow had, after all, found the “brighter mark.” Four times John Brown had escaped death in Virginia. He had endured the marine assault, lynch mobs in Harper’s Ferry, and an assassination plot and drumhead execution in Charlestown. With his confinement, the old man instead found something of a spiritual retreat in which to spend his final few days. He thrived in a relatively peaceful atmosphere of a friendly jailer, an eager press, and both the extra time and the means to prepare for the one great moment of his life. Indeed, John Brown knew that although these were his final days, they were also the rising of freedom’s dawn. “I failed,” he would tell one of his jail guards. “But it is only delay, for as certain as the sun shines, the Negroes will soon be free.”10

* All newspaper citations are from 1859 unless otherwise stated.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Rather than last, I would first like to thank my wonderful wife, Michele, and our son, Louis Michael, for all their love and support. This work was written against the backdrop of our busy lives together, full of interruptions and demands, but never without their affections and encouragement, and always precious beyond words. Likewise, I am thankful to my elder brother Frank, whose fraternal love throughout life, and unselfish support of our aged parents, has been a monumental blessing. Of course, in life and death, my loving parents, the Reverend Louis DeCaro and Clara DeCapita DeCaro, have been an inspiration and encouragement. Their love and prayers have followed me, even as my dearest affections and memories follow them. Likewise, my affectionate acknowledgments go to my aunt Desdemona DeCapita, and my beloved in-laws, Janice Suad Sweeting and Michael Sweeting.

There is no small number of friends, colleagues, and associates that might be acknowledged for their personal expressions of support and interest, and I fear that naming some will do a disservice to others. However, I must acknowledge my friend Robert D. Carle, Professor of Theology at the King’s College in New York, whose constant friendship and thoughtful dialogue on matters of faith and justice have been invaluable to me. Likewise, Paul D. Lee, Director of Best Efforts, Inc., Highland Park, Michigan, is perhaps the most rigorous, meticulous, and conscientious scholar I have ever known and has offered an encouraging stream of insight, information, and brotherly advice for many years, from Malcolm X to John Brown and beyond. Finally, I would acknowledge Gabriel Moran, my friend and former teacher at New York University. In younger days, it was my privilege to sit in his classes and draw from the depth and richness of his instruction; in more recent years, it has been a great joy to sit in his company, share his friendship, and listen to his reflections on human rights and other themes.

In terms of ministry association, likewise, I simply cannot salute all those whose kindness and interest in my work have been encouraging, but I must mention the Rev. Raymond Rivera; Dr. Luis A. Carlo; Dr. James Chin, Bishop Michael O. Brokenborough and Denise Hazzard Brokenborough, and Dr. Augustine (Austin) and Rosalyn Akalonu, Esq. Over the years, their association in ministry have offered tremendous help, guidance, and support to me, and they have proven more than faithful friends. As long-time friends go, I cannot forget to mention Hector F. Moreno and Rev. Walter Wilson.

In studying John Brown over the better part of two decades, I have come to know many wonderful people, from scholars and archivists to actors and activists, all of which share a common passion for the old man. Some of my kind associates have been correspondents that I have known only through e-mails and websites, while others have been part of the foundation of my work nearly twenty years ago. Thus, I name only a few and trust that others will forgive me: Jean Libby, Tom Vince, and Margaret Washington, who were so helpful, especially in my formative work on Brown; Gwen Mayer, Debra Basham, Ed Edinger, and Anne Stewart, whose support and contributions have been so helpful; James L. Huffman, H. Scott Wolfe, Mick Konowal, Grady Atwater, and Brendan Mills, researchers and keepers of the flame; Gwen Robinson and Brenda Travis, faithful stewards of black history in Chatham, Ontario; Martha Swann of John Brown Lives! and Naj Wikoff in the Adirondacks; Brown authors Albert Fried, David Reynolds, Evan Carton, Steven Lubet, John Hendrix, Terry Bisson, Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz, as well as Tony Horwitz, Robert McGlone, John Stauffer, and Zoe Trodd; Paul Finkelman and David Blight, for their outstanding leadership in the John Brown community of scholars; Greg Artzner and Terry Leonino, the wonderful musical group, Magpie; Ian Barford, actor and researcher; Kenneth B. Morris Jr., the direct descendant of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, and his associate, Robert J. Benz, who labor for freedom today in the Frederick Douglass Family Foundation; my friends Alice Keesey Mecoy and Marty Brown, the old man’s direct descendants; and, last but not least, Larry Lawrence, chairman of the John Brown Society of New York, and Norman Marshall the portrayer of John Brown—with whom I have shared many hours of discussion and reflection about the old man at our favorite diner on Broadway.

Finally, it is not only a customary courtesy but also a genuine desire on my part to thank my editor, Jon Sisk, for making room on the Rowman & Littlefield shelf for this work. Jon has been gracious and patient, as has also been Natalie Mandziuk and Karen Ackermann, who have undertaken the challenge of every task and detail in seeing this book published. I am very grateful to them for helping me bring this never told account to print after over a century and a half.

This is my Father’s world.

O let me ne’er forget

That though the wrong seems oft so strong,

God is the ruler yet.

GLOSSARY OF ABBREVIATIONS

ABR Rebecca B. Spring, A Book of Remembrance, Box 2, Folder 91, Rebecca Spring Papers, Department of Special Collections, Green Library, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California

AHF Josephus, Jr. [Joseph Barry], The Annals of Harper’s Ferry (Martinsburg, WV, 1872)

BACA Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser

BBS John Brown/Boyd B. Stutler Collection, West Virginia Division of Culture and History, Charleston, West Virginia

BDE Baltimore Daily Exchange

CVHM Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts

DHSL David Hunter Strother’s lecture on John Brown, Cleveland, Ohio, 23 Dec. 1868, David Hunter Strother Papers, A&M 2894, Box 8, FF16, West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, West Virginia

DHSP Dreer Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

EHF James Redpath, Echoes of Harper’s Ferry (Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860)

GEE Clarence S. Gee John Brown Collection, Hudson Library and Historical Society, Hudson, Ohio

GLC Gilder Lehrman Collection, at the New York Historical Society

HAW Henry Alexander Wise Family Papers (#16,888), Library of Congress, Washington, DC

HWE Henry Wise Executive Papers, Acc. 36710, Reels 4218–20, Library of Virginia Collection

HW Harper’s Weekly

JBHM Richard J. Hinton, John Brown and His Men (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1894)

JBT Brian McGinty, John Brown’s Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)

KSHS Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka

LLJB Franklin B. Sanborn, The Life and Letters of John Brown (1885; rpt., New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969)

LTE The Life, Trial, and Execution of Captain John Brown (New York: Robert M. DeWitt, 1859) [a compilation of contemporary reportage]

NYH New York Herald

NYHS New York Historical Society

NYIN New York Illustrated News

NYPL New York Public Library, New York, New York

NYT New York Times

NYT New-York Daily Tribune

OGV Oswald G. Villard-John Brown Papers, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, New York

PLJB James Redpath, The Public Life of Capt. John Brown (Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860)

SCHF The U.S. Congress. Senate. Select Commission on the Harpers Ferry Invasion (Washington, DC, June 1860)

SDOH S[impson] K. Donavan [Donavin], “John Brown At Harper’s Ferry And Charlestown. A Lecture,” Ohio History 30 (July 1921)

SS1860 1860 U.S. Federal Census—Slave Schedules, Eighth Census of the United States (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1860), Reel M653.

Trans. Transcript

VFHF Osborne P. Anderson, A Voice from Harper’s Ferry (Boston, 1861)

VFP Virginia Free Press and Farmer’s Repository (Charlestown, VA)

VILL Oswald G. Villard, John Brown: A Biography 1859–1909 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1910, 1929)

SECTION I

OCTOBER’S CAPTIVE

Old Lion! tangled in the net,

Baffled and spent, and wounded sore,

Bound, thou who ne’er knew bonds before,

A captive, but a lion yet.

—WILLIAM D. HOWELLS[1]

1. William D. Howells, “Old Brown,” in James Redpath, Echoes of Harper’s Ferry (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860), 316; rpt. in Ohio History (30), 181.

CHAPTER 1

I KNOW THESE MOUNTAINS WELL

Never betray your friends.

He was not yet sixty years old at the time of the raid on Harper’s Ferry, yet he had the appearance of an old, gray patriarch. His whitish beard, now cropped to a couple inches in length, gave him the look of a man at least a decade older. His aged appearance was further accented by the slight stoop that had overtaken his posture, as well as the wear and tear of fighting, flight, and hard life on the prairie. In 1857–1859, he had faced repeated attacks of “the Ague,” a lingering, feverish illness complete with sweating, chills, and weakness.1 He also suffered at times with inflammation in his eyes and ears and a likely bout with Bell’s palsy in 1856–1857, which had caused the right side of his face to droop—perhaps the original motivation for letting his beard grow.2 Yet the image of “Old Brown” was a useful illusion, considering that he was still quite wiry and rugged by the fall of 1859—more than ready to resume the life of a guerilla liberator as he had done in the Kansas territory. His militant antislavery activities there had won him the reputation of a fearless warrior and champion of the free-state cause.

Although he was already an advocate of militant resistance to slave hunters and marshals after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, John Brown’s experience in the troubled Kansas territory made him an antislavery soldier. His controversial role as a terror to proslavery thugs and a daring border combatant in the territory won him national reputation, bringing him into the company of influential abolitionists that were willing to support his efforts in Kansas and beyond. In 1857–1858, he sought to raise support for the free-state movement, moving back and forth between the territory and the East. Yet the whole time he seems to have been nursing his plan for a campaign of liberation to be launched elsewhere. Despite his popularity and success as a militant free-state figure in the territory, his efforts in Kansas proved a strategic detour toward operating, as he put it, “in another part of the field.”3

John Brown’s interest in western Virginia as the field of operation was not a novel idea, and it may be that it was the focus of interest for him about as long as he had considered taking some kind of action against slavery. The date of this determination is not clear, although there is good reason to think that his earliest ideas about running off enslaved people in large numbers dated back two decades. Although he came from a family of fervent abolitionists and was himself strongly antislavery from adolescence, Brown had made a notable public vow of war on slavery, prompted by the killing of abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois, in 1837.4

It was commonly stated by both Brown and family members that he had waited for decades to strike at slavery. As one Kansas associate recalled, Brown told him that for twenty years “he had been possessed of an earnest and firm conviction that his mission here on earth was to be the instrument, in the hands of a divine Providence” for the liberation of slaves.5 Given the radical developments of the 1850s, it is likely that his plan had been modified over the years; there may have been times when he considered launching a liberation effort in another part of the country.6 Yet the strategic appeal of western Virginia was far greater than other possible points of entry into the South.

John Brown Junior later said that his father’s attack on Harper’s Ferry “was not an accident” or an “ill-considered impulse.” Rather, it “was deliberately planned twenty years before,” while his high-profile role in Kansas actually was “accidental.”7 It has become fashionable to selectively dismiss certain recollections by Brown’s children as false memory, but John Junior’s statement is more than tenable. It is very clear that his father was not only contemplating some kind of movement as far back as the late 1830s but that he also had identified western Virginia as the point of entry.8 In the late 1840s, prior to the wave of radicalism brought on by the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, he shared as much with Frederick Douglass. As the black abolitionist recounted it, he spoke about moving into “the heart of the South” through the Allegheny Mountains. “I know these mountains well,” Brown declared, “and could take a body of men into them and keep them there despite of all the efforts of Virginia to dislodge them.”9

Yet Brown had conceived of a mountain-based effort in Virginia much earlier. Even apart from the family’s claim that plans for the raid were first proposed by Brown as early as 1836, there is sufficient evidence that he had formed an extensive idea before he was forty years old.10 David Bride, an Ohio business associate, clearly recalled an early conversation with Brown, in which he happened to mention that he had traveled through western Maryland and Virginia, and spent time in the romantic town of Harper’s Ferry. Brown responded with intense interest and asked Bride if he had “passed along the ridge west from the Ferry.” When Bride said no, Brown declared, “I have spent some time at that wonderful place while I was engaged in surveying out west, but I spend most of my time in examining the ranges of the mountains leading from it for another object than mere curiosity.”

When Bride became inquisitive, Brown replied “in an earnest confidential manner” that he had “wanted to find out a secure route for fugitives from oppression, when the proper time comes.” He further admonished Bride to keep his confidence, adding that he had traced “a route of excellent character” from Harper’s Ferry almost the whole way to the Ohio River, “and that any number of fugitives could readily find their way to the [Ohio] River and a thousand men in the mountains could not recapture them.”11

Assuming that this conversation probably took place about 1840, when Brown had done extensive survey work on behalf of Oberlin College in western Virginia,12 it sufficiently demonstrates the long-term nature of his plan. Indeed, he never abandoned the original premise of entering the South in western Virginia with the intention of using the vast Appalachians as a passageway for liberation. Following his arrest, Brown told a reporter from the New York Times that he “had only a general idea” of the way the movement would unfold in the South once it had begun, although he had “purposed a general south west course through Virginia, varying as circumstances dictated or required.”13

His strategy is further borne out in a series of maps of southern states found by militia at Brown’s rented farm in Maryland after the raid. The maps, taken from Morse and Breese’s 1842 North American Atlas, included those of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Andrew Hunter, the Virginia state prosecutor, confiscated the maps, but afterward allowed a reporter from the Norfolk Southern Argus to examine them. The reporter discovered that Brown had also pasted information on the side of each map. This included a table of the population of every county of each state based on the census of 1850, particularly statistics on whites, free blacks, and enslaved people. Similar maps were found of Maryland and Virginia, “giving the number of slaves and white men in each county and district.”14 The Argus reporter noted further that Brown had marked various localities in each of the states in a strategic manner. “The footprints of the Abolition scoundrels can be traced from Columbus, Georgia, across Alabama to Quitman, Mississippi,” he observed with disgust. It probably alarmed his southern readers when the journalist surmised that many of the counties marked on Brown’s maps “had been visited by abolition emissaries.” This would call for local officials throughout these states to remove strangers and to watch traveling businessmen and teachers closely while mobilizing every militia. “Eternal vigilance is the price of our peace and happiness,” he concluded.15

In fact, both State Prosecutor Andrew Hunter and Governor Henry Wise of Virginia had the same concerns about Brown’s surveillance and the extent of his preliminary reach into the South. When Hunter initially examined these maps, he observed that the abolitionist made particular marks on certain districts and, after interviewing Brown, ascertained that the marks distinguished areas with dense slave populations. Unfortunately, the content of that interview is lost to history, although in 1887 Hunter remained “strongly impressed” that what Brown had explained about the maps gave slave owners a cause for great concern. He further concluded that “Brown and his party were operating in all those quarters by their emissaries,” the notion of which is rarely considered, particularly because conventional narratives never go beyond Harper’s Ferry, nor is Brown credited with even the slightest ability to have developed a plan for action beyond the raid itself.16

John Kagi, one of Brown’s lieutenants, told Richard Hinton prior to the raid of “having marked out a chain of counties extending continuously through the mountains, and into South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.” Kagi explained Brown’s larger plan was to establish “small operations at many different points, striking alarm in every direction.” Hinton also believed that Kagi himself “had passed over a considerable portion of the region indicated, which embraced the sections wherein the most slaves could be found, having regard to their proximity to mountains or swamps.”17

Of course, any notion of Brown’s plans beyond Harper’s Ferry must be tempered by a balanced consideration of the record. First, it is likely that paranoia after the raid caused many Southerners to exaggerate Brown’s prior reach into the South. There certainly are reported appearances by Brown in the South that seem apocryphal, such as an old yarn about him posing as a clock repairman and working his way through Clarke County, Virginia, just before the raid. Lazarus McClain, a traveling Ohio truss salesman with a long, white beard, was unwittingly confused with Brown following the raid—many people having believed that the abolitionist had traveled through the South as a truss salesman as early as 1857. After the raid, a few of Brown’s “emissaries” apprehended in the South likely were similar victims of circumstance, like another salesman named Albritton. This unfortunate bookseller was arrested in Marion, Alabama, on the day following Brown’s execution in Virginia—allegedly being one of the “original men to be stationed on the line of the published Brown Map.”18

Certainly, it would be a mistake to project a network of John Brown’s agents and collaborators working in preparation for his South-wide liberation movement. In contrast to Andrew Hunter’s reminiscence of 1887, he told the investigating committee of the US Senate in 1860 that he did not believe that Brown had “emissaries” in the South; perhaps in later years he spoke of Brown’s “emissaries” because he felt it necessary to justify the ardent role he had played in bringing about Brown’s death. Yet, even in 1860, Hunter testified that Brown had told him that he had traveled “as far south as to the southern line of Virginia” and that the old man also “spoke of having many friends in the slave States.”19 Who were these “friends,” and—even in a minimal sense—how might they have proven allies to John Brown?

While Brown and his men were still incarcerated in Virginia in the fall of 1859, Governor Wise received an anonymous letter from someone claiming to have recovered some papers that had been left behind by a passenger on the Philadelphia–New York railway. The material suggested that Brown had associates doing surveillance in the South, moving among blacks and antislavery whites in Arkansas and Tennessee. The recovered materials included a letter intended for John Brown with information about an antislavery Southerner named William Palmer. The author of the letter, allegedly an associate of Brown, stated that Palmer had married a woman who owned a good number of slaves, and had designs on appropriating these enslaved people for a liberation effort. However, his marriage had failed and he was in the midst of a lawsuit in which he was seeking legal possession of her human property.

Although Governor Wise thought the anonymous source of information “irresponsible,” he took the matter seriously enough to alert Governor Isham Harris of Tennessee. Harris promptly sent an undercover agent to Memphis, where information in the letter placed Palmer’s residence. The agent, posing as an emissary of Brown from Indiana, won Palmer’s confidence enough to learn that indeed he was favorable to antislavery Northerners. Palmer himself may have had some suspicions about his guest; the agent believed that he was taking care not to express any interest in John Brown, even to the point of criticizing the recent raid at Harper’s Ferry. Yet Palmer warned Brown’s supposed emissary to be careful, further promising assistance to any Northern man. Governor Harris’s further inquiries confirmed that other information in the letter about Palmer was accurate, particularly regarding his pending divorce and legal battle over slave property. Believing he had sufficient evidence, Harris had him arrested on November 9, 1859. With some difficulty, Palmer eventually posted $2,500 bail in anticipation of standing trial in the upcoming session in January 1860. But then, somewhat mysteriously, he died at the end of December. His demise was given scant attention by the press, and his death was attributed to tuberculosis.20

The mystery surrounding William Palmer has yet to be resolved, and it is by no means certain that the case against him would have held up in court had he lived long enough to face the charges against him. After his death, the editor of the Memphis Avalanche boasted that he had never believed Palmer was guilty, and it was his opinion that actually he had been set up by a personal foe attempting to thwart his legal case. In fact, the Avalanche editor claimed that someone from Tennessee living in the North had perpetrated this malicious letter fraud, although he offered no name and seemed unwilling to do so. Horace Greeley of the New-York Daily Tribune had initially responded to the case in the same manner, arguing quite assuredly that the supposedly misplaced abolitionist documents actually were “manufactured by some of the parties concerned in the law suit and domestic quarrel in which it appears that Palmer is involved.” The fact that the person who first exposed the documents remained anonymous also reinforces skepticism.21

On the other hand, there may be more substance to this episode than was acknowledged at the time. First, the Tribune’s immediate inclination to dismiss the Palmer case seems purely a matter of political expedience. Editor Greeley had no particular insight into the matter, although he had a vested interest in playing it down. Antislavery moderates like Greeley likewise had reacted to the Harper’s Ferry raid by dismissing it as a mad, fanatical effort without mainstream support from the North.22 After refusing to take Brown seriously, Republicans would hardly want to perpetuate the notion that antislavery fanatics from the North had infiltrated the South. As to the dismissive remarks in the Memphis Avalanche, its editor wrote after the fact, making claims that seem hollow in retrospect. First, he claimed some inside knowledge yet never made it known, which makes his words at least as “irresponsible” as the source of the alleged abolitionist documents. Second, the same editor boasted that, having suspected fraud from the onset, he had refused to publish the alleged abolitionist documents “and other so-called developments” of the Palmer case. In reality, the Avalanche had published the whole story, including the alleged abolitionist documents, on November 10, 1859.

Furthermore, there are questions that remain unanswered. If the alleged abolitionist materials involving John Brown and William Palmer were fraudulent, why was nothing more reported about the perpetrator, and why did newspapers in Tennessee fall silent about the whole affair after Palmer’s death? Their lack of interest in following up on the story in any sense seems peculiar; certainly, if the documents were fraudulent, slave masters would have found it quite a relief to learn the true facts of the case.

Second, even the Avalanche editor had to admit that the alleged abolitionist documents presented “one of the most accomplished and deep laid schemes of villainy ever perpetrated.” In other words, why did these supposedly fraudulent documents entail a design that went far beyond what was necessary? Certainly, the complex of names, dates, places, and terminology they offer, and the way in which the documents were interrelated as well as correlated to external evidence, suggests a design way out of proportion to the objective—that is, assuming the objective was only to ruin Palmer from a personal and business standpoint.23 Finally, the undercover investigator who interviewed Palmer actually found him to be an antislavery sympathizer who was willing to harbor and advise someone purporting himself to be an agent of John Brown. Indeed, Palmer more than distinguished himself as a Northern ally, and therefore as one who likely would have entangled himself in subversive efforts given the opportunity.

Palmer’s death likewise seems curious. There was no reference in the undercover agent’s report that he was a sickly man, although Palmer’s ill health could very well have been exacerbated by the strain and frustration of being incarcerated. On the other hand, even the editor of the Memphis Argus had recommended that Palmer stay in jail for his own safety. “There is still a deep feeling in the community in regard to the affair,” he concluded. “For the present Palmer had better remain where he is.”24 With no evidence to the contrary, it may be appropriate to accept that Palmer died as reported, although it is possible that actually he was killed by outraged countrymen. Certainly, William Palmer—alleged to have been a Southern ally of John Brown—was not further discussed in Tennessee newspapers.25 It is as if suddenly he were erased from history.26

The mysterious Palmer case presents an intriguing insight into the possibility that Brown had friends, or at least friends of friends, with shared interests in undermining slavery in the South. Were some of these antislavery people aware of Brown’s intentions and willing to help him in the event of his success? On November 17, the Fayetteville Observer published notice of both rumors and reports of “traitors in Tennessee,” including Brown’s “emissaries canvassing” the western part of the state. The Trenton Journal in Gibson County, Tennessee, had only recently reported of “rumors about Brown and his accomplices in that Congressional District.” The editor of the Observer himself was certain of the fact, noting that a detective from Nashville had passed through Fayetteville in hot pursuit of “one of these scoundrels in Henry County.” Even assuming these were neither “emissaries” nor operatives of Brown, it certainly is possible that friends or associates with their own antislavery intentions were operating in the South, and that some of them were looking for the kind of opportunity presented by Brown.

The Fayetteville Observer likewise noted a secret report from Dresden, Weakly County, about a schoolteacher who fell under suspicion “and who in part acknowledged” that he was a friend of Brown—resulting in his immediate expulsion.27 Was there any truth to this report? Mention of this abolitionist schoolteacher is intriguing, particularly because the same letter that allegedly was to be hand delivered to John Brown included reference to a teacher, known only as “H,” in Brownsville, Tennessee, who was working among enslaved people. According to the letter, this “H” was confident that blacks and a segment of whites in western Tennessee would support Brown’s liberation effort.

Certainly Brown had early considered sponsoring teachers to work among free and fugitive blacks.28 Had he somehow begun to contact and encourage antislavery teachers in the South to support his plan for a South-wide liberation movement? Equally disturbing to the editor of the Observer was the concern that Fayetteville itself might be used as an Underground Railroad site. “Almost every day,” he lamented, “some citizen brings to this city captured runaway slaves. They say they have friends here who will free them.” Did Brown know of these friends, or know people who did? It is historically irresponsible to embrace paranoid legends of Brown skulking through the South prior to the Harper’s Ferry raid or to suggest that he had some network of spies and “emissaries” working as advance men. However, it may also be too narrow and reactionary to dismiss the possibility that Brown had friends or contacts in the South and that he hoped to tap into their support once he launched his liberation movement.

Whatever Brown had done or attempted to do in advance of the raid, he was not always building from the ground up. Not only was there a long history of local black revolts as well as Underground Railroad activity in Kentucky and Tennessee, but also there were whites who had contemplated antislavery plans and even attempted liberation plots, though never on the scale that Brown envisioned. He had interacted with Quakers and antislavery Christians for decades, and had aided and enabled runaways for years. His own conception of a “Subterranean Passage Way” in the late 1840s was premised on the antislavery networks already operating in the northeast.

Similarly, he did not invent the context for militant antislavery efforts, nor was he the only one who ever attempted to liberate enslaved people and undermine the “Peculiar Institution.” As a public figure in the antislavery movement in the late 1850s, he further encountered others with similar ideas and intentions, creating the possibility of both alliances and rivalries. His falling-out with the mercenary and treacherous Hugh Forbes, whom he had hired to train his men, was in part a conflict over strategy, notwithstanding Forbes proved a craven traitor.29

Quite in contrast was the brilliant Lysander Spooner, a genuine radical abolitionist who published A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery—a document perhaps more controversial than anything Brown would have composed, because it even entailed abducting and whipping slave masters as a form of intimidation. However, the gist of Spooner’s Plan was to target the nonslaveholders of the South, whose duty he declared was “in their private capacity as individuals—without asking the permission, or waiting the movements, of the government—to go to the rescue of the Slaves from the hands of their oppressors.” Brown and Spooner shared a mutual supporter in the abolitionist Gerrit Smith, and the latter put a copy of A Plan into his hands sometime after its publication in the summer of 1858.

When they finally met in Boston, Brown asked Spooner to withdraw the publication lest it forewarn Southerners, a reasonable concern. While he probably was informed by Spooner’s document, he was not its exponent, nor was he endeavoring to implement it by attacking Harper’s Ferry the following year.30 Brown was too proudly and stubbornly independent to consider following another man’s plan; furthermore, he had composed and published his own Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States in early 1858, some months before Spooner’s document was released.31

Although Spooner generously cooperated with Brown and withdrew his Plan from circulation, one of his associates had already shared it with someone, who in turn published its contents in the New York Herald after the Harper’s Ferry raid. The latter recalled that he had also been told that there were three sites where antislavery revolts might shortly break out, including the neighborhood of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the Arkansas River, and Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.32 Interestingly, the hand-carried message to John Brown from the alleged abolitionist spy dated October 3, 1859, included the writer saying he was on his way to Mammoth Cave, where he intended to remain “for a number of days before anything comes off there.” The alleged messenger himself had kept a memorandum of expenses, dates, and locations that not only suggested populations of whites, free blacks, and enslaved people but also from both Harper’s Ferry and Mammoth Cave. The editor of the Memphis Avalanche concluded that it was “understood from some correspondence found among Brown’s effects” that an “outbreak was to have occurred” at Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, perhaps around the time that the Virginia raid had taken place.33

Because there already were antislavery outbreaks in western Tennessee and the vicinity as recent as November 1856, the question is to what degree, if any, Brown had made efforts to appropriate these circumstances to the advantage of his own intended South-wide liberation movement. According to the same letter allegedly sent by messenger to Brown, his contact in the South had toured the region, concluding that a strike would be best suited either to Arkansas or to Tennessee because they had “an immense number of slaves already ripe and ready at the first intimation to strike a decided blow.”34

The editor of the Norfolk Southern Argus found it curious that Brown’s maps of Kentucky and Tennessee showed “not the slightest trace” of markings or census data that were posted for other Southern states. Perhaps Brown posted no information because his associates already had done surveillance there, and he hoped to collaborate with them when his movement spread into that region. “[I]t is known from letters found on Brown and his followers that localities in Kentucky and Tennessee were visited for the purpose of carrying out their nefarious designs,” the editor concluded. Is it a coincidence that John Copeland, one of the Harper’s Ferry raiders, afterward revealed that “there was an intention to attempt” a liberation movement in Kentucky “about the same time” of the Virginia attack?35

Even rumors and other unresolved questions may provide hints as to undocumented movements and activity, whether directly or indirectly related to Brown. The editor of the Norfolk Southern Argus contended that a brother of Charles Tidd, one of Brown’s raiders, had traveled through Mississippi “and kept Brown and company posted as to the disposition of the slaves.”36 Although the old man may have had a “friend” in Mississippi, it is more likely that this report was based upon rumor, or perhaps it was a distortion of other developments involving the raiders.37

Still, even rumors may have some little substance, and despite the undoubted paranoia that arose in the South after the raid, not all reports concerning “emissaries” in the South should be discarded without some consideration. Given Brown’s fastidious and obsessive tendency to plan ahead, it is likely that some of his clandestine activities have eluded the traditional narrative, in part because so few historians have actually looked. Since the Harper’s Ferry raid has often been viewed as a half-baked, quixotic effort without political context or connection, Brown’s preliminary efforts—especially among blacks—have been overlooked, diminished, or even denied.38

Yet it is clear that Brown had reached out to many black leaders—not just his famous associations with Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. In fact, the extent to which Brown was able to reach out to those specifically designated as “reliable” is still a matter of research.39 In fact, Brown told a journalist after his defeat that he had made “visits and associations and inquiries” in the area of Harper’s Ferry, which gave him a confident expectation for recruitment once his movement had begun.40 Virginia congressman Alexander Boteler later claimed that he had seen Brown prior to the raid, having coincidentally ridden in the same car with him on a train coming into Harper’s Ferry from points farther east in Virginia. Alban S. Payne, a colonel in the 1185th Regiment Militia, Fauquier County, was stationed in Charlestown just prior to Brown’s execution and had a number of opportunities to speak with him. The following month, after Brown’s hanging, Payne published a short series about his experience in the Warrenton [Virginia] Whig, blending harsh opinions with a few descriptions of their conversations. Although he found the old man evasive of certain questions, Payne wrote that Brown gave him “a graphic description of his journey through Virginia and other Southern States.”41 In another case, the old man seems to have had an eye on a liberation plot farther west, in the area of Clarksburg, [West] Virginia, in the summer of 1859. After the plot was betrayed, it seems Brown himself was drawn to the scene, making a hasty trip from his Maryland headquarters to Clarksburg. Appearing incognito, a bearded and somewhat agitated man, suspected as an “abolitionist,” was observed in the courtroom audience during the trial of a free woman named Charlotte Harris, a key figure in the foiled plot. Prominent men in the community later identified the peculiar stranger as having been John Brown.42 Should all these accounts be dismissed simply because conventional historians assume Brown was the Don Quixote of the antebellum epoch?

It may be argued that it is simply too difficult to determine where fact ends and fiction begins with respect to John Brown’s secret movements, real and potential contacts in the South, and his activities immediately prior to the Harper’s Ferry raid. Even granting that he probably had friends and contacts in the South, Brown later expressed a measure of disappointment, athough denying affiliation with anyone besides his own men. As one eyewitness later recalled, “the old raider compromised no living person.”43 All along, his philosophy had been to “make no confession.” Up to the last hour, John Brown admonished his men, “never betray your friends or bring obloquy on their memory, for beyond all other things, it will bring upon you the contempt of mankind.”44 In the end, he carried the many details of his plans and activities—as well as his personal criticisms and disappointments—with him to the grave.

CHAPTER 2

HUNDREDS OF SLAVES WERE READY

Why should we shoot a negro; that was not our object.

The initial phase of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry on the evening of October 16, 1859, was reasonably successful. He clearly understood that the attack and seizure of the sleeping town and its armory would present no desperate challenge, not even to his small “army” of seventeen men. Brown’s old friend and ally, Frederick Douglass, later claimed to have warned him in advance that Harper’s Ferry would be a “perfect steel trap”1 but probably knew little about the operation of the federal armory at the time, and mistakenly assumed it was secured by the military.

In contrast, Brown had studied the armory system and made a number of tours of the Harper’s Ferry armory, plying the staff with so many questions that he became a familiar if not annoying presence. Indeed, as David Reynolds has written, Brown’s plan “had a greater chance for success than Douglass acknowledged.”2 Brown doubtless knew that civilian watchmen minimally guarded the armory operation, while access to the town itself was meagerly supervised by bridge “tenders.” As one contemporary described it, “Old Brown” and his men simply entered the State of Virginia, captured a city of a few thousand inhabitants, and took a large number of captives without either destroying property or murdering his prisoners. He was even able to keep possession of the city “until all the forces of the General Government in that part of the country were brought to their assistance.”3 That ultimately he failed in his effort was not a matter of poor strategy or because Harper’s Ferry was a “perfect steel trap” but, rather, because of Brown’s own tactical misjudgment—the kind of which suggested a lack of clarity at precisely the time when it was most needed.

On the other hand, the raid had unforeseen and unavoidable elements of tragedy as well. Perhaps the most obvious was the killing of Hayward Shepherd, the baggage master of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad station in Harper’s Ferry. Neither Brown nor his men could have anticipated that one of their first antagonists would be a black man—particularly one so disagreeable and besotted that he proved an immediate danger to their entire plan. Shepherd bore the last name of a large slaveholding family in Jefferson County but was formerly owned by Fontaine Beckham, who was both the mayor of Harper’s Ferry and the railroad station agent at the time of the raid. Not only was Shepherd loyal to his former master, but he was also quite belligerent toward Brown’s men when they approached him. According to Simpson Donavin, one of the first journalists on the ground at Harper’s Ferry, Shepherd shared the “bad qualities” of his “haughty” and “obsequious” patron and former master. Tall and “powerfully” built, he faced down the raiders with contempt, evidently disdaining every effort on their part to win his cooperation. Donavin recalled that he “gave the raiders more trouble than all the rest of the people of the Ferry,” resisting them with curses and “vile epithets.”4 Afterward, one local paper reported that when the raiders sought to “induce” Shepherd to “take up arms and join them in their nefarious purposes,” he refused, at which point the raiders “immediately shot him.”5

To the contrary, while two of Brown’s men—including his son Oliver—probably quickly realized that recruiting Shepherd was hopeless, they would not simply have shot him. In fact, after he initially refused their offer to assist them in standing guard “in the cause of freedom,” the raiders warned him repeatedly to make no rash move—a warning that Shepherd ignored after an extended argument, because evidently they had encountered him well before the shooting, which took place just before one thirty in the morning.6 It was known among the raiders afterward that Shepherd actually had slipped off his shoes and had tried to sneak away, making for the Potomac Bridge in order to reach the Maryland side with the probable intention of alerting local whites. It was at this point that he was shot by one of the raiders, the bullet piercing him in the back and exiting through his chest. Mortally wounded and in agonizing pain, he stumbled back along the bridge, where he met a train conductor named Phelps, who had just arrived on an eastbound train. Finding no assistance on the platform, Phelps had walked past the station and onto the bridge to investigate. “Captain, I am shot,” Shepherd gasped before collapsing. After being carried back into the railroad office, the dying man began pleading for water—gulping and gurgling through his wound, lingering in agony until the next day.7

According to Patrick Higgins, an Irish immigrant employed as one of the tenders on the bridge, Oliver Brown had permitted him to bring water to the dying Shepherd but added, “Let him take what he got. He ought to have done what he was told.” Higgins afterward concluded that the raiders “must have had some conversation with the nigger” before they shot him. “At that time I didn’t take so much in. But afterwards I understood it.” In another interview, Higgins was more straightforward, saying that after Shepherd refused to assist the raiders, he “was threatened with death in the event he told.”8 Higgins’s reminiscences make sense of the tragic incident, because the younger Brown probably would not have spoken so harshly of Shepherd had he not proved a stubborn collaborator willing to risk his neck for slaveholders.

When first approached by the armed raiders, Higgins naturally was unsure of their intentions, probably assuming they were bandits. When he asked them what they wanted, William Thompson, another of Brown’s raiders, replied with a smile, “It’s a Negro scrape.” Baffled, the Irishman asked, “And where is the nigger?” “I’m one,” the white raider replied.9 His companion, Oliver Brown, began to laugh, adding, “I’m another.” As different as Higgins the Irish outsider was from Shepherd the privileged black exception, neither man could comprehend the implications of Brown’s sudden presence at Harper’s Ferry, or the egalitarian and abolitionist convictions of his soldiers. Besides being an unusual “interracial” movement with the goal of destabilizing slavery and liberating enslaved people, John Brown’s “army” was marching under the banner of the Golden Rule. As David Reynolds aptly put it, over against the pervasive racism of white society, “Brown entered sympathetically into black culture to a degree unmatched by any other white person of his day,” and the young men who followed him, were more than willing to walk in his footsteps.10 William Thompson and Oliver Brown had not merely taken up arms but were willing to own the profile of the oppressed “other.” This radical view of “race” was beyond the understanding of Patrick Higgins, who had already imbibed the racism of his new homeland without apparently considering how his own people had suffered so long under oppression. By his own admission, Higgins never had enough interest even to venture over to Charlestown afterward to see Brown hanged.11

As for Hayward Shepherd, having obtained his own freedom as the veritable exception to the rule of slavery in Virginia, he was satisfied to leave the rest of his people in bondage while he collected an unusual income and enjoyed a “trustworthy” profile among slaveholders.12 In tribute to their faithful ally, a number of militia companies escorted Hayward’s remains, along with a marching band, to his final resting place. At the cemetery, local dignitaries and somber white citizens “listened reverently to the reading of the burial service by an old negro preacher.”13

Almost immediately, proslavery and conservative people began to throw up the killing of Shepherd as if to prove both Brown’s folly as well as the alleged loyalty of enslaved blacks. Several weeks after the raid, the outraged editor of Charlestown’s Virginia Press and Farmer’s Repository, declared that abolitionist “monomaniacs” would not find much to console them in the case of John Brown because the “first blood shed was that of an unoffending, trust-worthy free negro man, Hayward Shepherd.” He concluded that poor Shepherd had been “shot down like a dog” only because “forsooth, he would not join the infernal scoundrels in their fanatical crusade against his white friends.”14

Shepherd’s supposed martyrdom proved even more useful to proslavery politics. “There is no danger from our slaves or colored people,” declared Virginia’s governor Wise before the state’s assembled representatives in early December 1859. Spinning the story to suit the slave masters of Virginia, Wise declared that the black men who had seemingly followed Brown actually were “taken” by force, yet even then they “refused to take arms.” To add authenticity to this dubious claim, Wise concluded that “the first man killed was a respectable free negro who was trusted with the baggage of the rail road, and who faithful to his duty was shot running from the philanthropists who came to liberate the black race!” Similar disdain was expressed later that month in a New York City rally of supporters of the South. “I feel less sympathy for John Brown and his associates,” one conservative preached, “than for the first free negro who was shot for refusing to join them.”15

In fact, not a few episodes of the black liberation effort had met defeat from betrayal at the hands of loyal or worrisome slaves, and Hayward Shepherd—well paid and satisfied with his exceptional status within the community—thus had proved a dangerous element to Brown’s raiders.16 His refusal to cooperate and his bold subversion had forced them to a crisis—either they could have spared him and jeopardized the mission, or they could treat him as they would any hostile. Unfortunately, the momentary decision on the part of the shooter was more consistently carried out according to plan than were some of John Brown’s subsequent actions, and it was his errors—not the killing of Shepherd—that indicated the failure of the raid. Had Brown proved tactically proficient by leading his men and their black allies into the mountains in a timely fashion, perhaps Shepherd would be remembered as a mascot, if not a monumental sycophant, rather than as an unfortunate victim, or even as the black icon of neo-Confederate revision.17

The killing of Shepherd, while tragic, did not prove Brown’s supposed ineptitude or the mythical loyalty of Virginia’s slaves. Rather, it was an unpleasant reminder that just as the African American struggle in the United States has always been laced with valuable white allies, at times it also has been undermined by the self-interest of individual blacks.18 By all accounts, Shepherd was such a man—so prosperous that even the Irish bridge tender Higgins envied him. Yet from the perspective of raider Osborne Anderson, Shepherd was “one foolhardy colored man.”19

Over many years, historians and narrators—both pro- and anti-Brown, have found Shepherd’s case impossible to resist, harping away at the tragic irony of his death at the hands of John Brown’s men.20 Unfortunately, few have considered the possibility that, rather than being an unlucky fluke or the result of a fidgety triggerman, his killing was an ugly necessity of the hour. Osborne Anderson, the only one of Brown’s men to leave a written record of the Harper’s Ferry raid, was not present at the time of the shooting. Yet he was inclined to defend the raiders over Shepherd, albeit with the unlikely explanation that “no one knew at the time whether [Shepherd] was white or colored.”

Still, Anderson at least was correct in concluding that the stubborn porter had been shot down because he refused to follow the orders of Brown’s men. “Had he stood when ordered,” Anderson wrote, Shepherd “would not have been harmed.” However, “his movements were such as to justify the sentinels in shooting him, as he would not stop when commanded.”21 Black writers on the raid have tended either to pass over the shooting with brief comment or to follow Anderson’s thesis that Shepherd was killed simply because he disobeyed commands and walked away.22 But to Brown’s men, the shooting probably was as necessary as it was bitter. They had been ordered not to use their guns unless townsmen “offered much resistance” or “refused to surrender.” When asked about the shooting after his defeat, Brown would say simply, “why should we shoot a negro; that was not our object.”23

Apart from the Shepherd incident, the occupation of Harper’s Ferry and seizure of the armory were accomplished without raising alarm. With the capture and confinement of the town’s meager civilian guard, detachments were sent out by Brown for specific tasks: the bridges were secured, and the armory, the engine house, and the rifle factory were to be taken and held. Other raiders were sent in the direction of the county seat of Charlestown to gather hostages from among the leading slaveholders, and bring them, along with willing black men, into Harper’s Ferry. Still others were sent back to Brown’s headquarters at his rented Maryland farmhouse to bring up weapons and ammunition. The old man and the rest of his small group remained to supervise the captured town. Telegraph lines were already cut by the raiders at the time of the invasion, leaving Harper’s Ferry no immediate means of communication with neighbors in the vicinity.24

John Brown was master of Harper’s Ferry well into the early morning hours of October 17, and there was good reason for optimism at first: the town was easily taken, hostages likewise were secured, and a promising number of enslaved people joined him quite willingly—something that Virginians later made a profession of denying. Osborne Anderson, the only raider to provide a firsthand account of the operation, recalled that they were directed to bring back their white hostages and “any slaves who would come.”25

Contrary to the propaganda published afterward, actually many local blacks greeted Brown’s raid with enthusiasm, although some hesitated or cautiously withdrew. Anderson recalled that en route to gathering white hostages late on the night of October 16, the raiders encountered black men “who immediately agreed to join us,” saying “they had been long waiting for an opportunity of the kind.” These men were directed to alert other enslaved people in all directions, with the result that “many colored men gathered to the scene of action.” As Anderson recalled, throughout the slave quarters “there was apparently a general jubilee,” and volunteers “stepped out manfully without impressing or coaxing.” The only exception, like Hayward Shepherd, was another black freedman who was too fearful to join—which led Anderson to conclude that free blacks in the South were “much less reliable than the slave, and infinitely more fearful.”

On the morning of October 17, while Brown still occupied the armory yard, he sent a black youth over to the Wager House hotel with a note for the clerk, W. W. Throckmorton, requesting breakfast for forty-five men. Taken aback by the order, Throckmorton went over to the armory yard to see Brown, who told him that he intended to free the slaves of the “surrounding country.” Brown also wanted coffee, Throckmorton recalled, and ordered dinner prepared for two hundred men—probably suggesting the number that he expected to gather in retreat to the mountains. Throckmorton said that Charles Williams, one of the enslaved men from the hotel, appeared to know Brown very well and had a conversation with the old man over at the engine house. When Throckmorton returned with the breakfast, Williams accompanied quite willingly, and afterward refused to obey when told to return to the hotel. In the presence of the old man, Williams told Throckmorton that he would go back when he was ready and that he was now his own boss. “This amused Old Brown, who laughed at me,” Throckmorton said.

After the failure of the raid, Williams fled Harper’s Ferry, knowing that local whites would beat, or possibly kill him, if they got their hands on him. This would explain why some of the other enslaved men and women at the Wager House “hung back” when the food was brought over to the raiders.26 The episode is telling: not all enslaved people joined Brown’s men immediately, although many were ready at the time. Nor was the old man expecting the entire enslaved community to follow him in one fell swoop. Certainly, it is a false notion that local blacks either knew nothing of Brown or refused to join him out of loyalty to their masters.

Furthermore, Osborne Anderson’s narrative, woefully underutilized even in the most recent histories of the raid, provides a strong corrective to the myth of disinterest and loyalty among Virginia slaves. Having evaded capture after Brown’s defeat, Anderson made good his escape and returned safely to Chatham, Ontario, where he crossed paths with Frederick Douglass. The famous abolitionist likewise had fled the United States in order to evade arrest on the grounds of his association with Brown. Anderson, still fresh from his escape, complained to the abolitionist leader how the “slaveholders of Virginia and the South generally” were “endeavoring to make the impression that the Negroes summoned to the standard of freedom by John Brown, viewed the effort to emancipate them with indifference.” Anderson was alluding to the propaganda put forth by Governor Wise among others, who claimed that Brown had “made a great mistake as to the disposition of the slaves to fly to his standard.” In this feint, the governor even concluded that the abolitionists simply could not understand that Virginia’s blacks were “held among us as by a patriarchal tenure.”27

This propaganda—long afterward the basis of the “official” version of the raid—was primarily premised on Southern news reports but also the conservative and proslavery New York Herald. The Herald’s publisher, James Gordon Bennett, clearly was an ultraconservative, racist, and an advocate of Southern interests. Any reader in that time was quite aware that “nigger was the word of choice” in the Herald.28 To be sure, Bennett was first a newspaperman, not a slave master or a Virginian, so information might slip into the press that the proslavery element disliked. As James Redpath put it, although it was “entirely managed by the partisans of Slavery at this time,” the telegraph “involuntarily told truths disgraceful to Virginia and illustrative of the effect of her iniquitous institution on the character of her citizens.”

On November 1, 1859, the Herald thus reported that the white residents of Harper’s Ferry and slave masters in the vicinity were “not by any means easy in their minds as to the temper of the slaves and free negroes among them.” Lewis Washington, one of the hostages taken by Brown, was afraid to go back to his home, just as “many other wealthy slave owners, whose residences lie at a distance from those of their neighbors,” regarded it “prudent to lodge elsewhere for the present.” Denying any charge of cowardice on the part of slaveholders, the reporter inadvertently contradicted the notion that Virginia’s slaves were loyal. The Herald concluded that despite contrary reports, “many negroes in the neighborhood” had been “tampered with” by Brown’s representatives, or at least had “cognizance of the plans of the marauders, if they did not sympathize with them.”29

Although it was impossible to keep the truth from leaking out, Bennett’s key reporting on the raid had a primary basis in the proslavery element of Virginia, and it was this voice that influenced much of the Herald’s coverage of the entire episode. In fact, the Herald was apparently informed by the submissions of two Virginia affiliates, John W. Gallaher, and his cousin, William W. (W. W. B.) Gallaher, the publisher of Charlestown’s Virginia Free Press.30 These affiliates provided the Herald with reports in advance of other Northern newspapers covering events in Charlestown. Almost immediately, too, the Gallahers seem to have made efforts to revise the story of the raid in the eyes of the nation.

On October 20, only days after Brown’s defeat, John W. Gallaher reported that the “slaves, without exception, refused to join” Brown’s men—a clear misrepresentation designed to protect the reputation of the slave masters, to portray enslaved blacks as both weak and passive, and to diminish the impact of the abolitionists’ appeal to the enslaved black community. “Brown had but four or five blacks under his command, and they were freemen,” he concluded. This showed “very plainly” that enslaved blacks were not ready for what abolitionists called “their last resort.”31

On October 27, another piece in the Herald bore the Gallaher imprint. Subtitled “A Lesson from the Slaves,” the article gave form to a deception that still burdens the narrative of the raid today. None of the “Southern slaves” were “mixed up in the affair,” he wrote, “nor did a single one of them voluntarily come forward to accept the great advantages which Brown and his fellow fanatics in the North held out to them.” Gloating over the supposed superior condition of blacks in slavery in comparison to free blacks in the North, he concluded, “we cannot be surprised that Cuffy should prefer to remain in slavery.” Indeed, whites and blacks in the South enjoyed an intimate connection “under the patriarchal institutions of the South” that no other system of society could obtain. Through this “lifelong intercourse,” he wrote, “the inferior has the benefit of the control and guidance of the superior intellect,” thus improving his morals and increasing his industry and making him “a better member of society than the vicious free negro of the North” or free black “barbarians” in other climes. “It would be well,” Gallaher concluded, that observers should “learn a lesson from the refusal of the slaves in and around Harper’s Ferry to accept the boon held out to them through the abolition invasion of old John Brown of Ossawatomie.”32

Another influential source of proslavery revision was the Virginia illustrator and journalist David Hunter Strother, who covered Brown’s raid and its aftermath for Harper’s Weekly. Trained as an artist in Rome, he had interned as an engraver in New York City before returning to his native Virginia as a contributor to Harper’s, submitting sketches under the name of “Porte Crayon.” After Brown’s death, Strother would prove loyal to the Union, in contrast to his relative, Andrew Hunter, the district attorney who prosecuted Brown’s case. However, his initial response to Brown was hostile, and his considerable skills were used to reinforce the condescending myths of black passivity and indifference in the pages of the New York–based weekly. Reflecting on the desperate acts of the raiders, Strother later acknowledged that he was deeply angry after the raid, having sympathized “warmly” with the people of Harper’s Ferry “in their losses & suffering.”33

As shown by his report to Harper’s Weekly, Strother’s rage was also blended with incredulous racism, the correspondent expressing amazement that Brown’s attack would concern itself over “this good-humored, good-for-nothing, half-monkey race—the negroes.” As far as the Harper’s Ferry raid was concerned, Strother declared that not a single black was induced to join Brown, the old man supposedly having “discovered early that he could make no use” of the blacks that he had “captured.” The Virginian went so far as to make the absurd claim that eleven black men that had accompanied Brown’s raiders over to Maryland after seizing the armory actually were “prisoners.”

Strother’s report likewise was filled with characterizations of cowardly, fearful blacks—one of them having refused to take a weapon from Brown, saying, “Good lord, Massa! I don’t know nuffin ’bout handlin’ dem tings,” to which the abolitionist responded, “Take it instantly, and strike home. This is a day that will long be remembered in the history of your race—a glorious anniversary.” To this, the frightened “Cuffee” demurs. “Please God, Massa. I’se got a sore finger.” Other “darkeys” were thus described as frightened, running, hiding, and dropping their weapons at the mere mention of “John Brown of Kansas.” Yet, Strother concluded, these same timid, fearful black men would be suddenly transformed into fearless warriors if called to defend their white patriarchs.34

He shortly brought these fallacious, racist characterizations to a new level in the November issues of Harper’s Weekly by means of his skillful artistry. In a disturbingly memorable series of sketches, Strother alternated between portrayals of blacks as cowardly, pretentious, or faithful slaves ready to fight in defense of their masters. On the cover of one issue, he portrayed a black man holding a basket and one of John Brown’s pikes, the long spear-like weapon intended for distribution among the slaves. The cutline has the man expressing gratitude for the pike, which is “terrible handy to dig taters wid.” Another sketch features a large woman with an apron standing in the kitchen, holding a cooking utensil in one hand and a large knife upraised in the other hand. “What’s dem fool niggers fraid on?” she says. “I’d like ter see one o’ dem folks ondertake to carry me off, I would!”

The third cover image is less of a caricature than the others are, realistically portraying a scene with a somber southern planter “arming his slaves to resist invasion.” The sketch reeks with the racist fiction of “patriarchal tenure”—the austere but benign slave master stands at the center of his admiring slaves with his dignified wife at his side. Nearby is an elderly, gray-haired, and trustworthy house slave holding the master’s young son in his arms, while all around the master are pictured brave black men, brandishing ax and sword in defense of the master and his family.

Strother published more images in the next issue, one featuring two older black men, Caesar and Pompey, evidently house slaves in their coats and ties. With the title “Neglect and Indignity,” he portrayed them discussing the recent disturbance at Harper’s Ferry. When Caesar asks his colleague if he was disturbed by John Brown’s men, Pompey answers: “I b’lieve not. I allows dem was ignorant pussens, onacquainted wid de neighborhood of Harper’s Ferry.” In another demeaning caricature, a black man refuses to answer John Brown’s call. “Please God! Mr. Brown, dat is onpossible,” responds Cuffee. “We ain’t done seedin’ yit at our house.”35

Strother thus provided Harper’s Weekly with realistic, lifelike sketches conveying dignity and humanity to whites, while using racist caricatures of blacks to justify slavery and revise the story of the raid into an episode of ultimate failure for Brown, since even the slaves themselves supposedly had rejected him. Using images that were as false as they were offensive, Strother successfully promoted the same deception conveyed by proslavery writers and politicians at the time of the raid and effectively rewrote the narrative in keeping with the larger racist mind-set of white society.36

“The propaganda from the southerners was continued saturation and news control,” notes Jean Libby. While Northern journalists were restricted and eventually driven out of Jefferson County, Southern reporters like Strother could go anywhere and interview anyone in keeping with the mission to revise the facts of Brown’s raid.37 But even these antebellum revisionists could not have imagined the extent to which their self-serving portrayal of the raid would become a mainstay of historical memory in the United States. To this day, it is strongly asserted by historians and journalists that Brown’s impact on the enslaved community was minimal if at all, a notion that seems further justified by his unfortunate tactical errors resulting in defeat at Harper’s Ferry. “While we can understand that the slaveholder must believe himself to be noble and beloved by those whom he enslaved in order to face himself in the mirror, or to sit in a pew in church and believe that he is a good Christian,” Libby has written, “it is harder to understand why historians must believe it too.”38

In reality, there is ample evidence that Brown’s efforts generated significant interest and involvement from the enslaved community of Jefferson County and neighboring counties as well. Yet is a common error among Brown’s critics that he somehow expected thousands of enslaved people to gather when he struck his first blow at Harper’s Ferry. To the contrary, writes Hannah Geffert, “the initial phase of his plan never included the assistance of a sizeable number of armed blacks.” Brown’s studied plan entailed the town of Harper’s Ferry and Jefferson County as an ideal starting point precisely because it was not a stereotypical slave region in the South. He was not looking to rally a vast amount of black support all at once but, rather, to launch an effort that would grow, attracting more and more enslaved people as it moved deeper into the South.

Shortly before the raid, Brown’s lieutenant, John Kagi, wrote to his sister a somewhat coded message, stating that they had all their weapons and were situated in Maryland in preparation for the move, and were waiting a few days more to be joined by the black raiders, Leary and Copeland, from Ohio, “not so much because we want them, but because they want a share themselves. . . . Things could not be more cheerful and more certain of success than they are,” Kagi concluded. “We did not expect to liberate any great number of slaves immediately, nor even rapidly,” recalled Owen Brown, another survivor of the raid, “but by means of the series of rendezvous, and by various other methods of assistance, we expected to open the way for slaves in increasing numbers to escape from their masters.”39

The area of the raid was unusual for a number of reasons, not only in its mix of farms, factories, and mills but also in its unofficially “free” and enslaved black population and not a few cases in which free blacks and whites shared housing and neighborhoods.40 Jefferson County already had a significant number of runaways, and some efforts had been made to use legal means to secure slaves, including an attempt to persuade Pennsylvania to pass cooperative laws benefiting slaveholders. Geffert rightly concludes that based on discussions with free blacks, “Brown anticipated that there would be a positive slave response.” Another of the raiders, Charles Tidd, later told Thomas Wentworth Higginson that the slaves “were ready and glad to be armed against the masters,” including two men who were already planning to escape during the coming summer. Tidd concluded that Brown was not disappointed. “The slaves were ready.”41 Even Osborne Anderson observed that the old man was more than satisfied by the enthusiastic response—quite the opposite of his real disappointment at the miserable support that ultimately came from the free black community in the North.42 During the Civil War, Lieutenant Robert Morris Copeland, serving in the Massachusetts Second Regiment, befriended a fugitive slave from Shepherdstown named Antony Hunter. Hunter claimed to have been associated with Brown and that there were hundreds of blacks awaiting Brown’s departure from Harper’s Ferry, including “hired out” men who returned to Jefferson County expressly to join the movement. Even if Antony Hunter was exaggerating in retrospect, his account verifies that local blacks in significant numbers beyond Harper’s Ferry knew about the raid and were awaiting Brown’s movement out of town in order to join the liberation effort.43

Osborne Anderson, Brown’s escaped black raider, was galled by the proslavery revision of the raid as it was reported in newspapers and repeated by politicians in the North and South. He was not only disturbed by the promotion of the supposed contentment of the slaves under their “patriarchal tenure” but was particularly outraged by the charge that blacks had not been willing to fight.

Back in the safety of his adopted Canadian homeland, Anderson put the lie to the claims of Wise, Gallaher, Strother, and others, arguing from firsthand knowledge of the enslaved community that nothing was more “untruthful” than what had been published concerning enslaved blacks. “There was seemingly a studied attempt to enforce the belief that the slaves were cowardly,” Anderson wrote, along with the spurious claim that blacks “were really more in favor of Virginia masters and of slavery, than of their freedom.” In fact, it was Brown’s captured slave masters who proved cowardly, Anderson pointed out, because they failed to fight, and some spilt “cowardly tears” in fear throughout their captivity under Brown’s benign control. As one who had “an intimate knowledge of the conduct of the colored men engaged,” he testified that even John Brown was pleasantly surprised by the eager response of local blacks. Their “promptitude” and “manly bearing” exceeded even his expectations. Indeed, the conduct of enslaved people not only showed the weakness of the “institution” but also that “the colored people, as a body, were well represented by numbers, both in the fight, and in the number that suffered martyrdom afterward.” In fact, “hundreds of slaves were ready” to join John Brown that night at Harper’s Ferry, if only the old man had not delayed to his ultimate defeat.44

If Hayward Shepherd had proven a disturbing opponent of Brown’s raid, then abolitionist Frederick Douglass was probably the greatest disappointment to the old man’s plans. Later in life, Douglass wrote that he had learned of Brown’s intention of attacking Harper’s Ferry during a secret meeting that took place within three weeks of the raid in October 1859.45 In fact, their meeting took place nearly two months before, when Douglass met with Brown in a quarry near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in late August 1859. As Douglass refashioned the story, it was during this meeting that he first learned of Brown’s determination to make an attack on Harper’s Ferry as a preliminary move in his mountain-based campaign in the South. Despite Brown’s urging, Douglass wrote that he had refused to join the venture and warned the old man that if he tried to seize Harper’s Ferry, he would find himself trapped and blown sky high. Douglass stated that Brown had previously spoken of raiding Harper’s Ferry but had “never announced his intention of doing so” until the Chambersburg meeting, a claim that has never been questioned by scholars. In fact, Douglass probably conflated a number of episodes that took place in 1859, entirely omitting an unpleasant clash with Brown that had taken place much earlier in the year, during a meeting of black leaders in Detroit in March 1859. Indeed, Douglass’s dissent from Brown’s plan evidently originated in a manner more extensive than what is portrayed in his autobiography.46

Given that their association dated back to the late 1840s, it seems that Douglass had supported his friend’s plans—at least in theory—as long as Brown kept to the basic strategy of initiating raids on plantations and establishing a mountain-based campaign in the South. Whether Douglass originally promised to join Brown in the field is open to question.47 In the long run, however, Brown probably wanted Douglass’s considerable influence if he could not have the man himself follow him into the field. However, by 1859, Douglass began to back away.

Brown’s ally and biographer, Franklin Sanborn, suggested that Douglass knew of the Harper’s Ferry plan earlier than he portrayed in his autobiography.48 This may explain a number of things about the John Brown story, including the evident lack of free black support from the North. In fact, despite their ongoing friendship, Douglass was consistently opposed to Brown’s plan throughout 1859. After their argument in Detroit, Brown evidently endeavored to mend fences with Douglass. Yet the latter was no closer to accepting the Harper’s Ferry invasion. On April 16, 1859, Brown wrote to John H. Kagi that he had enjoyed “a good visit at Rochester” with Douglass, “but did not effect much.”49 Douglass continued to oppose Brown’s plan, probably with increasing detriment to his hope for greater involvement by free blacks, especially those in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a major focus of Brown’s preliminary efforts.

According to black leader William H. Johnson, a newly formed “colored military company” had scheduled a parade in Philadelphia in August 1859, including men who were already enlisted by Brown. When Brown heard that the group intended to parade in the city, he was quite disturbed, fearing that the public display of “armed and disciplined” blacks would draw undue attention from authorities. The old man appeared in the city on August 15, hoping to discourage the parade, but his intentions were fully thwarted that evening during a public meeting at the Shiloh Baptist Church. The guest speaker was another one of Brown’s black associates, J. J. Simons of New York City. According to Johnson, Simons “made a speech in which he commended the Negroes of Philadelphia for organizing a military company and stated there was a grand project on foot to invade the South with an army of armed northern Negroes” in order to liberate the enslaved. He then called for recruits from Philadelphia’s black community who would “march through the South with a gun in one hand and a bible in the other.” Johnson says that Brown was present at this meeting, and thoroughly appalled by Simons’s lack of discretion. Later that night, Brown and Frederick Douglass attended an emergency meeting at the home of Thomas J. Dorsey, a famous caterer, and another leading figure in Philadelphia’s black community. Johnson was in attendance and remembered well that the “very kindly” Brown was quite disappointed because of Simons’s indiscreet remarks at the church.50

While this episode did not entirely ruin the prospects of enlisting black Philadelphians, Brown’s plans were jeopardized. Furthermore, new concerns were arising among some of the city’s black leaders, particularly that they might be associated with or even blamed for Brown’s actions. As a result, Douglass seems to have held another secret meeting in Philadelphia shortly before his autobiographically memorialized rendezvous with Brown in a quarry near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, on August 20–21. However, it is unlikely that Douglass had promoted recruitment for Brown in this meeting, and more likely did the opposite out of concern for the community’s well-being.51

Nevertheless, in the interim between these meetings and the Harper’s Ferry raid, there remained sufficient support among black Philadelphians that might have proven an encouragement to Brown’s efforts. In September, “certain colored citizens” wrote a letter to Douglass urging him to support their efforts to join Brown. “We think you are the man of all others to represent us,” they wrote, even pledging to support Douglass’s family if he himself would join Brown in Virginia. “We have now quite a number of good but not very intelligent representatives collected. Some of our members are ready to go on with you,” they concluded in their appeal.52 Yet Douglass remained unfazed. Certainly he had no intention of joining the dangerous effort despite the appeals of Brown and his Philadelphia supporters. The real question is whether he would support the raid at a time when Brown desperately needed the assistance of black men from the North.

Brown and Douglass were together in Philadelphia once more, just prior to the raid, on Thursday, October 13, 1859. Brown now referred to his small number of raiders as “the forlorn hope of what might have been a grand expedition.” Apparently, Douglass had promised to meet with Brown once more prior to the raid, perhaps feeling torn—clinging to his friend without supporting his dangerous plan.53 His halfhearted approach seems evident in the fact that Douglass himself introduced but one man to Brown, a former slave known as Shields Green. In retrospect, Douglass thinly veiled the fact that he was disapproving of Green’s surprising decision to “go wid de ole man.” In this last Philadelphia meeting, Johnson says that Douglass even held a list of black Philadelphians, but apparently none of them finally joined Brown in Virginia. To what extent Douglass had a negative impact on their involvement we will never know, but thereafter, it was a prominent sentiment among the Browns that he had broken his long-standing promise to support “Father” when the trumpet was blown. Nearly thirty years afterward, Douglass alluded to his negative influence when he told an audience: “I had no part in that enterprise, but on the contrary I did all I could to prevent the dear old man from going into what I termed ‘that steel trap.’”54

Undoubtedly, the old man was relentless, and the spirit of Douglass’s autobiographical portrayal is probably quite authentic, even if the letter of its details is conflated and stylized to hide their strained friendship from the view of history. After all, the old man probably had hounded Douglass throughout the year to support his effort, and his characterization of Brown’s appeal was likely true of an ongoing campaign by the latter. “Come with me, Douglass, I will defend you with my life. I want you for a special purpose,” Brown urged in a brotherly tone. “When I strike the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them.”55

Neither man doubted that a bold move on the South would attract enslaved people. Although conventional historians have long tended to favor notions of loyal or disinterested slaves, there was never any doubt that Brown’s effort would elicit a sufficiently positive response from the enslaved community. Douglass must have recognized Brown’s need for strong black leadership once the movement began to spread, but also the possibility that his “grand expedition” could morph into a full-blown insurrection. But Douglass was neither Spartacus nor Nat Turner. In retrospect, he was honest enough to admit that he was probably both discreet and cowardly in his refusal, yet given Brown’s great powers of persuasion, it was not easy to walk away. While Douglass did not want to abandon or harm his old friend, neither did he wish to follow John Brown nor wish to send other men behind him into what he believed was certain defeat and death in Virginia.

In Douglass’s defense, it was hardly fair for Brown to expect him to throw his personal and political weight behind an effort that he did not support. While Douglass probably knew about the Harper’s Ferry invasion much sooner than he admitted, likewise he was honest in saying that he had opposed it all along. If his famous prediction that Brown “was going into a perfect steel-trap” was actually made in 1859, it was an unstudied conclusion. On the other hand, Douglass’s instincts were in play, and he may have surmised that the departure from Brown’s original plan would end in failure. Perhaps he knew his friend was not only ponderous to a fault but that he would not pass up an opportunity to make a moral lecture if given the chance. In the long run, Douglass, too, was correct. Yet he skillfully crafted the episode in his autobiography later in life, handling his friend with exquisite tenderness and respect, while redacting the more painful aspects of their falling-out.

Furthermore, Brown was not entirely fair in what he was asking of his friend. Douglass was a powerful man, but he was scarred from the brutal experience of slavery. Even Brown knew that Douglass would have been challenged by prolonged activity in the mountains, especially given the damage that he had sustained to his legs and feet while in bondage. Privately, Brown admitted to his daughter Anne that Douglass “was physically incapable of running,” although he seemed to think that the disability was worsened by the abolitionist’s new, improved lifestyle, including a richer diet. Furthermore, he knew that asking Douglass to return to the land of his bondage “would be sure death.”56

Yet Brown did not consider “sure death” an excuse not to enter the militant arena. For all intents and purposes, he asked every man who followed him to take up his cross, and certainly he would have preferred that Douglass risk his life, especially if it meant drawing other black men into the field. He could no more have understood Douglass’s predicament than he could have sympathized with his temptations as a kind of antebellum “rock star.” Brown was aged, and the sun of his life and labors was almost setting. Douglass was nearly twenty years his junior, and his sun only then was reaching its zenith. While a relative youth, he had fiercely fought a slave overseer, carried out his own escape, and then battled racist brickbats as an abolitionist orator.

By 1859, Douglass was a handsomely ripened man entering his forties, and his leonine powers of intellect and communication had reached new heights. Activist, advocate, orator, writer, and publisher, he already was popular—already on the brink of a long career in public life, politics, and national controversy on behalf of oppressed blacks and disenfranchised women. Naturally, he could not have known what lay ahead, although his heart probably told him, as he later put it, that he “could live for the slave”—quite in contrast to John Brown, whose career path now seemed to point toward a heroic kind of suicide, if not martyrdom.

To no surprise, there is only a little evidence of Brown’s final disappointment with Douglass. Perhaps the most undeniable is a list that was found among Brown’s possessions in his rented Maryland farmhouse after the raid. Alexander Boteler, a congressman from Virginia’s Eighth District at the time of the raid, inspected Brown’s belongings and found “a list of persons that he had asked to join him, or had partly consented to do so.” Boteler described the document as consisting of two lists, one marked “reliable” and the other “unreliable.” Brown had written the names of Frederick Douglass and one of his sons, probably Lewis, at the top of the “unreliable” list.57

Of course, contrary to the sentiments of some of Brown’s family members, it would be unfair to blame Douglass for the failure at Harper’s Ferry. In the end, it was not the famous black leader’s lack of support that brought ruin to his plans, but the old man’s own stubbornness and lack of tactical discretion. Nevertheless, following Brown’s death and for generations afterward, there was an evident silence between the Brown and Douglass families. For all intents and purposes, all correspondence between Douglass and the Browns seems to have ceased following the raid. While the passing of time would allow Douglass to purposefully reflect on his friend’s life and death, the personal side of the story remains hushed.

CHAPTER 3

A SWATH OF BLOOD

I know just what they would do with me. They would kill me like a dog.

While the town and armory had easily fallen under his control, Brown’s success at Harper’s Ferry was tenuous. Incidents involving gunfire, including the killing of Hayward Shepherd, had aroused attention as the raiders continued to take prisoners, but individual acts of resistance did not jeopardize the operation. However, the longer he remained in Harper’s Ferry, the more his little army was endangered. Certainly, he might have withdrawn before daybreak, taking hostages and black recruits, being joined by more eager slaves awaiting his appearance as he moved upward into the mountains. “We have mountains here in which ten thousand men might conceal themselves & nobody suspect,” the superintendent of the armory wrote shortly after the raid.1

Had Brown functioned with expedience and deliberation, the whole episode could have turned on a very different hinge, and the first phase of his liberation movement would have commenced. The wagon brought into Harper’s Ferry by the raiders bore witness to the readiness of the operation, being filled with pikes, picks, shovels, “kindling bark saturated with fluid,” and whistles. Besides arming enslaved people with pikes for defensive warfare in the mountains, the tools would allow for the quick construction of temporary fortifications and hiding places in the mountains, with kindling for cooking and some newly designed whistles for Brown’s “shepherds” to send coded signals over the wilderness landscape.2 Brown had also brought weapons and ammunition, including gunpowder—not to destroy the town’s bridges as some have surmised, but barrels filled with small prepackaged portions to be distributed among the raiders for ammunition and defense.3

Certainly, before dawn, he was lacking nothing in men or supplies and could have withdrawn from Harper’s Ferry and been deeply ensconced in the mountains by late morning. “There was abundant opportunity for him and the party to leave a place in which they held entire sway and possession, before the arrival of the troops,” recalled Osborne Anderson, one of the few survivors among Brown’s men.4

In retrospect, Brown must be blamed for errors in judgment resulting in his defeat and the loss of most of his men. Among other things, his conduct at Harper’s Ferry reveals that he was a flawed tactician and that his tendency to be overly ponderous got the better of him. Charles Tidd, one of the raiders—and one who particularly disagreed with invading Harper’s Ferry—later blamed Brown for the deaths of his men, particularly because of his unconscionable delay in town, leading to their being trapped and defeated. Tidd remembered that as the wee hours of Monday morning, October 17, began to slip by, “some of the [raiders] begged of me to go and try to persuade [Brown] that it was best to leave there, but I could not make him think so.” Osborne Anderson was far more sympathetic in his narrative but drew the same conclusion: “This tardiness on the part of our brave leader was sensibly felt to be an omen of evil by some [of] us, and was eventually the cause of our defeat. It was no part of the original plan to hold on to the Ferry, or to parley with prisoners; but by doing, time was afforded to carry the news of its capture to several points, and forces were thrown into the place, which surrounded us.”5 Thus, instead of moving expeditiously by gathering hostages and black volunteers, and then retreating into the mountains before sunrise, the old man seemingly fell prey to his own stubborn inclinations.

First, he went to extraordinary lengths to comfort and assuage the fears of his prisoners; in some cases, he even allowed prisoners to go out to “assure their families of their safety” and even was heard telling his men several times not to shoot back at dwelling houses. At the time, Anderson was understandably bothered by “the fountain of [Brown’s] sympathies” toward his Virginia prisoners and captives and believed his leader’s judgment should have favored his own men, and the concern of the slaves he had come to liberate.6

Second, Brown seems to have become caught up in extended discussions with those he had taken captive, some regarding the justification of his actions, and others some peculiar transactions involving the freeing of prisoners. Meanwhile, recalled Anderson, Brown was considering a proposition for release from his prisoners “and was moving back and forth from the armory to the bridge, trying to encourage his men. “Hold on a little longer, boys,” Brown told his worried raiders, “until I get matters arranged with the prisoners.” According to Benjamin Mills, an armory official and captive, Brown had tried to get him and other armory officers and citizens to sign a document permitting his possession of the armory grounds in exchange for the release of prisoners. Mills likewise testified that Brown “appeared anxious to effect a compromise.”

But Samuel Snyder, another hostage, afterward testified that Brown “constantly said that he wished to make terms more for [the hostages’] safety than his own.”7 Another prisoner, the slaveholder Lewis Washington, later testified that “negotiations” had been conducted with Brown “for the release of prisoners” prior to the counterattack by militia, although Washington did not know “whether all the prisoners signed the proposition for a suspension of firing.” In these negotiations, Brown wanted his prisoners to agree to cross the bridge with him and his men to a certain distance, with the commitment from the enemy that their party would not be fired on until they reached that point.

Throughout, too, he felt it necessary to engage his prisoners in discussion, not only justifying his actions but also instructing them with regard to slavery. Some of his captives later told the Baltimore American that Brown had “made an abolition speech” to the armory workmen. Similar exchanges probably took place between the old man and the worried slaveholders. Regardless, it is clear that he needlessly became bogged down in conversations and negotiations with his prisoners, even to the point of preparing documents, something evidently irresistible to Brown.8

After his defeat, Brown was very clear that he had failed to follow his own plan: “I intended to remain here but a few hours,” he told a reporter, “but a lenient feeling toward the citizens led me into a parley with them as to compromise.” In wounded hindsight, he believed that the hostages “by prevarication” were able to delay him until militia entered Harper’s Ferry and launched a counterattack, forcing him to “entrench” himself in self-defense.9 Whether his hostages actually intended to undermine him by negotiation and prevarication is open to question; what is clear is that John Brown demonstrated the worst tactical judgment at the most vulnerable moment of the operation and did so because his sympathy for the enemy got the best of him.

In the same interview, Brown revealed that his original intention was to have taken the captive slaveholders “to the Harper’s Ferry Bridge, and there to establish a commanding position, from which he would insist upon exchanges of slaves for his prisoners.” However, he changed his mind and placed the hostages inside the armory shop “where they would not be exposed to the weather” because the deepening night was becoming “severely cold.” Had he inconvenienced his hostages and taken them over to the bridge, he would have kept a strategic advantage for exiting town and heightened the opportunity for “hundreds of slaves” waiting on the periphery to join him, further igniting the start of his “enormous rescue.”10 Unfortunately, because of his own ineptitude, the “general alarm” spread faster than Brown had planned, leaving him, as the Tribune put it, “disappointed in this hope” and forced to “fight to the end.” In later interviews and in letters from jail, Brown continually reflected upon “his weakness in yielding to the entreaties of the prisoners, and delaying his departure” as the basis of his failure. “It was the first time,” he would lament, “that I ever lost command of myself, and now I am punished for it.”11

Besides worrying to distraction over his hostages, Brown’s other ruinous blunder was to permit a late-night Baltimore & Ohio train to stop in Harper’s Ferry and then pass through without hindrance. After his defeat, Brown told a reporter “that he made one mistake, in either not detaining the train on Sunday night, or permitting it to go on unmolested.” Brown concluded that this mistake not only allowed news of the raid to spread too quickly, but the resulting movement of militia and armed locals “prevented his reinforcements from coming.”

Once more, Brown seemed to have been worried about the welfare of other people rather than his mission, especially after the conductor was brought to him, appealing “in the strongest terms to allow him to pass with the train,” which was “full of fearful women and children.” Brown, being more inclined to the Golden Rule than to military expedience, replied that he would permit the train to pass if the conductor “would hold his peace and not speak of what was going on in Harper’s Ferry.” When the conductor refused to move the train for fear that the bridge might be sabotaged, Brown pitifully assured him otherwise. “My head for it, you will not be hurt!” he told the conductor, apologizing and promising him that it was not his intention to shed blood—even somewhat belittling the manner in which his men on the bridge had handled the situation. As if he had not already bent over backward, Brown then personally escorted the train across the bridge on foot to assure the conductor that he had no terroristic intentions. Of course, the conductor naturally stopped at the next station and telegraphed officials about the takeover at Harper’s Ferry, virtually summoning armed opposition to town hours before they might otherwise have arrived in such numbers.12

As the hours passed from Monday morning into afternoon, Brown seemed “all activity” but “somewhat puzzled.” Although he was undoubtedly torn between the well-being of his hostages and the success of his mission, probably he also was caught up in alternative strategies, trying to anticipate the possibilities of every move. It was characteristic of Brown to be overly ponderous and hesitant to move quickly in most things, and this tendency probably took its toll on the raid as well. As his son Salmon later put it, “Father had a peculiarity of insisting on order. . . . He was finic[ky] about all matters connected with his methods and had a horror of departing from the order that he fixed in his own mind. . . . He would insist on getting everything arranged just to suit him before he would consent to make a move.” An Ohio associate concluded that the Browns “were characteristically slow. . . . They were slow to move in anything,” including John Brown, who “seemed rather so too.”13

Finally, it was unfortunately true that he rarely took advice from anyone, even when he solicited it. At worst, he was imperious and chided others for not following his lead; at best, he considered the views of others, but mostly went his own way. With the unfortunate absence of the brave Harriet Tubman, whom Brown greatly admired and lauded as both a “man” and a “general,” there seems to have been no one at his side who could persuade him other than the voice in his own head.14 Certainly Brown’s regret and frustration over his tactical misjudgments are palpable both in his remarks to the press as well as his letters, and there is no reason to question his sincerity.15

On the other hand, just as the sum of Brown’s actions would never be fully known, neither would all the details of the raid itself because of conflicting information, questionable reportage, and standardized speculation. Not even the facts conventionally reported about the raid can always be trusted. The most notable example in this regard is the fate of Lewis Leary, one of the black raiders killed on Monday, October 17, while trying to escape in the Shenandoah River with two other raiders and an enslaved man.

The accepted version of the story says that Leary was shot and pulled from the water, being laid aside in one of the armory shops and left to die. One supposedly reliable report stated that “the wounded man died in a few hours,” and a local narrative written less than a decade later states that Leary “suffered great agony” but was left alone by the infuriated defenders.16 Writers have long accepted this without question, even though it seems unlikely that enraged local whites simply left Leary unmolested as he lay helpless and bleeding to death. From the conduct of whites during and after the raid, it is clear that the outraged people of Harper’s Ferry were not above doing cold-blooded murder, violating the bodies of dying men, and mutilating corpses in the most vindictive fashion.

To no surprise, then, the single report by Donavin of the Daily Exchange inadvertently preserves the real fate of the wounded Leary after he was taken from the river. Having traveled into Harper’s Ferry with a militia company, Donavin presents one of earliest reports on the final phase of the raid. Coming on the scene, he saw a wounded “mulatto” raider of about twenty-five years of age, undoubtedly Lewis Leary.17 Attempting to speak to him, Donavin propped Leary up, resting “his dying frame” on his arm, and asked his name. While the wounded man was trying to speak, a white woman suddenly came up and struck Leary in the face. The “mulatto” could only roll his eye and shake his head, but when he finally managed to speak, Leary told him that although the raiders had only been nineteen in number, “that they had got, and were expecting to get, reinforcements”—very likely referring to the positive support from local slaves.

Suddenly, the pitiable interview was horribly interrupted when “one of the infuriated citizens” snatched Leary from the journalist’s arms “and with one gash of a knife cut his throat from ear to ear.” Dissatisfied with Leary’s gruesome death, another white man attacked Leary’s corpse, ferociously clubbing the black man’s remains. In retrospect, Donavin would tell how his editor censored his straightforward reporting thereafter.18

Apart from Donavin and whatever information either randomly slipped out or could be covertly reported to the New-York Daily Tribune, the nation was fed largely an edited version of the raid. Historians mostly have overlooked statements that have gone against the grain of the accepted history, such as Osborne Anderson’s certainty that many more whites were killed by Brown’s men in the battle at Harper’s Ferry than were ever acknowledged, or Donavin’s later claim that Fontaine Beckham, the ill-fated mayor, actually may have been killed by friendly fire, not by Brown’s men.19

In the end Brown’s own blundering and bad judgment brought him and his men to defeat. As the more familiar part of the record goes, most of the raiders either were scattered or killed. A few others managed to join Brown, along with some hostages and a few local black men, in the engine house for their tragic last stand. The most notable attempt to storm the engine house had been repulsed earlier in the day, when a group of railroad men and other volunteers from Martinsburg failed, with two men killed and eight seriously wounded under heavy fire from Brown and his raiders’ Sharps rifles^20 (see figure 3.1).

FIGURE 3.1 Brown and his men, holed up in the fire engine house of the Harper’s Ferry armory. Robert M. DeWitt, The Life, Trial and Execution of Captain John Brown (1859).

However, by Monday evening, Harper’s Ferry was full of militia as well as armed, drunken civilians eager for revenge, assuring that the raiders had no hope of escape. Before midnight, a group of marines arrived in Harper’s Ferry under the command of Robert E. Lee.

The next morning, after refusing to surrender, Brown and his men fell before the marine assault. The old felon, defeated and appearing near death, lay unconscious in the front yard of the Harper’s Ferry engine house, dragged there by the conquering marines. Inside the brick structure where he had made his last stand, the whitewashed back wall bore testimony to the ferocity of the onslaught that had finally ended the episode. A swath of blood streaked down the wall—“a horrible, long red splash extending nearly four feet and nearly four inches wide,” along with pieces of the old man’s scalp and some gray hair stuck to the bricks. It was there that Brown was struck down under the fury of Lieutenant Israel Green, who toppled the abolitionist and ruthlessly beat him on the floor. Afterward, the people of Harper’s Ferry would not clean the wall for some time, preferring to leave the gore as an “example,” really a sign of contempt toward the man who had presumed to invade their town and steal their human property.21

Yet Brown was neither dying nor were his wounds mortal, although the marine assault left him with cleaved flesh, stab wounds, and perhaps a concussion—injuries that would take more time to heal than the remaining days of his life permitted. His attacker, Lieutenant Green, would later portray his violent assault as a “capture,” but capturing the old man and his raiders was not the objective at the time. Green, along with the other marines, had not entered the Harper’s Ferry engine house to take prisoners. After Brown refused Colonel Robert E. Lee’s demand of unconditional surrender, their only orders were to secure the lives of the hostages—most of them slave masters—along with any black chattel that happened to be inside with them. Lee was explicit in his orders that the slaves should be salvaged unless they resisted, while the abolitionists were to be taken down, but only with bayonets so as not to further endanger either masters or their enslaved people.22 There was nothing in Lee’s final orders about “capturing” Brown and his men.23

It is well known that Green somehow had blundered by carrying a light uniform sword instead of an actual combat blade when called away from Washington City to Harper’s Ferry. Upon entering the engine house, he drew his sword to kill Brown—who was standing without his gun raised—and struck him with such force that the sword bent double.24 The marine later said that either it had no point or had struck something hard in Brown’s accoutrements. (Perhaps it merely had bent against the force of history.) Failing to impale him, Green desperately pummeled his head with the hilt of the sword, opening a gaping wound and knocking him unconscious. Yet Green continued to beat Brown, even after he was down, bleeding profusely, and completely defenseless. Momentarily, another marine joined in, thrusting his bayonet into the prostrate old man, one thrust piercing his lower abdomen. “Two or three bayonet stabs finished him, it was then supposed,” one Virginia journalist reported.

Then, one of the assailants, probably Green, forcefully turned the unconscious Brown over on his face. According to one eyewitness, the old man was “rolled” with “careless roughness” onto his stomach and then faceup again, like the carcass of a hunted animal. As one Civil War journalist later described it, the whole scene of the marine assault was one where “chivalry quailed”—where some of the nation’s finest fighting men were reduced to killers in the service of a government devoted to human bondage. To no surprise, when Brown told his interrogators afterward that he had been brutally attacked “some minutes after I had ceased fighting,” his statement was immediately and “vehemently” denied.25

Most narrators have overlooked the murderous nature of the marine assault, although Donavin of the Baltimore Daily Exchange recalled Green’s “unsoldierly conduct,” likewise concluding that another marine had followed after him and “bayoneted the old man as he lay in his unconscious condition,” wounding him near the shoulder and then again, lower, near his kidney.26 In a letter to his wife afterward, Brown wryly described the incident, saying, “I was taken prisoner, immediately after which I received several Sabre cuts in my head, & Bayonet stabs in my body.” The New York Herald correspondent likewise reported that “Brown proceeded to give some details of the fight. He was wounded half a dozen times, he said, after he had ceased firing.”27 It is noteworthy that most historians have overlooked this brutal assault, even though there is a good deal of evidence that Brown was brutally attacked by both Green and a bayonet-wielding marine after he was down on the ground.28

Yet the old man had saved his life in the process. That he was able to survive the homicidal attack remains something of a wonder. Brown knew that the assault would bring down mortal force on himself and his men once he refused Lee’s offer of surrender. One local tradition of the black community in Jefferson County has Brown telling the enslaved men with him to step back lest they be killed when they were finally overrun. Even one of the hostages heard as much. “If they get hold of me my life would not be worth a straw,” Brown declared prior to the final marine breakthrough. “I know just what they would do with me. They would kill me like a dog.”29

Although he wanted to fight to the end, he tried at the last minute to alert the marines that some (perhaps only one) of his men were calling out to surrender and thereafter claimed that he could have easily shot down Major William Russell, who entered the engine house just after Green.30 Indeed, Brown later stated that he believed that the marines were approaching to receive the surrender of his men, or else he would have shot Russell immediately. “I had ceased fighting and consented to surrender,” Brown told his interrogators, “for the benefit of others, not for my own.”

His claim seems reasonable enough, because the old man’s weapon was not raised and the first two marines to break into the engine house through the breech were essentially unarmed—Green with his dress sword and Russell, the paymaster, carrying only a rattan cane. Apparently, then, the first marines to enter the engine house either deliberately or inadvertently misled the raiders as to their intentions, causing Brown and his men to cease firing. When they realized that armed marines were entering immediately behind Russell, two of the raiders evidently took up their weapons again and managed to kill one leatherneck and wound another before being overcome in the close conflict. Brown afterward stated that he did not know who struck him but believed his attacker was backed by a half-dozen marines “at once.”31

Perhaps fearing how details of Brown’s abuse might inflame Northern opinion, Virginia’s prosecuting attorney afterward suppressed testimony of Green’s murderous conduct in court, and in retrospect the lieutenant himself never admitted the brutality of the marine assault. In fact, the marines not only killed two of Brown’s raiders immediately but also nearly bayoneted a hostage, who was spared only by Green’s intervention. The raiders were not merely stabbed but torturously impaled as well. Jeremiah Anderson, after literally being pinned to the wall, was writhing so painfully that he turned himself almost upside down while his attacker evidently held fast and watched; young Dauphin Thompson was so brutally skewered that the hostages could hear his teeth gnashing.32

Of course, Green made no mention of the fact that, while he was beating Brown on the floor of the engine house, at least one other marine joined him in the assault.33 Nor is it clear that the several bayonet stabs Brown received were intended to kill him or simply the malicious brutality of the marines after the fact, perhaps a vindictive attempt to see if he was still alive. Green later claimed that he had to tell his men “to spill no more blood,” although this probably took place only after Brown was believed to be dead.34 J. E. B. Stuart, who oversaw the attack under Lee, later wrote to his mother, describing how Green was quite upset afterward because he had not been able to kill Brown with such a dull sword. Stuart then mocked Brown for “playing possum,” and bragged to his mother that if he had taken the old man down, his heavy, sharp combat sword would have saved Virginia the expense of hanging him.35

Years later, after some published eyewitness accounts revealed some aspects of Green’s ruthless conduct, he wrote a stylized piece, apparently to adjust the details to his benefit. Privately, Green had “brooded” for years over the fact that he was often disdained for his cruel treatment of Brown and was particularly convinced that “everybody in the North, at least, hated him.” The old leatherneck finished his days in South Dakota, typically more drunk than sober—trying to barter his tale for money. In a manner almost karmic, Israel Green finally descended into poverty and bitterness—swallowed alive by the legacy of the man he had brutalized on the floor of the armory engine house in 1859.36

Despite the serious wounds he had sustained in the attack, Brown may have come to his senses sooner than the marines realized. When he opened his eyes, he had already been carried out to the yard and placed next to his dead and dying men, including his sons Oliver and Watson. According to both The New York Herald and the New-York Daily Tribune, despite evident pain and discomfort, almost immediately he began to speak about his failed effort to anyone who questioned him.

“Are you Captain Brown of Kansas?”

“I am sometimes called so. . . .”

“Are you Ossawatamie Brown?”

“I tried to do my duty there.”

“What was your present object?”

“To free the slave from bondage.”

“Were any other persons but those with you now, connected with the movement?”

“No.”

“Did you expect aid from the North?”

“No—there was no one connected with the movement but those who came with me.”

“Did you expect to kill people in order to carry your point?”

“I did not wish to do so, but you force us to it.”

This line of question and response continued for some time, one reporter noting that Brown answered “clearly and freely, with seeming anxiety to vindicate himself.”

In these initial remarks, he appealed to facts that would become a mainstay of his defense when on trial. Brown protested that throughout his occupation of the town he had the people of Harper’s Ferry at his mercy and that he could have set fire to the town and murdered its inhabitants. He had not only spared the town and people but had also shown the greatest courtesy to his hostages. Now, the old man complained that he had been hunted down like a beast and his men likewise slaughtered—that even one of his own sons was shot while bearing a flag of truce. The same reporter concluded Brown’s words “bore the impression of the conviction that whatever he had done to free slaves was right, and that in the warfare in which he was engaged he was entitled to be treated with all the respect of a prisoner of war.”

Indeed, he saw himself in a mirror of military dignity that his captors would never allow. To the people of Virginia, he was nothing but an insurrectionist and brigand operating under a flag of abolition piracy. Yet John Brown had prefaced his attack with a drafted constitution, officers similarly appointed in a democratic process, and by binding himself to rules of warfare that any soldier would hope his enemy would follow. “He seemed fully convinced that he was badly treated and had a right to complain,” the journalist concluded.37

This was very much John Brown the idealist, who disdained unprincipled soldiers in his own ranks, and expected slave masters to rise above self-interest sufficiently to respect him as the leader, as it were, of a legitimate army of state.38 Yet in a sense, he was a prototype for the Southerners who held him as prisoner. Not too many years hence, the leaders of Virginia and other slave states would rebel against the Union, form their own constitution and place themselves outside the laws of the country by means of far greater violence than Brown would ever have countenanced. And just as they had refused to see him as representing a legitimate political movement, President Abraham Lincoln would never acknowledge the legitimacy of the Confederacy or regard its leaders as anything less than treasonous lawbreakers.39 Even so, Brown had invaded the South and attacked a federal armory for the sake of human freedom; they would attack their government and fellow citizens in order to guarantee the expansion of chattel slavery.

Despite his willingness to die in combat, the old man seems to have had a premonition that he would not perish while fighting proslavery forces, but rather would die on the gallows for the cause of the slave. “I may be hung,” he once told a friend, “but I will not be shot.”40 Of course, he probably had not considered the possibility of being stabbed and hacked to death, although he likewise evaded this fate. Having thus survived the brutality of the marines and hoping to evade being lynched by angry townsmen in the aftermath, he quickly saw another opportunity.

Coming to consciousness in the engine house yard—or appearing to do so—he was now aware that his words were his only weapon and that he might yet prove a good witness. In fact, his instincts were correct. From that hour, he would almost endlessly be interrogated, grilled, and questioned by reporters, soldiers, citizens, lawyers, politicians, and preachers. Despite his tattered, beaten appearance, blood-caked face, and matted hair, John Brown was about to attain his finest hour.

CHAPTER 4

CLOTHED IN RAGS AND ALL HIS HUMAN WEAKNESS

I pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them; that is why I am here.

Simpson Donavin, a Pennsylvanian of Virginia stock, was the first journalist on the ground at Harper’s Ferry, having come along with both militia and marines from Baltimore. His first dispatches to the Daily Exchange are dated from the evening of October 16, at the time Brown and his several raiders and black supporters were holed up in the armory engine house. Approaching Harper’s Ferry, Donavin reported at Monocacy that it was “impossible to describe the excitement of the people throughout the entire county,” with rumors flying about insurrectionists and captured slaveholders. Already there was concern among the militia that the raiders held the long, curving Potomac Bridge that lead into the Ferry. “If defended with obstinacy,” Donavin reported it, “will cause our troops considerable trouble.”

Fortunately for the militia, Brown had mistakenly opted to remain within the armory grounds, forsaking strategic advantage for the benefit of his hostages. En route, Donavin heard inconsistent and varied reports about the raiders and their leader, but even before arriving at Harper’s Ferry, he not only learned that neighboring militia had driven the invaders to what would be their last stand but that Major Russell, the ranking marine commander, had received word not to take action and wait for orders at Harper’s Ferry. Stopping at the Weverton, Maryland, station, Donavin found “a great many men, citizens, with all styles of fire arms on their shoulders, some of whom had just returned from the Ferry, where they had participated in the fight,” and a number of women who had fled the town for security. “Some were weeping,” Donavin wrote, “whilst others were rehearsing to the eager listening crowd, the outrages which had been committed by the insurgents.”1

However, at Harper’s Ferry, Donavin would witness firsthand that the citizens of the assaulted town could give far worse than they had taken—Brown’s men having been shot under a flag of truce, three raiders ruthlessly murdered, and the bodies of some raiders vengefully abused, mutilated, or stolen away for medical experimentation—a macabre blend of political malice and science. According to Steven Lubet, even when a white man from Ohio came with a letter from Governor Wise of Virginia, the body of one of the black raiders could not be reclaimed following the raid. The bold students of the Winchester Medical School simply refused to surrender it.2

“I attempted, as in all my reportorial work, to give an account of what occurred from time to time without bias or comment,” Donavin later recalled. “Finally I noticed that my reports were not published in full and some of them were materially changed. On my return to Baltimore one evening I asked why this was done.” He was told that it was not to the interest of the paper to publish some of the material that he had submitted.” When he protested that he had simply reported the facts, the editor responded that his communications suggested “sympathy with the prisoners.” Donavin says he submitted to the editor, but his candid, on-the-ground reportage of the raid and its aftermath seems almost to have disappeared from the pages of the Daily Exchange thereafter, with the exception of some firsthand accounts of Brown’s sentencing and execution.

With such censorship, it appears that the editors of the Daily Exchange had collaborated in the prevailing tendency of southern newspapermen by either misrepresenting or omitting information on behalf of the “insolent and arrogant institution” of slavery.3 Donavin was also one of a few journalists to interview Brown while still a prisoner at Harper’s Ferry. Both the Tribune and Harper’s Weekly afterward relayed his initial description of the abolitionist following his defeat on October 18. “Old Brown, the leader, is a small man, with white head and beard, and cold-looking gray eyes. When not speaking his lips are compressed, and he has the appearance of a most determined man.”4

Donavin further recalled that, when the marines brought their prisoners out of the engine house, “an immense cry of ‘Hang them’ filled the air, and young men with rifles jumped from the walls and the bridge into the armory yard, and were pressing to where they were, fully intent on killing them.” With the growing mob surrounding their defeated foes “it was impossible to keep the crowd back,” and some insult was made of the wounded and dying men even with the marine presence. Jeremiah Anderson, mortally wounded from a bayonet thrust and “wallowing in death spasms,” was angrily punched and kicked after he was carried out of the engine house and laid in the yard. A local farmer then forced his jaws open and spit a slimy chaw of tobacco into his mouth. Perhaps it was the same man who returned afterward, standing over him and complaining, “Well, it takes you a hell of a long time to die.”

Another observer named Peter Crow sent an account of the episode to the New York Times, describing Anderson as a “dying penitent” whose only consolation was to shut his eyes. Other townspeople had cut souvenir flesh from the body of the black raider, Dangerfield Newby, “whose glassy staring eyes and fallen jaw was hideous to behold.” Crow was probably alone in trying to “chase a hog” away from this “dead negro” lying in the street. After kicking and spitting on his remains, the outraged people of Harper’s Ferry left Newby’s corpse to be “rooted, pushed, and poked” by pigs, while dogs sniffed his coagulated blood. In the midst of such malice, a mountain man appeared in the company of two women. The expression of disgust on his face might have been mistaken for sympathy, until the man said loudly, “Gentlemen, just give me room here. Can’t you stand back and let the ladies see the corpses?”

Brown, now quite conscious and willing to speak to interrogators, complained aloud, telling the crowd not to maltreat him because he was dying and “would soon be beyond all injury.” Even with the determined intervention of the marines, the old man had good reason to fear that an overwhelming lynch mob might yet prevail. According to one source, he continued to express apprehension over the possibility of lynching, perhaps until the early part of November, even after his incarceration in nearby Charlestown. Worried to distraction by the mob, and lying on the small lawn in front of the engine house in the midst of his dead and dying men, Brown presented a “gory spectacle” to onlookers. It was evident to one journalist that he had a “severe bayonet wound” in his side and that his face and hair were clotted with blood.5

Under command of Major Russell, the marines then moved the prisoners into nearby armory offices where they could be better secured. Donavin was “kindly admitted” by Russell, finding Brown and Aaron Stevens, another badly wounded raider, lying pitifully on makeshift pallets on the floor. As Donavin observed, Brown looked up and immediately recognized Russell. “Young man,” he told the marine, “as you entered the engine house, I had you covered with my rifle, and could have killed you, but your frank face and your true courage caused me to pause, and I spared your life.” Brown may have been speaking truthfully, but this was hardly the whole truth. Later the old man made it clear that he “could have killed him just as easy as a mosquito” but had “supposed he came in only to receive our surrender.” Russell tipped his hat and replied, “I am deeply thankful to you for it.” Complaining about the crowds outside clamoring for his death, Brown said, “For what I have done I am willing to answer before any proper tribunal, but I do not want to be torn to pieces by a mob.” Russell responded, “Neither shall you be, so long as I have a soldier to defend you.”

At this point, Donavin recounted that he spoke to Brown, asking for personal information. “My name is John Brown. I am well known. I have been known as Old Brown of Kansas. I’m from Litchfield County, Connecticut, and have lived diverse places.” His sons had fallen in the raid, he said, and he was dying too—although he may have been hoping that his bloodied and feeble condition might somehow lessen the mob’s outrage, or at least that he could inveigh upon his captors to increase security. “I came here to liberate slaves, and was to receive no reward. I have acted from a sense of duty, and am content to await my fate, but I think the crowd have treated me badly,” Brown told Donavin. “I’m an old man, and yesterday I could have killed whom I chose, but I had no desire to kill any person, and would not have killed a man had they not tried to kill me and my men. I could have sacked and burnt the town, but did not; I have treated the persons whom I took as hostages kindly, and I appeal to them for the truth of what I say.”

Once more, perhaps hoping to discourage a bloodthirsty assault, he portrayed himself as being several years older than his age. Donavin may have been joined by other journalists at this point because he mentions comments made by Brown to some other reporters: “I have failed. I did not intend to stay here so long, but they (the citizens) deceived me by proposing compromises which they had no intention of carrying out. I am not in any man’s employ.” Donavin said that the old man continued to complain about the crowds outside, still clamoring for his death, but “was fully convinced that he was dying in a righteous cause.”6

Brown’s evident fear at the possibility of being lynched seemed far more unflattering to correspondent David Strother, also known as “Porte Crayon,” the Virginia sketch artist of Harper’s Weekly. In retrospect, Strother acknowledged that the town was full of armed people after Brown’s defeat, “now resolved into an unorganized mob, wild with excitement and whiskey . . . yelling like Comanches,” firing off their weapons in the air or into the mountains, or making targets of the few dead raiders still floating in the river. Brown had good reason for concern, being “hedged about with hatred & observed with jealous & unsympathizing scrutiny,” protected only by the thin blue line of disciplined federal forces. Strother afterward reported Brown’s “dread” of “Lynch law” in the pages of Harper’s Weekly but did not describe the extent to which the old man had succumbed to fear—except perhaps in the manner in which he sketched his restless, troubled form stretched out on the floor.

In his drawing, Brown, as he later described him, appears a “gaunt, grim & grizzled” older man with “bristling white hair, thick cropped beard and haggard features.” Strother’s Brown thus reclines without ease, with his “gory” head on a black oil carpetbag, the upper half of his body covered with a “dirty quilt,” and another cover restively kicked from his feet. Strother had begun to sketch the grim, old figure when suddenly another onlooker announced that a scaffold was being erected on the armory grounds. Hearing this report, the prisoners became upset, if not terrified. The helpless Stevens, seriously wounded and seemingly close to death, could only glance back and forth “in an agony of terror,” while the “Old Man shook violently, rolling to and fro & groaning in a manner painful to hear.”

Strother recalled that even the marine guard was moved by this pitiable display, trying to comfort Brown with a drink of water and fixing his covers as if he were a sick child. But Brown had no taste, even for water. “I hope they are not going to lynch us,” he said with anxiety. “I hope gentlemen you are not going to let them lynch us!” When it was realized that the report of the scaffold was mistaken, Brown was somewhat calmed, Strother then assuring him that the marines would not allow them to fall into the hands of the mob.7

Nine years later, the artist recalled Brown’s dread of being lynched, evidently doing so as a way of diminishing his haloed reputation. Telling an audience in Cleveland, Ohio, that he was describing neither a popular hero nor a prophet but “simply John Brown, the man; overthrown, wounded, enfeebled, exhausted.” Strother thus described him as “John Brown the Prisoner, clothed in rags and all his human weakness.” This was fair enough, although it is clear that Strother—unlike Simpson Donavin—would only salute Brown insofar as history had shown him correct in the matter of slavery. Otherwise, the artist was simply a Southern racist, exalting in his loyalty to the Union, a man whose contempt for the rebellious Confederacy had little or nothing to do with understanding Brown’s compassion for black people and the struggle for justice.

In later years, Strother could characterize Robert E. Lee facetiously, calling him a “worthy” crossbreed of military genius and Virginia “drawing room poodles.” Yet he was no kinder to Brown in retrospect. Having previously described him in Harper’s Weekly as being “under the influence of a ferocious vanity,” in 1868 Strother saw the old man as “the incarnation of an exalted & aggressive idealism.” The Virginia artist would eventually expose the old lie of slave loyalty, describing how the fear of “servile insurrection” actually had overshadowed the antebellum South—even admitting that “the very confident and vaunting tone in which the Virginian assured you of the fidelity of his slaves, proved the existence of the ever-present dread.”

As for Brown, in the years following the Civil War, he would declare a “regretful and half repentant” world was now turning back to inquire of the “Old Grey Man.” However, the artist perhaps was speaking of himself more than he realized. It was nearly a decade since Brown’s hanging, but to no surprise, Strother, who could make beautiful sketches of blacks while considering them a “half-monkey race,” still viewed the Harper’s Ferry episode through a cynical lens that obscured the real nature of Brown’s angst—a fear that never was as simple as a fear of death, or even a violent death.

On the battlefield in Kansas as well as the crisis at Harper’s Ferry, the old man had distinguished himself as naturally brave and fearless, and his undoubted courage ultimately was vindicated in the confident and peaceful manner in which he finally ascended the gallows less than two months after his defeat. Biographer Franklin Sanborn, sometimes given to worshipful descriptions of the old man, exaggerated only slightly when he wrote that the “emotion of fear seemed to be quite unknown” to John Brown. In contrast, Strother simply could not recall him as being other than “confused” by “the mysterious ways of Providence.”8

Yet this was precisely why Brown was fearful—that notwithstanding his defeat, he believed the ways of Providence had led him all along, and might yet deliver him were he not deprived of one, last opportunity to speak against slavery. Had he been lynched or torn apart by the mob, his failure at Harper’s Ferry would have remained unresolved, and his voice would have gone down to the grave without bearing witness. It was not hanging that John Brown feared, or even death at the hands of his enemies. What filled him with dread was the prospect of passing suddenly and silently into the shadows of history, deprived of the final role for which he longed in the midst of failure and defeat.

With his life thus far saved, Brown, along with the other captive raiders, were hardly certain of what would come next. Even if spared the attack of a mob, they could not have known what manner of trial or judgment they would face. Brown probably hoped for a complete intervention of the federal government, because he and his men had been apprehended and defeated on the grounds of a federal facility. If he was uncertain about the course of judgment, he was also uncertain of his health as well as the fate of his son Watson, who was mortally wounded prior to the marine breakthrough. At one point, he struggled to his feet, painfully opening his mired and bloody shirt in order to examine the bayonet wounds in his body—but quickly fastened his garment and lay back down when Major Russell happened to enter the room.

Russell concluded that he was hardly near death, and the old man’s bitterest critics, especially the ill-starred J. E. B. Stuart, mocked him as a faker with mere flesh wounds, although anyone sustaining the same injuries today might be hospitalized in guarded condition. After all, Brown had lost a great deal of blood, his skull had sustained blunt force, and he had been repeatedly and deeply cut on his head and stabbed in his body. Indeed, the force of the beating on his head was so great that he would complain of a loss of hearing and an inability to concentrate for an extended time, probably because he was experiencing severe headaches.

When the slaveholder Alexander Boteler found him lying on the floor in this condition, he was put off by Brown’s awful appearance but brushed aside any concern since his wounds were not mortal.9 Boteler, a congressman from Virginia’s Eighth District, described him as lying on his side, “with that eye turned up into which the blood had run from the cut over his scalp.” In fact, the blood had flowed profusely over most of Brown’s face, but one of his eyes was completely closed by dried, caked blood. When he later wrote of this episode, Boteler described him as “grim and grizzly,” looking like “some aboriginal savage with war-paint.” He recalled kneeling down, bending himself over the prostrate figure, and could hear Brown groaning. Introducing himself and inquiring of his wounds, Boteler perhaps was surprised that the old man was familiar with his name and political status, but proceeded to ask him of his origins and family, really with the intention of inquiring about the raid. “I want to know if this is the whole of the invasion of this district. Who started this thing?” Boteler asked.

Turning himself over, Brown responded, looking at his interrogator with one keen eye. “I started it myself.” The slaveholder was naturally intent on finding out if more attacks were to follow. “Will there be any further descent on this region or State?” Brown answered, “Time will tell. If there is any more to come it will not be of my knowledge.” To this, Boteler asked, “Mr. Brown, if this is the whole of the raid, you must have expected assistance when you got here?” “Yes,” the old man replied, with the “earnest gaze” of his one clear eye. “I did. My expedition was to free the slaves and I expected them to join me, as well as other people in favor of that object.”10

As Boteler was preparing to leave, their closing conversation was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a priest, probably Father Michael Costello of St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church in Harper’s Ferry, who had come to give last rites to one of the marines, a young Irishman who was mortally wounded in the engine house assault.11 The priest wore his vestments, and just his appearance in the doorway set Brown off. “Go away from here!” the old Calvinist shouted, as the priest bowed and backed away. “I don’t want any thing to do with you. Take him away!”

Boteler wrote of the episode years later, suggesting it proved Brown’s “hatred” and lack of charity. However, in an earlier interview, the slaveholder described the same scene with more sympathy, stating that he had also admonished the priest to leave, noting that “the old Puritan” did not want a “Romanist” to come around him, especially in his condition. Although Brown probably resented the priest for catering to slaveholders like the rest of the clergy in Harper’s Ferry, his strident Protestant sensibilities were deeply rooted in his traditional Puritan heritage.

FIGURE 4.1 This illustration of Brown’s examination under Mason and Vallandigham is based on an Alfred Berghaus sketch in Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Robert M. DeWitt, The Life, Trial and Execution of Captain John Brown (1859).

It was not merely that Brown, steeped in the Protestant confessions of the seventeenth century from childhood, probably believed the pope was the antichrist (or at least, an antichrist). In the antebellum era, there was no small concern among evangelical Protestants that the rising presence of Roman Catholic churches in the United States posed a political threat to the nation. As one writer put it in the introduction of the 1835 edition of Jesuit Juggling, by the seventeenth-century Puritan Richard Baxter (one of Brown’s favorites), there were forces “in operation which give life and encouragement to the efforts that Roman Priests and disguised Jesuits make to subjugate these States to the Italian Pontiff.” It is likely, then, that the old man viewed slavery and Roman Catholicism in similar shades.

To Brown the Calvinist, both the pope and the slaveholder were the historical and spiritual agents of human bondage. This is apparent in the manner that he harked to the first Puritan victim of England’s “Bloody Mary” in writing to his wife and family from jail: “John Rogers wrote to his children, ‘Abhor that arrant whore of Rome. John Brown writes to his children to abhor with undying hatred, also that ‘sum of all villainies’ Slavery.”12

At midday, Tuesday, October 18, Governor Henry Wise arrived at Harper’s Ferry by train, accompanied by several hundred militias from Virginia and Maryland. According to Livingston Grahame, when Wise had received dispatches in Richmond confirming the small number of raiders that had taken Harper’s Ferry, he had leaned back in his chair, nervously chewing tobacco, and exclaimed, “Why, this John Brown is playing Coeur de Lion—he attacks the world single handed—he must be a lunatic, or braver than Caesar!” As a result of his train being delayed near Washington City, Wise was prevented from taking immediate action to quash the raid. “Had I reached Harpers Ferry before these men were captured,” he later wrote, “I would have proclaimed martial law, have stormed them in the quickest possible time, have given them no quarter, and if any had survived, I would have tried and executed them under sentence of Court Martial. But I was too late.”

Instead, as Strother put it, Wise fumed “like a man, who in a violent passion has kicked at a door & found it open.” After brooding for a few minutes, the governor—described as gaunt, wiry, and pale (some even said he looked like a cadaver), unleashed a tirade of sarcasm, particularly mocking the people of Harper’s Ferry for having been conquered by so small a force. The Baltimore Sun reported that when one man protested, telling the governor that Brown had them “huddled in like a flock of sheep” because of his superior weapons, Wise bitterly snapped that they were “very much like sheep” and that Brown certainly cornered all of Harper’s Ferry.13

When the governor and his entourage of aides, officers, and citizens finally came to interview Brown, his appearance seemed improved. His wounds were somewhat dressed—but not before he and Stevens were verbally abused by the brash, vindictive Lieutenant Stuart, who had finally sent for a doctor after cursing and vilifying both prisoners. (It was probably to Stuart—not Wise, as mistakenly reported in some sources—that Brown stated, “If you have your opinions about me, I have my opinions about you. You (slaveholders) are the robbers.”

The governor immediately pressed in on his prisoner, emphasizing that he was now in the hands of Virginia and that he could choose to answer questions, to which the old man replied that he was aware that he was in the hands of the law and was ready to meet his fate. In an interview that Strother characterized as “long and tedious,” lasting several hours, Brown was frank in discussing any information about the raid as long as it did not implicate others. After acknowledging that he had expected help from large numbers of whites and blacks, Wise wanted to know if any of his allies were from the vicinity of Harper’s Ferry. This question the old man refused to answer but, after pausing, declared, “From my visits and associations and inquiries about here, I have a right to expect the aid of from three to five thousand.”

During their interview, evidently Brown had begun to take up his argument against slavery, which the governor promptly cut off. According to a source from Richmond, Wise remarked, “Mr. Brown, the silver of your hair is reddened by the blood of crime, and it is meet that you should eschew these hard allusions and think upon eternity.” Whether he died from his wounds or by execution, the governor continued, “It is better you would turn your attention to matters concerning your eternal future, than be dealing in denunciations which can only injure you” (see figure 4.1).

The old man replied in a manner of sober piety that must have disconcerted him. “Governor, I have, from all appearance, not more than fifteen or twenty years the start of you in the journey to that eternity of which you kindly warn me; “and whether my tenure here shall be fifteen months, or fifteen days, or fifteen hours, I am equally prepared to go. There is an eternity behind and an eternity before, and the little speck in the centre, however long, is but comparatively a minute. The difference between your tenure and mine is trifling, and I want to therefore tell you to be prepared; I am prepared. You all (referring to slaveholders) have a heavy responsibility, and it behooves you to prepare more than it does me.”14 The Richmond Enquirer afterward noted that the old man’s remarks were made without the slightest sense of disrespect.

For his part, Wise, who characterized himself as “sharp and quick and imperious in his temper,” was seemingly both impressed and infuriated by his prisoner’s ability to match wits, and to do so in a manner both pious and confident. One of Brown’s former captives, John Daingerfield, listened intently to the grilling and concluded later that Wise was astonished by Brown, who had all the “careful reserve” of a lawyer while showing no disrespect to the governor. Still, Wise was put off by Brown’s audacity, such as when he asked the old man if he felt it was wrong to run off with other people’s slave “property.” Without hesitation, Brown simply said no.15

What is evident in this and other interviews is the importance of Christian faith and morals to both the interrogators and their prisoner; it is also what seemed to gall Wise and others, whose questions are often loaded with religious assumption and rebuke. Had Brown proved a godless robber, they could have easily brushed him aside; had he been a libertine, or a man of novel religious ideas and heterodox assumptions, their scorn would be easy. But here was a creature for which they had no category. They simply could not comprehend or tolerate a man whose piety and evangelical orthodoxy were as genuine and robust as any proslavery Calvinist in the South, yet one who had taken up arms and invaded their land only for the purpose of liberating the enslaved African. Even Wise, reared in the conservative religious culture of the South, seems to have found it impossible to circumvent the religious question, returning to it repeatedly rather than adhering to points of law. For instance, the governor asked Brown whether he, being a religious man, had considered that there might be something wrong with a plan that could lead to bloodshed and suffering, and would it not have been better to have left it to the Almighty to correct evil? Pausing, Brown responded that he had “been long & painfully exercised on that subject,” leading to uncertainty and hesitation, but that he had “finally concluded that God accomplished his great designs by means of human instruments often weak & erring.” Believing himself called to undertake the antislavery effort as “a high moral & religious duty,” Brown stated that he had “hoped that it might have succeeded without much violence.” If violence were required, he concluded, then the blame would rest on the oppressors.16

Wise rebuked Brown at this point, questioning the clarity of his views and concluding that he still had “much to learn both of true religion & high morality.” Before Brown could respond, the governor changed the subject, questioning his judgment about attacking Harper’s Ferry with such a small force. “The Old Man blinked with a snappish vivacity,” saying, “Why, Governor—I did take it and hold it the better part of two days.” Enraged by this rejoinder, Wise shouted, “Yes, and if I had been here—if I had commanded this cowardly rabble you wouldn’t have held it ten minutes!” Brown retorted that doing so would have meant killing many innocent citizens simply “to shed my blood.” Not realizing he was cornered, Wise held fast, declaring that he still would have done so for the sake of the honor of Virginia: “I would have blown you to the Sky, all together.” Suddenly the wounded prisoner struck: “If these are your ideas of right & justice, I must say, Governor (meaning no offence) that you also have much to learn of true Religion & high morality.”

Nine years after this interview, Strother claimed that Brown had told Wise that he had expected hundreds to join him once he had made his strike at Harper’s Ferry and that he had “enrolled” thousands in the North and Canada. However, “through cowardice or want of zeal,” their hesitation and false promises had led him to strike on his own. Furthermore, from “the reports of his emissaries,” Brown said, “he had been led to believe confidently that the whole servile population of the South was ripe for insurrection and that the lower class of Whites would either join him or remain neutral and indifferent.” Strother’s narrative is not entirely reliable, because it is improbable that Brown ever referred to his plan as an “insurrection”; likewise, the numbers mentioned were probably exaggerated, either by Brown or by Strother in retrospect. Nor is Strother’s interpretation trustworthy, particularly in his inclination to portray Brown in diminishing shadows of private bitterness and disappointment. Still, even considered with caution, his narrative suggests why Wise and other Virginia leaders seemingly took Brown more seriously than have historians and writers over the past century and a half. The old man clearly had projected and planned for a South-wide liberation movement, believing that “once fairly initiated by a bold stroke and an easy success,” he would gain support against a class of elite slaveholders, “rolling in wealth and pride” but “few in number, scattered & enfeebled by habits of luxurious indolence.” Although he believed the slaveholders could not withstand a bold movement, Brown even hoped they “would yield without serious bloodshed and accept terms” other than warfare.

Even if historians and television documentary makers have underrated Brown’s plan, the slaveholding congressman Alexander Boteler spoke for those Virginians who surmised how close the old man actually had come to jeopardizing the stability of slavery throughout the South. “It was one of the most marvelous campaigns ever devised,” he told a journalist in 1882. “If John Brown got into the mountains there is no telling how extensive that raid might have been. Unquestionably a certain proportion of the slaves would have run away,” and had the old man exited Harper’s Ferry for the mountains and “kept upon their wooded summits,” he “might have exceeded all our present notions.”17

As to the attack on the federal site, it is very clear from Brown’s interviews and statements while under arrest at Harper’s Ferry that the plot to seize the armory was, as the Richmond Enquirer reported, “well contrived and arranged as far back as 1856” and that he “had fully examined [the armory’s] strength, ascertained the number of men in charge of it, and the probabilities of taking it.”

After his defeat, Brown also told Robert E. Lee that his plan had originated in 1856, a fact subsequently reported to President Buchanan by US District Attorney Robert Ould. In an unrelated trial in 1867, John Brown Junior testified that although his father’s overall plan had been formed as early as 1836, no practical action was taken in accordance with the plan until 1856–1857. Even Mary Brown told a journalist that her husband had been waiting twenty years for an opportunity to free the slaves. “[W]e had all been waiting with him, the proper time when he should put his resolve into action. When at last the enterprise of Harper’s Ferry was planned,” she concluded, “we all thought that the time had now come.”18

It is evident that Brown had contemplated a “rescue” plan from the vicinity of Harper’s Ferry for decades, but had never considered attacking and seizing the town and armory until only a few years prior to the raid. One journalist thus summarized Brown’s intentions based on an interview conducted with him in early November 1859: “He had calculated upon, and fully expected to accomplish, a rescue of a great number of slaves. To maintain a warlike position in Virginia for any definite period was not his object. The idea of his seizing the Armory for the sake of the weapons it contained, he will not admit. He says he had far better weapons of his own.”19 Brown likewise told a New York Times correspondent “that it was no part of his purpose to seize the public arms. He had arms and ammunition enough.” As far as the assault on Harper’s Ferry, he had “only intended to make the first demonstration at this point,” what he elsewhere referred to as a “discriminating blow at Slavery.”20

It has become a mainstay of historical narration that Brown attacked the armory in order to seize the weapons for an uprising, although actually the evidence weighs against this assumption. Just as he always denied that he had intended to incite bloody insurrection, Brown emphasized repeatedly that he had not come to Harper’s Ferry to seize its weapons. Following his defeat, the only weapons found in his wagon were his own, and the Sharps rifles he had brought to Harper’s Ferry actually were superior to the percussion muskets and muzzle-loading rifles produced at the armory.21

Evidently, the raiders posted at the arsenal were not sent there to empty it but to prevent townsmen from gaining access to its stores.22 Despite all claims otherwise, the only substantial testimony regarding Brown’s men and the Harper’s Ferry rifles was made by W. S. Downer, the Master Armorer’s clerk, who stated that the raiders broke open the arsenal and took out two boxes of “muskets.”23 Whether or not the raiders thought to complement their weapons stores with a meager two boxes of muskets, the notion that Brown’s “insurrection” at Harper’s Ferry was centered on seizing the arsenal weapons and arming thousands of liberated blacks is little more than a southern legend.

Equally important was Brown’s stated intention to have made “the first demonstration” at Harper’s Ferry. Beyond seizing some slave masters and gathering the first fruits of his rescue operation, primarily the old man was interested in making a statement to the leaders of the South. To understand the nature of this demonstration, it is essential to recall that Brown apparently conceived of the idea of attacking the armory about 1856, when he was in the Kansas territory. As Republican senators Lyman Trumbull of Illinois and Daniel Clark of New Hampshire later surmised, the idea to attack the Harper’s Ferry armory was likely inspired by a proslavery action that took place shortly after Brown had gone to the Kansas territory to support his family’s settlement.

On December 4, 1855, a small proslavery force led by Judge J. T. V. Thompson and a “Captain Price,” attacked the federal arsenal at Liberty, Missouri, robbing it of ammunition, weapons, and three six-pound cannons. This violation of federal property was indirectly sanctioned by the sitting territorial governor of Kansas, who permitted the proslavery raiders to use these weapons in the first major move against free-state forces, especially the free-state center at Lawrence. Although the weapons were not successfully employed and many were later returned, this flagrant abuse of a federal arsenal by proslavery forces went unpunished by both the territorial and federal governments.

To the disgust of Senator James Mason of Virginia, Trumbull and Clark pressed home their point about the raid only days after Brown’s hanging. To Trumbull, there was a “striking similarity” between the raids on Liberty and Harper’s Ferry that merited equal investigation. Clark was more blunt: “Where did he get his example? From Missouri, where an armed band took arms from an arsenal of the Government to invade Kansas. [Brown] only followed the example that was set him; he only carried out the same violence that was practiced there to a greater degree.”24

Unlike the Missouri raiders at Liberty, Brown and his men had brought their own guns to Harper’s Ferry, so the weapons themselves were not a central point as much as was the apparent “demonstration” that the old man wanted to make in launching his liberation movement in the South. This not only explains why Brown seems to have guarded the arsenal rather than ransacking it, but also suggests the attack was a bold political gesture, not only to the slaveholders of the South, but to the proslavery administration in Washington that had turned a blind eye to the abuses and terrorism forced on free-state settlers in the Kansas territory. In this sense, seizing the armory was only incidental to his larger South-wide plan. As relayed by one of Brown’s interviewers, the idea of occupying Harper’s Ferry was “a variation from his original determination,” which was to establish a commanding position at the Harper’s Ferry bridge, where he could exchange prisoners for slaves and finally retreat in haste to the mountains. “He had supposed that, after a few days of successful evasion, he would be joined by hundreds of slaves anxious to escape, by whose aid he could have perfected arrangements for an enormous rescue.”25

In congressional debate, Mason, the slaveholding Virginia senator and author of the oppressive Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, opposed the clear logic of Trumbull and Clark, calling Brown a stark insurrectionist. Without real basis, Mason insisted that Brown had intended massive “extermination” of the white population of the South, something that was averted only due to “the loyalty of the slaves.” As to the blacks in Brown’s company, Mason further claimed that the few black raiders were mere “decoys,” while the slaves seeming to be with him actually had been captured and forced into service.26 In the end, Mason and the interests of slaveholders would win the argument: in 1860, a committee of US senators began to investigate the Harper’s Ferry raid, while the incident at Liberty, Missouri, went overlooked. To no surprise, Mason, who already had made personal investigation immediately after Brown’s defeat, headed the senatorial committee.

The senator had reached Harper’s Ferry by railroad early Wednesday afternoon, October 19, apparently having missed Governor Wise, who left for the county seat of Charlestown after a second, brief interview with Brown that morning. However, the Senator was joined by another Virginia leader, Charles J. Faulkner, a former congressman, and “several other distinguished gentlemen,” as well as soldiers and journalists, most notably from the Baltimore American. While the most familiar and expansive transcript of Mason’s interrogation of Brown appeared in the New York Herald, perhaps the unidentified “special reporter” was John W. Gallaher, the Virginian who acted as the Herald’s correspondent throughout this episode.27 Indeed, having a Virginia affiliate on the ground at Harper’s Ferry and Charlestown put the Herald far ahead of the other New York papers—an advantage first creditable to editor James Bennett, who had developed an extensive network of special correspondents by the 1850s. Otherwise, only conservative newspapers such as New York’s Observer and Herald were welcome in Charlestown, and certainly the latter viewed national affairs “from a southern view.”28

Mason and those accompanying him, a party of about ten men, were a little delayed at first, probably by Colonel Lee, who seems to have given a brief lecture in regard to conduct, warning that visitors who annoyed or “pained” the prisoners would be excluded. Gallaher came a little later than the correspondent of the Baltimore American, who described Brown as having long, gray hair matted with blood, gashes in his head, and his face and hands smeared with blood and dirt, with clear eyes “of a pale blue, or perhaps a sharp gray.” Gallaher described him similarly, with “restless gray eyes,” “a grizzly beard and hair,” and face, hands, and clothes “all smouched and smeared with blood.”

By this time, the old man had taken some refreshment and improved his pallet with a clean feather pillow laid on the back of an upturned chair, allowing him to sit up and speak to his interrogators. Assured at least of his immediate security, he showed “no sign of weakness” nor “the slightest manifestation of fear or uneasiness.” Rather, he spoke courteously, fluently, and cheerfully; he even seemed “glad to be able to make himself and his motives clearly understood.” Congressman Clement Vallandigham, a proslavery Democrat from Ohio, shortly joined Mason and the others. Vallandigham had rushed over from Harper’s Ferry, where his train from Washington had a layover. According to Vallandigham, he found the room quite busy during the interview, with new people “coming and going every moment,” and the old man “conversing freely with all who chose to address him.”29

As Brian McGinty has observed, the Mason and Vallandigham interrogation has become perhaps the defining interview of Brown as a prisoner at Harper’s Ferry, while other interviews either have been overlooked or confused with the Herald’s “verbatim report of the conversation.” Yet Vallandigham thought it both “casual” and relatively brief, lasting, as he said later, only about twenty minutes. Nor was the Herald report precise, the reporter erroneously attributing a number of statements to Vallandigham and confusing some of the information provided by Brown.30 It is interesting, too, that the interrogation by Wise was not only more extensive, but the questioning was done exclusively by the governor, who prohibited anyone else from speaking, whereas the Mason and Vallandigham interview seems almost an open forum, with important politicians as well as soldiers and citizens taking their turn at Brown.31

Both Mason and Vallandigham were primarily interested in Brown’s backers, but the latter drove fairly hard once he learned that the old man was from his home state. He first began with an insinuating question relating Brown to an infamous Ohio counterfeiter by the same name but, more important, sought to tie him to the abolitionist movement and to Congressman Joshua R. Giddings, the gadfly of proslavery politicians. Brown admitted to having met with Giddings earlier in the year, but refused to say anything that would implicate the antislavery leader.

Throughout the interrogation, Mason assumed Brown was merely the agent of more powerful forces in the North, but his questions were neither as penetrating nor as provocative as those from Vallandigham. To no surprise, Mason asked about Brown’s intentions, the number of his raiders, his financial support, and his Provisional Constitution. Perhaps the most persistent point of Mason’s interrogation, however, pertained to the financing of what he called Brown’s “expedition”—suggesting that he took the old man for something of a freebooter or paid adventurer (known as “filibusters” in the middle of the nineteenth century). Brown insisted that he had raised his own money, but Mason repeatedly asked Brown about his support and financiers, and even the wages he had offered to others.

For his part, Brown wanted to be clear that he was the author of the raid and that he had raised most of the money, and that the mission had failed because of his own “folly” in not securing the route of his escape from Harper’s Ferry. Rather than following his own plan, he said, he had become gripped by “feelings” of concern for his hostages, prompted by the weeping of their “wives and daughters,” and the need to “allay the fears of those who believed we came here to burn and kill.” Likewise, Brown said, he had sought to “spare the feelings” of the passengers and their families on the Baltimore & Ohio train, giving them “full liberty to pass on” in order to “allay the apprehensions” that the raiders were “a band of men who had no regard for life and property, nor any feeling of humanity.” The old man had made this admission from the first moment of his arrest and would continue to claim that the source of his failure was in allowing concern for his captives to cloud his judgment—a claim that historians conventionally have overlooked or denied, preferring speculative explanations or suggesting Brown was not telling the truth.

Although a good portion of the questions and answers involve details and incidents of no primary interest, several chunks of the verbatim transcript prove to be quite revealing of both Brown and his interrogators:

Mason: If you would tell us who sent you here—who provided the means—that would be information of some value.

Brown: I will answer freely and faithfully about what concerns myself—I will answer anything I can with honor, but not about others.

Bystander:32 Mr. Brown, who sent you here?

Brown: No man sent me here; it was my own prompting and that of my Maker, or that of the devil, which ever you please to ascribe it to. I acknowledge no man in human form.

Mason: How many are there engaged with you in this movement?

Brown: Any questions that I can honorably answer [I] will, not otherwise. So far as I am myself concerned, I have told everything truthfully. I value my word, sir.

Mason: What was your object in coming?

Brown: We came to free the slaves, and only that.

Mason: How do you justify your acts?

Brown: I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity—I say it without wishing to be offensive—and it would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you so far as to free those you willfully and wickedly hold in bondage. I do not say this insultingly.

Mason: I understand that.

Brown: I think I did right, and that others will do right who interfere with you at any time and at all times. I hold that the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you,” applies to all who would help others to gain their liberty.

Lieut. Stuart: But you don’t believe in the Bible.

Brown: Certainly I do.

Mason: What wages did you offer?

Brown: None.

Lieut. Stuart: “The wages of sin is death.”

Brown: I would not have made such a remark to you if you had been a prisoner and wounded in my hands.

Bystander: Do you consider this a religious movement?

Brown: It is, in my opinion, the greatest service a man can render to God.

Bystander: Do you consider yourself an instrument in the hands of Providence?

Brown: I do.

Bystander: Upon what principle do you justify your acts?

Brown: Upon the golden rule. I pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them; that is why I am here, not to gratify any personal animosity, revenge, or vindictive spirit. It is my sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged, that are as good as you and as precious in the sight of God. . . . I want you to understand gentlemen—(and to the reporter of the Herald) you may report that—I want you to understand that I respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of colored people, oppressed by the slave system, just as much as I do those of the most wealthy and powerful. This is the idea that has moved me, and that alone. We expected no reward except the satisfaction of endeavoring to do for those in distress and greatly oppressed as we would be done by. The cry of distress of the oppressed is my reason; and the only thing that prompted me to come here.

Vallandigham: Did you expect a general rising of the slaves in case of your success?

Brown: No, sir; nor did I wish it. I expected to gather them up from time to time, and set them free. . . . I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better—all you people at the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question, that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared the better. You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled—this negro question I mean; the end of that is not yet. These wounds were inflicted upon me—both saber cuts on my head and bayonet stabs in different parts of my body—some minutes after I had ceased fighting and had consented to surrender, for the benefit of others, not for my own. (This statement was vehemently denied by all around.)

Unidentified: Brown, suppose you had every nigger in the United States, what would you do with them?

Brown: Set them free.

Bystander: To set them free would sacrifice the life of every man in this community.

Brown: I do not think so.

Bystander: I know it. I think you are fanatical.

Brown: And I think you are fanatical. “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad,” and you are mad.33

Here he was, as the reporter from the Baltimore American afterward observed, “in the midst of enemies, whose home he had invaded; wounded and a prisoner, surrounded by a small army of officials,” and outside a mob of desperate, angry men. “With the gallows staring him full in the face, he lay on the floor, and, in reply to every question, gave answers that betokened the spirit that animated him.” Vallandigham recalled Brown being “wiry, muscular, but with little flesh—with a cold gray eye, gray hair, beard and mustache, compressed lips and sharp, aquiline nose; of cast-iron face and frame” but mistakenly described him as being tall, even though he was of average height—a frequent error, no doubt reflecting the impression made by the old man on his listeners. Writing to the Cincinnati Enquirer several days later, Vallandigham also described the old man’s conduct during the interrogation: “He has coolness, daring, persistency, the stoic faith and patience, and a firmness of will and purpose unconquerable . . . with powers of endurance equal to anything needed to be done or suffered in any cause.” He also considered Brown’s raid as “among the best planned and executed conspiracies that ever failed.”

Of course, Vallandigham was no admirer and erroneously concluded that Brown’s “powers are rather executory than inventive” and that he lacked “the depth or breadth of mind” to originate and devise such a plan. Vallandigham was clearly intent on finding something amid the wreckage of the raid that he could use against antislavery leaders in the North, especially the abolitionist Giddings of Ohio. (A move that Giddings did not leave unchecked: “I have no time,” he fired back in a letter to the Cincinnati Gazette, “to notice the dialogue between John Brown and a certain smelling doughface, who appears to think he can make the people believe that I said something privately that I dare not say publicly, not because he proved it, but because he failed to prove it.”) While he fully acknowledged that Brown clearly was “the furthest possible remove from the ordinary ruffian, fanatic or madman,” Vallandigham shared the assessment of the proslavery leaders of the South. He not only insinuated that Brown was a tool of more powerful and intelligent antislavery leaders in the North, but that the old man had come to Virginia to launch an “insurrection.” As Vallandigham concluded, the “folly and madness” of the effort was in expecting slaves and sympathizers to join him at “the moment the blow was struck”34

Whereas proslavery leaders and their allies in the North could only see Brown as a fanatical tool, hardened in his own delusional belief, many others read Gallaher’s transcription with an almost biblical sensibility. To antislavery readers, the interview with Governor Wise, followed immediately by Mason’s free-for-all interrogation as published in a right-wing journal like the Herald, had now begun to reveal John Brown as something of a modern-day prophet. Brown believed he was raised up by God to liberate the slave, opined one writer in the Springfield Republican. “This is made evident in the answers given to his catechizers, as he lay chained and bloody, with fierce eyes around him and hearts thirsting for his blood. His perfect coolness and self-possession, his evident truthfulness and transparent sincerity, and the utter absence of fear in his manner, command the respect of all about him.” Even considering that many had believed him “misguided and insane,” the writer stated, the old man was now seen as being “inspired with a genuine heroism” as well as “a large infusing of the stern old Puritan element.”

Although he was both the old man’s apologist and panegyrist, James Redpath was correct in weighing the impact of Brown’s words before his “political inquisitors.” “Never before, in the United States, did a recorded conversation produce so sudden and universal a change of opinion.” Prior to the publication of Brown’s words, wrote Redpath, many “lamented that he should have gone insane—never doubting that he was a maniac.” But when Brown’s bold, penetrating, and fearless responses were printed, “from every corner of the land came words of wonder, of praise rising to worship, and of gratitude mingling with sincerest prayers for the holy old hero.”35 Brown’s single-minded adherence to the Golden Rule, his frank disinterest in reward or compensation, his straightforward declaration of the raid’s purpose, his bold rejoinder to proslavery religious hypocrisy, and the stern, measured manner of his rebuke to malicious hecklers such as J. E. B. Stuart, had turned the head if not the heart of the nation. By one borrowed proverb, John Brown had turned his accusers’ weapons against themselves and prophesied the calamity that would finally consume slavery: “‘Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad,’ and you are mad.”

As for Brown’s interrogators, some rushed home to plot, most notably Mason of Virginia, who would grant nothing to Brown, except to declare him an insurrectionist as well as a “ruffian, a thief, and a robber.”36 Already accomplished at turning the power of the government in the favor of slaveholders, Mason was now intent on launching a federal investigation, which he secured on December 14, only twelve days after Brown’s execution. Evidently, he not only hoped to use the investigation to root out and indict any of Brown’s supporters but also to assure that the slaveholder revision became the official version of the Harper’s Ferry raid for state and history. Although Mason was not finally able to use the investigation to implicate antislavery leaders, he was quite successful in misrepresenting Brown’s intent and the response of enslaved blacks to the raid. In the majority report of the committee’s findings, he would write the quintessential slaveholder revision, fraught with misrepresentation, outright fallacy, and a little paranoia to boot:

For [Brown’s] military force he relied, very clearly, on inciting insurrection amongst the slaves, who he supposed would flock to him as soon as it became known that he had entered the State. . . . an expectation to no extent realized, though it was owing alone to the loyalty and well-affected disposition of the slaves that he did not succeed in inciting a servile war, with its necessary attendants of rapine and murder of all sexes, ages, and conditions. It is very certain from the proofs before the committee, that not one of the captured slaves, although arms were placed in their hands, attempted to use them; but on the contrary, as soon as their safety would admit, in the absence of their captors, their arms were thrown away and they hastened back to their homes.37

Wise of Virginia took a different tack. Unlike Mason, the governor could not help but express a mixture of admiration and sarcasm concerning the old man, while at the same time being quite determined to bring him to the gallows. On leaving his interview with Brown, he had turned aside to Gallaher, saying that Brown’s wounds were not so serious. “Turn him loose,” Wise said, and “he would be like a Bedouin.” Comparing Brown to the self-assured daredevil, Sam Patch, the governor jested, “Brown wanted to show them that ‘some things can be done as well as others.’”38

When the governor returned to Richmond, on Friday, October 21, militia escorted him from the train station to the city hall, where a crowd quickly gathered as a band played the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Wise denied that any disgrace had befallen Virginia, except for those responsible for letting Brown and his small band of men turn the armory into the “Thermopylae of Harper’s Ferry.” He went on to say that he had only remained there to prevent “Lynch law” from breaking out, and that if he could get his hands on the abolitionist Gerrit Smith, he would give him a “moral lecture and then send him home.”

As for Brown, Wise defied anyone who might call the old man insane. To the contrary, declared the governor, Brown was a “bundle of the best nerves I ever saw, cut and thrust, and bleeding and in bonds.” While the old man was a “fanatic, vain and garrulous,” said Wise, he was also “firm, and truthful, and intelligent,” a “man of clear head, of courage, fortitude, and simple ingenuousness.” He likewise found Brown to be “indomitable” as he was “humane to his prisoners.” He “professes to be a Christian, in communion with the Congregationalist Church of the North,” Wise concluded, “and openly preaches his purpose of universal emancipation.”39

The governor also made it clear that Brown would be tried by the State of Virginia, even though the summit of his actions involved seizing a federal armory and facing off against federal forces on federal property. On the same day of Brown’s defeat, President Buchanan had met with Lewis Cass, secretary of state, and John Floyd, secretary of war, recognizing that the Harper’s Ferry raid marked “the first case which has ever occurred in this country involving, at the same time, both State and Federal jurisdiction”—Virginia’s concern being slavery and locality and the federal government’s concern being its exclusive control of the armory. Buchanan dispatched District Attorney Robert Ould, who wired from Harper’s Ferry later that day, confirming that Brown had indeed attacked the federal facility, but that the “Government money is all safe.” The New-York Daily Tribune also reported that Wise and Ould had met at Harper’s Ferry concerning the issue of jurisdiction.

However, the governor was adamant about trying Brown and his men in Virginia, and President Buchanan apparently gave no resistance. The Tribune thus reported that Ould had departed for Washington on the evening of October 19, “virtually leaving the prisoner in the hands of the Virginia authorities.”

On the day that Brown was transferred to the jail at Charlestown, Wise told Colonel Robert Baylor, one of the officers at Harper’s Ferry, “Now is the time to strike.” “Strike what?” asked Baylor. “To break up the Union,” the governor replied. With the prisoners incarcerated, Wise then returned to Richmond, where he boasted that there had never been a question about jurisdiction in the arrest of the raiders. Indeed, the governor had already “made up his mind fully” that Brown and his men would be tried under Virginia law, and “he would not have obeyed an order to the contrary from the President of the United States.” It was an expression well suited to a future secessionist.40

■

CHAPTER 5

I AM READY FOR MY FATE

Posterity at least will do me justice.

The prisoners remained under arrest at Harper’s Ferry until Wednesday evening, October 19, when they were conveyed by marine guard to the county seat of Charlestown, where the old man and four raiders (afterward joined by two more captured men) would stand trial. Back home in the Adirondack town of North Elba, New York, Brown’s family had heard rumors of the defeat, including a false report that all the raiders had been killed. Awaiting the arrival of the newspaper, the Browns stayed up all night talking over things, “trying not to believe the reports.” The next day, “the papers told us the story,” recalled Salmon Brown. As teenage Annie read the New York Times, the family fell stunned. “There was very little weeping or wailing or loud demonstration on the part of our broken household,” she recalled. “We were most of us struck dumb, horror stricken with a grief too deep and hard to find expression in words or even tears.”1 Mary Brown had lost her two sons, Watson and Oliver, as well as neighbors, William and Dauphin Thompson, with whom her family shared bonds in marriage and antislavery devotion.2

It was almost unbelievable for them to learn of the defeat and capture of the old man and his raiders. “My father had often spoken of the possibility of failure and the certainty of his being hanged in such an event and had endeavored to prepare our minds for it,” daughter Ruth later recalled, “but I did not think failure possible.” Worse, they would not hear directly from “Father” until after his trial was concluded.3

Down at Harper’s Ferry, when the time came for the prisoners to be taken to the railroad station, they were escorted under the guard of the same marines who had nearly killed them two days before. The two black raiders, Shields Green and John Copeland, along with the Quaker, Edwin Coppoc, walked to the train station between files of soldiers. Brown was placed on the flatbed of a wagon along with Aaron Stevens, whose wounds were considered possibly mortal. A crowd gathered to watch, quickly growing to hundreds of angry people, many crying out to lynch the prisoners. In his description of the scene, a Virginia reporter projected the worst fear onto the expressions of the black raiders, characterizing them as having wild, twitching eyes “almost bursting from their sockets”; but Coppoc the white raider looked “calm,” despite being “evidently much frightened” (see figure 5.1).

Governor Wise was present to oversee the procedure, and from the railroad platform he intervened, admonishing the crowd that it would be “cowardly” to kill the prisoners at this point. Although his admonition had its desired impact, one militia captain approached the wagon, seeming to inquire of the old man’s health. When Brown responded that he did not believe he would die from his wounds, the officer mocked him: “If you were going to die, I should take one of your teeth. But as you mean to live, I’ll only take a piece of your hair to remember you”—at which point the officer cut away a small lock of Brown’s grayed hair. Boarding the train under heavy guard, the old man was propped up with pillows in his seat, while the suffering Stevens was laid out on the floor of the train car.

In the hour of his death, Brown would famously comment on seeing the grandeur of the countryside, but despite his painful distractions, perhaps he caught sight of the sun descending over the natural beauty of the area as the train made its eight-mile trek to Charlestown. Some years later, a traveler would describe the town as being situated on the “grand highway” that ran from Harper’s Ferry “down the valley of the Shenandoah to Winchester and other points in that glorious valley.” With fertile soil and a “climate like that of Italy,” the traveler wrote, “a more beautiful part of the country is not to be found” with such “rolling and wooded landscapes” and lovely, blue mountains stretching away on either side of the valley. Still, Charlestown was little more than a humble farm town, being smaller than Harper’s Ferry and lacking in both manufacturing and commerce. The handsome, compact little courthouse was perhaps the only notable site in town, marking its political importance as the seat of Jefferson County since 1801, the year after Brown’s birth.4

From the train station at Charlestown, the prisoners were once again conveyed under marine escort to the jailhouse, which one journalist described as “a meek-looking edifice” that in former times “must have been a respectable private residence.” The larger west side of the building served as the jail, which was separated from the smaller east side by a corridor, where the main entrance was located. The jailer and his family had rooms on the same east side of the building behind a vestibule or reception room. The dividing corridor ran from the front entrance to the backyard—with the jail segment of the yard being enclosed by a high wall. Inside the structure, the jail had “very large and nicely kept rooms” converted to cells on the first and second floors, including barred windows. Brown and Stevens were incarcerated on the first floor in the same cell, probably on the far west side of the building. Their long, narrow room had a desk, a stove for heating, and a small, barred window that looked out into the enclosed backyard of the jail.5

FIGURE 5.1 This illustration of Brown and his men being conveyed to Charlestown is based on an Alfred Berghaus sketch in Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Robert M. DeWitt, The Life, Trial and Execution of Captain John Brown (1859).

Brown and his men were formally committed to jail the following morning, Thursday, October 20, according to oaths provided by Governor Wise and others; on the same day a warrant was issued to Sheriff Campbell for a preliminary examination, scheduled for Monday October 24, by a “Justices’ Court.” The preliminary examination was peculiar to Virginia law and determined whether a case would come to trial. What Brown did not realize was that even before his trial could begin, there were important men in Jefferson County moving to derail the legal process. Believing that a trial would leave too much to chance, their intention was to seize the prisoners and execute them.6 Although this murderous plan was stillborn, it was by no means the intention of Virginia authorities to extend the days of John Brown’s life beyond what was minimally required by law.

Although the old man was to spend the rest of his days surrounded by the raw, hateful energy of Charlestown as well as the cool, studied contempt of his prosecutors, at least he found one kind face among his captors. John Avis, the jailer and deputy sheriff, had been one of the raiders’ most aggressive foes at Harper’s Ferry. As captain, Avis had formed a company of twenty volunteers who fought Brown’s men from behind the arsenal, driving them back to the cover of the armory engine house, where they made their last stand. During the counterassault, Avis himself had forced the arsenal door open under fire, enabling his volunteers to push forward.7 However, rather than be resentful of him, Brown admired Avis’s courage and afterward boasted that his kindly jailer “was one of the bravest” of his opponents at Harper’s Ferry. “So far as my observation goes, none but brave men are likely to be humane to a fallen foe,” he wrote in commendation.8 In fact, Avis would prove an ersatz ally to Brown, showing acts of kindness and liberality toward the old man, even at the risk of clashing with officials and disturbing wrathful townsmen.9

While awaiting the start of his trial, Brown was evidently concerned about his representation, being apprehensive that without lawyers from the North, “neither the facts in our case can come before the world, nor can we have the benefit of such facts as might be considered mitigating.” On Friday, October 21, still quite weak and unable to write for himself, Brown dictated a letter with Sheriff Campbell acting as his amanuensis. The letter, which Campbell had recopied a number of times, was initially addressed to Ohio senator Benjamin Wade, an abolitionist associate of Joshua Giddings, as well as to Judge Thomas Russell of Boston and Attorney Reuben Chapman of Springfield, Massachusetts. Given Wade’s radical antislavery views, Brown probably reconsidered the following day, deciding instead on Judge Daniel Tilden of Cleveland. The identical letters begin with Brown’s self-descriptive appeal: “I am here a prisoner, with several sabre cuts in my head, and bayonet stabs in my body. My object in writing is to obtain able and faithful counsel for myself and fellow-prisoners.” According to the local stringer for the Herald, Brown also had wanted to write to Governor Chase of Ohio and Governor Banks of Massachusetts, but “the Sheriff advised him not to, as they would not leave their executive duties to come.”

What these governors might have done in response to such an appeal is open to speculation, whereas Brown had good reason to expect assistance from all three men. He had known Tilden from his early days in Ohio’s Western Reserve, Chapman from his several years as an antislavery wool dealer in Springfield in the late 1840s, and Russell from his more recent tour of New England on behalf of the free-state cause in Kansas. In the letters, Brown discusses his ability to pay for legal assistance, appealing “at least for the sake of the young men prisoners” and admonishing that no “Ultra-abolitionist” lawyer be sent.10 The letters to Tilden and Russell would bring the response of support desired by the old man, although Virginia authorities would not wait for him to secure the representation of his choosing before starting the trial.

When the sheriff was finished writing out Brown’s letters, the old man scrawled his signature and then lay back on the bed next to Stevens, who was quietly suffering from his wounds. At this point, it appears that John W. Gallaher entered the cell, once more securing an advantage to the Herald by providing the first interview with the prisoners in jail. Evidently, he had gained this advantage by enlisting as one of the jail guards, and obtained the position through his friendship with Jailer Avis, with whom he had served in the First Regiment of Virginia Volunteers during the Mexican War.11

Gallaher briefly described the old man and Stevens, as well as the conversation that ensued between them, the jailer, and possibly another local reporter. The old man undoubtedly welcomed interviews, mainly to persuade reporters to provide all the facts, including those in favor of the prisoners. “Have any of you here,” he asked, “ever stated this fact, that we had no idea or thought of killing or wounding or injuring any person who did not interfere with us?” He further emphasized that the men he had held hostage at Harper’s Ferry would testify “that they heard me continually order my men not to fire into houses, not even when we were fired upon from them, lest we should kill innocent persons.”

At this point, Jailer Avis interjected, saying that people were wondering about the fatal shooting of Fontaine Beckham, the unarmed mayor of Harper’s Ferry, presumably killed by one of the raiders. Brown grew excited by the remark, responding that there was no reason for people to wonder about Beckham’s death, since he had ordered his men to shoot no innocent persons. Gallaher sniped, “I know you say it.” The remark offended the old man, whose eyes flashed with emotion. “You know the fact,” he countered, arguing that reason based on facts would show that he was correct, and that he had made every effort to protect his prisoners, even when his own men came under fire at the armory. “But Beckham was unarmed and doing nothing against you,” Gallaher challenged. “Then I know nothing about that at all,” he responded. “I did not know he was killed. I utterly deny any possible connection with the killing of any unarmed man. I did my utmost to protect innocent persons and my prisoners.”

The old man carried on the discussion further, describing the fight at Harper’s Ferry, and pointing out that he had been assaulted in the engine house “after he had ceased from firing.” He did not know the identity of the marine who had so brutally assaulted him, Brown said, but remembered a half dozen marines backing his assailant—further suggesting that he was attacked even though he had refrained from firing on the incoming marines. “He could have killed the officer in command,” Gallaher recounted the old man’s words, “but he supposed [the marine] was only coming in to receive their surrender, otherwise he would have shot him.” Brown repeatedly urged that the facts of the case be published, not just for the sake of the forthcoming trial but also so that all the facts would “go to the world.” Suddenly, as if awakening from an uneasy sleep, Stevens “broke in very earnestly” in support of the old man’s remark. “I am willing now, and have been for years to die,” the young raider declared. “A thousand years—ten thousand or million deaths—if I can by that means benefit the cause.” Before the interview ended, the old man told Gallaher that although he did not agree with the “sentiments” of the Herald, he had read it a great deal and found it “very fair in its reports towards all sides.”12 In fact, Brown—always careful if not generous in his criticisms—was both balanced and precise in his estimate of the Herald, which had attributes both worthy of appreciation as well as damnation.

According to Oswald Villard, by the time of the Harper’s Ferry raid, the Herald had “an accuracy nowhere equaled,” subsequently rendering it a source of “remarkable historical material.” Yet the editor Bennett’s claim to be a political independent notwithstanding, he was consistently on the side of the Democratic Party, taking a flagrantly racist and proslavery position. He was also a man with a “cold, hard, utterly selfish nature,” whose editorials doubtless outraged antislavery readers. (For example, one of Bennett’s editorial attacks on abolitionist leaders had the heading “The Exposure of the Nigger Worshipping Insurrectionists.”)13

Although notable newspapers in the North and South would also make significant reportage of the raid and its aftermath, it would be two New York dailies that would provide definitive albeit contrasting reporting on John Brown’s final days in Virginia: Bennett’s racist Herald, which reflected the editor’s inherent “incapacity to appreciate high and noble aims,” and Horace Greeley’s antislavery New-York Daily Tribune.

The Tribune was printed on “large imperial sheets” and published every morning except on Sunday. Greeley boasted that it employed “large corps of the best newspaper writers of the day,” providing domestic and foreign reportage ranging from the proceedings of Congress to livestock news—“a newspaper to meet the wants of the public.” In 1859, the Tribune’s access to “telegraphic news” annually cost an impressive fifteen thousand dollars annually, roughly equivalent to one-half million dollars in this era. Greeley had started the Tribune in the 1840s was a Whig, but his antipathy toward slavery had gradually intensified by the time of the Harper’s Ferry raid. While he was cynical toward one-plank politics and certainly was no abolitionist, his antislavery position was sufficient to provide a counterpoint to Bennett’s ultraconservative views.14 The Tribune thus became the venue for perhaps the most authentic and insightful reporting on the John Brown episode, particularly by publishing the correspondence of a precocious twenty-three-year-old writer who would shortly emerge as one of the leading figures of Civil War journalism.

Edward “Ned” House inherited his mother’s musical ability and his father’s precision as a banknote engraver, mastering both skills and excelling as a music and theater critic. Born in the Boston area, House was an autodidact, described variously as “handsome, well-bred” and “winning in manners.” Something of a playboy, he was later referred to as a “dilettante bachelor” and was numbered among New York’s memorable nineteenth-century Bohemians, associating with the leading men and women of literature and the arts in his day.15 After studying orchestral composition and honing his skills as a music critic in Boston, House relocated to New York City in 1854, where he assumed the position of drama critic for the Tribune^16 (see figure 5.2).

It is not known how he became the Tribune’s correspondent at Charlestown, although it is certain that House was strongly antislavery by conviction. However, he had “credentials” with the Democratic Party, having been both part proprietor and arts critic for an anti-Republican newspaper in Boston. Another source says that House presented himself in Virginia as a proslavery lawyer as well as correspondent. Regardless, the young reporter enjoyed a status that enabled him to move comfortably around Charlestown, associating with proslavery journalists and enjoying a firsthand view of goings-on throughout town. In one of his memorable submissions to the Tribune, House best illustrated the opportunity afforded him when describing the attitude of local newspaper publishers in Charlestown: “For all who come with credentials of adherence to the Pro-Slavery faith, they have words of sweetest welcome.”17

It is not clear when Ned House arrived in Charlestown, but his first correspondence to the Tribune seems to be dated Wednesday, October 26, after the examining court was concluded. Working, as Boyd Stutler put it, “very much incognito,” he remained in town for about five weeks—an amazing accomplishment, especially because he increasingly entertained the North by torturing the people of Charlestown and the State of Virginia with his “long, picturesque, and stingingly ironical letters,” replete with Yankee “malice and laughter.” Of course, secretly filing his stories with the Tribune was an undertaking in itself. Apparently, while carrying the credentials of the Democratic paper in Boston, he also was smuggling correspondence to the Tribune through associates in Baltimore and other points nearby. According to a colleague, one of House’s methods was to conceal his reports in express money orders.18 Of course, John Brown was clueless about the Tribune’s clandestine operation, and although he surely met Ned House and was even interviewed by him, it seems the daring young reporter never revealed his true identity to the old man.

In the meantime, Brown might expect visits from representatives of the Virginia and Maryland press, including Simpson Donavin of the Baltimore Exchange, or local correspondents from Jefferson and neighboring counties. One such early interview, perhaps conducted on Saturday, October 22, appeared in the Charlestown Spirit of Jefferson and was picked up the following day in the Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser:

Reporter: What is your age?

Brown: I am in my 60th year.

Reporter: At what time did you go to Kansas?

Brown: In 1855, and remained there until the latter part of 1858, but was absent at intervals. I left Ohio in 1826, and settled in western Pennsylvania, after which I lived in Massachusetts. Have since lived the greater part of my time on a farm which I have in Essex County, New York. My wife and three young daughters are now there, the youngest now six years old.

Reporter: Do you object to answering questions relating to your late expedition?

Brown: It depends upon the nature of the question altogether. I will answer nothing that may involve others, or that is not consistent with honor.

Reporter: Where were you when you first projected this movement?

Brown: I can hardly tell but since I first went to Kansas—I have several years had the project in my mind.

The journalist breaks off the transcript to point out Brown’s request that the newspaper would clearly report “that he and his party positively deny any intention to commit murder, to shoot at, or injure in any way, persons who were not fighting against them” and that it was his own “feeling of humanity that betrayed him into an error which caused the failure of his plans,” particularly by permitting the train to pass from Harper’s Ferry and by delaying himself with his prisoners. “For this he is blameable in a military point of view,” he concluded.

Reporter: What did you intend to do with your prisoners, and where did you intend to take them?

Brown: As many of them as I could exchange for able-bodied colored men, I intended to swap man for man. Those I could not exchange in that way I intended to treat with kindness the short time I might hold them and to liberate them in a few hours, and all the time to protect them from insult and injury.

Reporter: Was it your intention at any time to escape with them to a free State?

Brown: Certainly not.19

FIGURE 5.2 Edward “Ned” House, the undercover New-York Daily Tribune correspondent, as he looked at the time of the Harper’s Ferry raid. Kindai Bungaku Kenkyu Sosho 5

(Tokyo, Japan).

Although Brown hoped that the points concerning his humanitarian and sympathetic actions at Harper’s Ferry might mitigate some of the penalty faced by him and his men, he was not so unrealistic as to expect to change the minds of the Virginians. His remarks in these interviews, like the rest of his discourse throughout his trial and incarceration, were points he sought to make for history. He was not simply concerned about setting right the idea of his plan, such as his denial that he had intended to carry hostages into the free states. Brown was nothing if not conscious that he had undertaken an effort that turned on the most delicate hinge of history. His cosmology of defeat—that is, his belief in the overarching plan and purpose of the deity—was one thing. If God had predestined his failure, as afterward he believed to be the case, then both God and John Brown would have to make the best of the defeat.

Yet the old man was less certain of the historical record than he was of the Lamb’s Book of Life. His fixation on presenting the facts was not simply about his trial. He knew that his invasion of Virginia, and how he had chosen to act as the leader of that invasion, would never be understood in historical terms apart from the mortal record. His desire to be heard, and to be clearly represented in history, not only explains why the prospect of being lynched had so disturbed him but also helps us understand why he had carried copies of his Provisional Constitution and a great deal of his personal correspondence with him into the South—and probably would have left it behind in his Maryland headquarters even if he had succeeded at Harper’s Ferry. Brown’s historical consciousness—his belief that his work was important because it would avail for those in bondage as well as for the nation as a whole—was beyond his captors’ understanding. “Who would not be willing,” he once told a black friend, “to dance on nothing between Heaven and earth to free the Nation from this curse of slavery?” But what would it avail history, in Brown’s eyes, were he remembered merely as a freebooter, a robber, or even an insurrectionist? In his Herald interview, he had emphasized his concern to avoid a mock trial. “Not that it would make any difference in the result,” the old man told Gallaher, but that there would be “justice as to the faith” of his motives. The Virginia reporter perhaps inevitably misinterpreted Brown’s words, concluding that the old man “evidently wishes to be considered throughout the country as a hero and a martyr.” A slaveholder could hardly appreciate Brown’s goal of freeing slaves, let alone perceive his desire to do so for the cause of justice and the well-being of the nation. As Evan Carton aptly phrased it, “John Brown for all his religious fervor” never embraced an “apocalyptic vision” or the “punitive occasion of slavery’s demise” that either servile or civil war might bring. That he wanted “only facts to go to the world” indicated a considerable historical prescience on Brown’s part, considering that so many of the old man’s narrators have long since mistaken both the man and his intentions.20

On Tuesday morning, October 25, Sheriff Campbell brought the prisoners to the courthouse for a preliminary examination. “The examination of prisoners is peculiar in Virginia, being an examination on both sides, preliminary to indictment,” explained Gallaher in his correspondence to the Herald. The purpose of the magistrate’s court was to evaluate whether the charges were sufficient to go before the grand jury, which then would make its determination the following day. As Brian McGinty has pointed out, all eight of the magistrates conducting the examination were slaveholders and corporately held more than one hundred slaves. Handcuffed together, Brown and Edwin Coppoc “were conducted from jail under guard of eighty armed men,” a contingent of “citizens’ guard” having been ordered to Charlestown by Governor Wise. Guards were likewise stationed around the courthouse, along with a small cannon at the front; it seemed to Ned House that the building “was bristling with bayonets on all sides.”21

Charles B. Harding, the Jefferson County attorney, was said to be “assisted by Andrew Hunter, counsel for the Commonwealth,” but by all accounts Hunter was the brilliant light of the prosecution, while Harding was somewhat contemptible and lowly regarded for his poor judgment and conduct. Ned House afterward described Harding as “an unfortunate man,” as much ignored as disdained and ridiculed and known even to fall asleep in his chair during trial. Indeed, the pompous Harding, “flushed with imagined triumph,” had wandered out of the courthouse after the examination, only to end up in a quarrel with a “blind negro” on the street, who gave him something of a beating, quite to the amusement of the locals.22 As to “Old man Brown,” Gallaher reported to the Herald that he was not as tall as he had imagined, although the “daring of his spirit” evidently was not tamed. The Virginian also noted Brown’s bruises and contusions were much more visible than he recalled from the interview a few days prior. House was also observing the scene, and both he and Gallaher described the old man similarly as appearing weak and haggard—although the Virginian could not help but see Brown as casting a “hasty and rather defiant look around him.”

When asked by the court if he had counsel, Brown responded that he had none, nor had he been able to meet with one, although Governor Wise had given him assurance of a fair trial. Addressing the court as “Virginians,” the old man pointed out that his health was insufficient, and that there were mitigating circumstances requiring a postponement if a fair trial were allowed. “But if we are to be forced, with a mere form—a trial for execution—you might spare yourselves that trouble,” he declared in a manner that the proslavery press interpreted as sheer defiance.

I am ready for my fate. I do not ask a trial. I beg for no mockery of a trial—no insult—nothing but that which conscience gives, or cowardice would drive you to practise. I ask again to be excused from the mockery of a trial. I do not even know what the special design of this examination is. I do not know what is to be the benefit of it to the Commonwealth. I have now little further to ask, other than that I may not be foolishly insulted, only as cowardly barbarians insult those who fall into their power.23

Brown’s remarks probably surprised the spectators, in part because they had consistently underestimated him by virtue of their own propaganda. An old man who would presume to lead a quixotic effort to violently undermine the condition of their loyal, happy slaves could hardly be competent, let alone speak with such profound courage and conscience. It is once more evident that Brown was not hanging his hopes on the trial itself but, rather, on the opportunity for his testimony to be rightly recorded. Not having been given an opportunity to consult a lawyer, he was soundly skeptical about being dragged before a court. He had no knowledge of the legal procedure, which naturally seemed strange to him, as it would have been even to an uninitiated lawyer from another state.

When asked if he would accept court-appointed representation, Brown responded that besides initially being advised to apply for local lawyers, he had sent for his own representation, although no time had been afforded them even to reach Charlestown. He clearly preferred to await his own lawyers’ arrival, and should have been permitted to do so. It was clear to the old man that he was being rushed to trial. “I wish for counsel if I am to have a trial,” he continued, “but if I am to have nothing but the mockery of a trial, as I have said, I do not care anything about counsel. It is unnecessary to trouble any gentleman with that duty.” To this, District Attorney Harding replied, “You are to have a fair trial.” But Brown would not relent. One of the Virginia lawyers had already declined acting as his counsel, but otherwise, he had heard so many lawyers named that he could not recall. “I am a stranger here,” Brown continued. “I do not know the disposition or character of the gentlemen named. I have applied for counsel of my own, and doubtless could have them, if I am not, as I said before, to be hurried to execution before they can reach me. But if that is the disposition that is to be made of me, all this trouble and expense can be saved.” It was now quite evident that Brown’s right to a supposedly fair trial was to be interpreted according to the agenda of his prosecutors. Had he attacked the government armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, not only would John Brown’s case have been brought to a federal court, but he also would have been given sufficient time to recover from his wounds, as well as retain and consult with lawyers of his own choosing. Instead, he was being forced to slaveholders’ justice on slaveholders’ terms. “The question is,” Harding demanded, “do you desire the aid of Messrs. Faulkner and Botts as your counsel? Please to answer yes or no.” Brown refused to answer on Harding’s terms, finally leaving the matter in the hands of the court. “I feel as if it was a matter of very little account to me. If they had designed to assist me as counsel, I should have wanted an opportunity to consult with them at my leisure,” the old man concluded.24

Clearly intent on ignoring Brown’s appeal, the court then assigned Charles J. Faulkner and Lawson Botts as counsel for the prisoners. “Colonel” Faulkner immediately objected to serving as Brown’s defense but was constrained at first to remain. Of course, he was hardly unique among Virginia lawyers in wishing to forgo the responsibility of defending John Brown, but at least he was honest enough to admit that he should be disqualified for bias. Perhaps both lawyers might have been disqualified, because Botts was one of the volunteers who fought against Brown at Harper’s Ferry, and Faulkner stood with Senators Mason and Vallandigham in cross-examining him after his defeat. Furthermore, both men were slaveholders, a fact that probably offended the old man and thwarted any confidence he might have had in his representation. Likewise, it simply may have been too uncomfortable for Faulkner to involve himself in a case that might raise questions about his own political actions with regard to the Harper’s Ferry armory. Several years prior, Faulkner himself had spearheaded a bill in Congress that successfully removed military supervision from the armory. As the New York Tribune suggested, while his self-aggrandizing effort had enabled him to grant armory positions to civilians, it “was accomplished for corrupt purposes.” Worse, Brown and his raiders probably would not have been able to capture the armory had it not been for Faulkner’s role in stripping the site of its military presence.25

On Wednesday afternoon, October 26, Brown and four of his raiders were brought into the courthouse under guard and had passed across the street “without the slightest demonstration on the part of the people.” Perhaps it was on this day, when the old man was being conveyed back to the jail, that he came close to a black woman holding her baby, one of the spectators pressing in on the courthouse. Throughout the trial, Brown daily passed back and forth in this way between two strings of guards, and Charlestown was not yet flooded with a military presence as it was in the last weeks of his life.

David Strother remembered that the courthouse was not more than fifty yards from the jail and that the prisoners were escorted back and forth “through a lane of Volunteer Soldiers.” People in the town were understandably curious, and both adults and children regularly gathered to get a glimpse of the despised old man and his raiders. While the crowds might swell to the point that the guards were forced to level their bayonets, this was the only phase of Brown’s incarceration when he was visible to the public. One writer recalled being a young boy at the time, and running along the lines with his friends, peering between the guards’ legs at the sight of the old man being conveyed to court.

According to Prosecutor Andrew Hunter, the black mother was standing close by and probably was near the entrance of the courthouse when Brown emerged. On seeing her, the old man suddenly bent down and kissed the baby in her arms before proceeding across the street to the jail. Hunter may have been present to see the incident, or heard about it at the time. News of the baby kiss seems to have floated about afterward, unmentioned by reporters until finally turning up as a worshipful interpolation in the New-York Daily Tribune after Brown’s hanging.

Even assuming the reliability of Hunter’s recollection, it would be purely speculative to pursue the identity of the woman and her child. According to the 1860 census, there were quite a number of infants and small children enslaved in Charlestown at the time of the incident (including a good many listed as “mulatto,” suggesting they were sired by the master or one of his male relatives). It may seem to some that a black woman with a baby in her arms might not have been readily permitted, even under less restrictive conditions, to draw so close to the line of guards. Yet this would not have been an issue in a small town where she may have been a familiar figure, even to the “citizens’ guard.” This would especially be so if she were the slave of a prominent citizen; she might even have been the slave of someone involved in the trial. For instance, Mayor Thomas Green of Charlestown also owned a thirty-year-old “mulatto” female and a “mulatto” baby who was probably about six months old at the time of Brown’s trial. Obviously, these details would make for a good novel, although the point is that Hunter’s recollection is substantial enough that the historical baby need not be thrown out with the legendary bathwater of John Brown’s black-baby kiss.26

Brown and the other prisoners passed into the courthouse, walking through a wide, poorly lit hallway between two brick walls, which emerged into the courtroom on the ground floor of the building. According to Judge Richard Parker, the dark corridor presented some security concerns, particularly because there were people in town who had considered killing Brown prior to his trial. Because Parker refused to permit soldiers to enter the courthouse, he directed Jailer Avis to appoint six reliable men to act as a security detail in getting Brown and the prisoners safely in and out of the building.

When Brown entered, reporters observed that he “looked somewhat better,” as the swelling around his eye had begun to go down. The reporter from the Baltimore American, along with Gallaher of the Herald, described the entrance of Brown and his men, noting that the old man was made to stand throughout the arraignment, and poor Stevens, “having the appearance of a dying man,” was at first held up by two bailiffs, but finally allowed to recline on a mattress on the floor. Not far from the prisoners sat David Strother, identified by the Baltimore American reporter as the artist “Porte Crayon.” In the crowded but quiet setting, Strother quickly prepared a study of Brown standing, which he used for his published sketch of the prisoners at arraignment, which was featured on the cover page of Harper’s Weekly on November 12.27

Before the reading of the indictments, Prosecutor Hunter announced that a new attorney for the defendants would be required, because Faulkner “considered his duty in that capacity as having ended” and had left the court. With only Lawson Botts now standing as representation for the prisoners, Thomas Green agreed to act as counsel. Green was not only Charlestown’s mayor, but also a “well-connected attorney” and a slaveholder like his colleagues in the trial. From what Ned House had been able to gather, a rumor had been going around since the previous day that the old man wanted to “make a full statement of his motives and intentions through the press”—which likely meant that Brown had placed higher hopes in speaking to reporters than whatever might be accomplished in a hurried trial. At least House believed that Brown had hesitated to accept court-appointed representation, fearing that “he will not be allowed to speak for himself” or that his Virginia lawyers would not be willing to “express his views.” Nor was it lost on the authorities that Brown considered the press his only lifeline; he was promptly denied further access to reporters, House wrote, “fearing that he may put forth something calculated to influence the public mind, and to have a bad effect upon slaves.” Standing before the grand jury and awaiting the reading of the indictments against them, the prisoners “presented a pitiable sight,” especially poor Stevens, painfully struggling with multiple gunshot wounds in his head, chest, and arm. 28

The indictment consisted of three counts: conspiracy with blacks to create an insurrection, treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, and murder.29 Before the prisoners could plead to the charges, Brown stood to address the court. Underscoring that he had been promised a fair trial, he appealed to the poor state of his health, including the injury in his lower back resulting from the bayonet attack, and the impairment of his hearing as a result of being beaten over the head. Feeling enfeebled and unable to hear the proceedings of the trial, the old man asked “a very short delay . . . so that I may in some degree recover and be able at least to listen to my trial and hear what questions are asked of the witnesses, and what their answers are. If that could be allowed me I should be very much obliged.”

To this reasonable if not rightful appeal, Hunter responded that it was too soon in the process for the request, and this could be considered following the arraignment. As the indictment was read, Brown listened intently, becoming visibly frustrated and finally “denouncing the indictments as false and exaggerated.” When he became insistent on raising points of difference in the court, Judge Parker, with some difficulty, ordered him to stay silent. While inappropriate to the procedure, Brown wanted a discussion of the indictment, not merely for the sake of his case, but once again because of his concern for the record. As Strother recalled, there were not only points to which he objected, but also aspects of the indictment that “he didn’t want to deny.”

While this might seem peculiar, there is no mystery in the old man’s reaction, since primarily he was concerned about preserving the fairest possible record of his intentions and actions at Harper’s Ferry. Brown had no desire to completely deny the extent to which he had broken Virginia laws, seized federal property, held captives, and “conspired” with enslaved people, any more than he wished to accept the charge of murder and insurrection. However, as Brian McGinty pointed out, none of the journalists present made note of Brown’s protest and it was eventually forgotten. Likewise, Simpson Donavin later recalled that at the reading of the indictment, the old man complained: “I am surprised and indignant at the unseemly haste with which you seek my blood. I am not here to ask favors. I have asked none. But this professes to be a court of justice, and I think that the decencies and proprieties which should accompany the administration of law should be observed in this trial.” Brown continued to argue that his physical condition, including his inability to “think consecutively for any length of time,” merited a delay. He also characterized himself as “without counsel” even though he had sent for them. This was not actually true, because Botts and Green were now standing as his lawyers. However, the old man clearly did not want the Virginia counsel that had been foisted on him and wanted to wait for his own counsel to arrive. “Yet, if it is the intention of this court to indulge in a mockery and speedily make a fact out of a foregone conclusion,” Brown concluded, “I ask that it spare itself the trouble and me the indignity.”30

Hunter then declared the state’s intention of trying the old man first—at which point Botts the defense attorney restated Brown’s insistence on a delay, further declaring that word had been received that the “counsel of [Brown’s] own choice will be here, whom he will, of course, prefer.” In fact, Judge Tilden of Cleveland had wired Charlestown, asking if it would be useful if the attorney left for Virginia that evening—probably assuming that the court would have granted a slight delay. But given that the court was bulldozing him, Brown responded with urgency, asking that the lawyer come at once because the jury likely would be sworn in the very next morning. Botts appealed that Brown had made “a reasonable request” and that he hoped the court would grant it—undoubtedly, the Virginia lawyer being as eager to be free of Brown as the prisoner was to release him. Nevertheless, Hunter declared that no delay should be granted to await the old man’s lawyers because he already had capable counsel and even questioned whether there was sufficient reason for Brown to expect help from the North. Afterward, Ned House wrote that it was the prosecution’s position that Virginia “had been imperiled and jeopardized, as they supposed, by enemies.” In fact, Hunter’s argument was a shabby display of prejudice, vindictiveness, and impropriety, thinly disguised as judicial expedience—especially the jingoistic claim that there was a “public duty” resting upon the court to avoid “the introduction of anything likely to weaken our present position, and give strength to our enemies abroad.”31

Brown’s lawyers continued to argue for the delay, with the newly appointed Thomas Green likewise reminding the court that he had neither consulted with Brown nor prepared a defense. But Judge Parker was no more willing to await the Northern lawyers than was the prosecution. He yielded only enough to summon a physician to testify about the old man’s condition; to no surprise, the doctor expressed his belief that Brown could continue with the trial. His wounds had not affected his mind, the doctor said, nor had he complained of hearing difficulties. The doctor concluded, along with one of the jail guards, that the old man had conversed freely enough to continue. However, when the court questioned Jailer Avis, they were probably put off by his response. To the contrary, Avis said, Brown frequently had told visitors “that his mind was confused and his hearing affected.” It was a brave gesture on the part of the jailer, but suddenly he was on the wrong side of the prosecution. Perhaps sensing that he had gone too far, Avis pulled back, refusing to give any further opinion as to Brown’s ability to stand trial. Judge Parker closed any discussion on delay determining to move forward in the afternoon session.32

The court resumed at two o’clock that afternoon, but word came back that Brown was staging something of a protest. If the court would not permit him delay, the old man demonstrated his complaint by refusing to get up from his cot. Undaunted in their determination to push forward with the trial, Judge Parker ordered that Brown be carried from the jail on his bed if necessary. Gallaher wired the Herald that Brown was conveyed into the building and was placed before the court, still lying on his cot. Throughout most of the afternoon, he lay with his eyes closed and the sheet pulled up under his chin. “He is evidently not much injured,” Gallaher wrote, “but is determined to resist the pushing of his trial by all the means in his power.” While Brown reclined in seeming sleep, the jurors were sworn in and empanelled. William Martin, one of the jurors, later recalled that he did not see Brown until seated in the jury box. The old man was only two feet from him, and he seemed very tall and spare to Martin, who thought Brown’s hands and build revealed him to be a powerful man accustomed to hard work. “His hair and beard were sprinkled with gray,” Martin recalled. “I remember he had eyes that looked at you like they would bore through you.”

The rest of the day was consumed with preparing the jury, and the prisoner was returned to his cell for the night. “Brown has made no confession,” Gallaher reported. On the contrary, the old man would only say that he had “full confidence in the goodness of God, and is confident that He will rescue him from the perils that surround him.” Brown told the journalist that he had had rifles leveled at him, knives at his throat, and his life in great peril. “As it now is,” the old man concluded, God had always been at his side, and was still with him. He feared nothing.

That night, a heavy storm blew over Charlestown. Perhaps as the winds howled in the darkness outside, Brown lay restless on his cot, gathering thoughts of his family back in North Elba and his errors at Harper’s Ferry or simply wondering at God’s plan for the morrow. Then, somewhere in the night, lightning struck a telegraph line, just when the reporter Gallaher was dictating his correspondence to Mr. Bennett up in New York City. As the Virginian later noted, Charlestown had never had a telegraph office until John Brown attacked Harper’s Ferry. With the prisoners afterward confined and the trial of the old man commencing, special lines were extended from the Ferry to Charlestown at the expense of the metropolitan newspapers—New York’s Herald, Tribune, Times, and Sun, all having paid large fees to benefit from the new technology. As Gallaher put it, Charlestown was now in “instantaneous communication with New York—an epoch in the uneventful history of the capital of Jefferson county.”33

The next day, Bennett complained that northern newspapers, such as the Albany Journal, had begun to express sympathy for Brown and his raid, or at least had published the opinion that slavery had made the raid inevitable. These otherwise respectable journals, Bennett argued, were “blinded by political partisanship” to the “enormity” of John Brown’s crimes—“which, under ordinary circumstances, they would be the most zealous to denounce.” Over at the Tribune, Horace Greeley was preparing his own editorial, based on reports of the developing trial. “In what marvelous hurry they are, in Charlestown Court!” Here they were, the editor declared, “trying a wounded, sick, and suffering man in his bed—a kind of legal clinic . . . not unknown, long ago, in the amiable tribunals of the middle ages.” Greeley jeered that the Virginians now had to make the most of Brown. Perhaps it would be better to put him in an iron cage and cart him around the Old Dominion, so that all Virginians would have a “peep at the monster.” Mocking the prosecution, he concluded, “While Brown lives, Virginia is in peril! . . . Hurry ‘Old Brown’ from the dock—we mean the cot—to the yard! Presto! Up the gallows stairs! Adjust the noose! Swing him off!”34

SECTION II

NOVEMBER’S FELON

O, patience, felon of the hour!Over thy ghastly gallows-tree

Shall climb the vine of Liberty,

With ripened fruit and fragrant flower.

—WILLIAM D. HOWELLS[1]

1. Howells, “Old Brown.”

CHAPTER 6

PREJUDICE RULED THAT HOUR

The old man simply extended his hand without opening his eyes.

On Thursday, October 27, Brown walked into court, his cot being carried before him and then placed within the bar. The old man stretched himself on it, closing his eyes in seeming indifference to what was going on around him. Several newspapers carried the same description of Brown looking “considerably better” now that the swelling around his eyes had begun to disappear (see figure 6.1).

The jury members were now seated but not yet sworn. They had spent the night in a large upper chamber of a tavern known as Gibson’s Hotel, forced to sleep in double beds alongside fellow jurors and two officers of the court. The heavy rains of the night before left the brick walls damp and moldy. “I hated it awful bad,” recalled William Abrams, “but there wasn’t any getting out of it.”1

Abrams was one of three jurors not recorded as having been a slaveholder. However, fifty-five people were held as slaves by the other nine jurors, more than half of their victims being under eighteen years of age. Juror Joseph Myers held the most people in bondage, with two enslaved adults older than fifty years, three adults in their late twenties and early thirties, and seven children between the ages of two and ten years. The slaveholder with the least number was Jacob Miller, who held one twelve-year-old female in bondage. Judge Parker and Prosecutor Harding, along with the three jurors, are not listed as slaveholders in the 1860 Slave Schedule. Otherwise, both Botts and Green, the court-appointed defense attorneys, and Prosecutor Hunter were slaveholders, each keeping four people in bondage. Sheriff James Campbell also held one man in slavery, and one of the jail guards, Daniel Cockerell, kept fourteen people enslaved.2 Furthermore, the Charlestown jail was also the site where enslaved people were kept after sale, in preparation for being shipped deeper into the South.3 Whether for reasons of prejudice, pride of heritage, or historical amnesia, John Brown’s trial often has been viewed in a manner disassociated from the terrible reality of chattel slavery. Yet if we believe slavery and human trafficking to have been as great an injustice then as it is now, then we might also pause to remember the real nature of this historical drama as it unfolded in the courthouse at Charlestown in 1859.

FIGURE 6.1 Original sketch by artist William S. L. Jewett, “Brown Going to Court.” Jewett’s finished sketch was published in Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper on November 12, 1859. Pencil, gray wash, wove paper. Charles Town, West Virginia, 1859. The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

At the onset of the second day of the trial, the defense read a telegram from Asahel Lewis, editor of the Akron Summit Beacon, who claimed that insanity was hereditary in the family of the accused, making references to a number of his relatives who had been confined in “lunatic asylums,” and offered witnesses to attend the trial in support of these “facts.” The defense attorney, Botts, noted that the prisoner had not submitted an insanity plea and that although Brown acknowledged that there were some instances of “insanity” on his mother’s side of the family, there was none on his father’s side.

More important, he disdained the very thought of an insanity plea and made it clear that his Ohio friends had done this without his solicitation. Clearly frustrated, the old man was not satisfied to let his lawyer speak for him. Brown opened his eyes and pulled himself up by one hand on the bar. “I will add, if the court will allow me,” he said, “that I look upon it as a miserable artifice and pretext of those who ought to take a different course in regard to me, if they took any at all. And I view it with contempt, more than otherwise.” Juror Martin remembered Brown’s tone as both earnest and “savage” in denouncing the insanity plea as “the refuge of cowards.”4

It was evident from the start that this telegram was a desperate attempt on the part of sympathetic friends to intervene by winning a commutation of the death sentence. Oswald Villard wrote that not even to save his life would Brown have consented “to have the sacrifices already made minimized, and his entire twenty years’ war upon slavery written down as the mere mania of a lunatic.” Of course, in Brown’s era, “insanity” did not have a clinical definition, and there is no way of knowing, for instance, what had ailed his afflicted relatives. The old man further contended that he had known insane people and that generally they “think they know more than the rest of the world,” and denied that this was the case for himself.

In fact, the Akron telegram was the first fruits of desperation, emanating almost exclusively from friends and family in Ohio who continued to push for an insanity appeal. Even after the trial was concluded, nineteen affidavits were gathered, promoting various claims of Brown’s mental instability, probably on the strength of Judge Parker’s remarks in rejecting the initial telegram. Instead of “mere statements,” Parker had declared, “we should have affidavits, or something of that character.”5

The first of these Ohio affidavits appears to have been sent to Wise under the cover letter of Brown’s attorney, Hiram Griswold, on November 7. The lawyer wrote frankly that he felt “divided” about Brown’s mental state and “that on questions connected with Slavery & the liberation of the slave he is insane.” Otherwise, Griswold wrote, the old man seemed quite rational and, in their last conversation, had even shown great resolve in condemning any threatening or manipulative letters sent to Virginia authorities.

Wise directed his secretary to prepare a response to Griswold, inquiring if an insanity plea was made at any time during the trial. Regardless, he concluded that “the mode of attesting the fact of insanity, by opinion of a relative at a distance” would not be acceptable to cross-examination and would not be sufficient without the opinion of an expert. The governor then directed his secretary to contact the foremost authority in Virginia, Francis T. Stribling, in order to arrange for an expert evaluation of the prisoner.

On November 10, Wise wrote an official directive to Stribling, who was the superintendent of the Western State Insane Asylum in Staunton, Virginia, asking him to visit Brown and make an evaluation. He was to do so, Wise wrote, “without disclosing your purpose, and take such time & opportunity as you may elect, to examine him, and impart your judgment upon the condition of his mind.” The governor wanted to be certain of the old man’s sanity “in the sense of legal & rational responsibility for crime,” and wanted Stribling to make his report prior to the execution date on December 2. If insane, Wise wrote, Brown might be cured (before being hanged); “if not insane,” he concluded, “the fact ought to be vouched in the most visible form, now that it is questioned under oath & by counsel since conviction.”

However, Wise quickly had second thoughts about sending Stribling, not only because he did not doubt Brown’s sanity but perhaps also because of his respect for the old man. Lawyer Griswold had also written that he was concerned that his client’s case not be “complicated and embarrassed” by the actions of others over whom Brown had no control.6 Wise was not impressed by the affidavit tactic, and he had no reason to think Stribling would have concluded that the old man was insane. However, he had his own reasons for not wanting Brown’s case to be “complicated and embarrassed,” and this probably included the prisoner’s feelings. Had he followed through with Stribling’s evaluation, it would have lent some credence to the affidavits, which would have deeply offended the old man. Wise was the captor and Brown the doomed prisoner, but the two men had found a level of mutual respect and confidence, something that would have been betrayed by sending Stribling to Charlestown. Nor would Brown have overlooked the undisclosed reason for the doctor’s visit.

Notwithstanding Brown’s disapproval, the affidavits were produced, compiled, and presented by his defense to Governor Wise on November 23, a little more than a week before the execution. In these forlorn documents, the well-meaning affiants left no stone unturned with respect to family and personal experience with Brown. They used terms ranging from insanity to the more prominent monomania. It is also clear from many of the affidavits that the charges of mental instability often reflected the affiants’ own political revulsion toward Brown’s radical politics, especially after his return from war-torn Kansas in 1856.7

Following the verdict, other former associates wrote letters, undoubtedly hoping to save Brown from the gallows by making almost abusive characterizations of his hardheadedness and antislavery zeal, including Eric Erickson, a successful northern businessman, and the notable Iowa congressman, Josiah B. Grinnell.8 However, the most curious letter came from an apparent longtime political opponent of Brown, a Democratic and anti-abolitionist doctor named William W. Durbin. Durbin was a native Marylander but had grown up in Columbiana County, Ohio, near Brown’s old stomping grounds on the Western Reserve. Durbin knew Brown for decades but, despite his obvious political differences, probably liked him and was troubled by his imminent death sentence. In late November, Durbin thus wrote to Governor Wise, identifying himself as a patriotic Democrat and veteran opponent of abolitionism. Durbin hoped to ingratiate himself to Wise by referring to his having “battled” against abolitionism and by lamenting that the day had come in Ohio when blacks were “overestimated.” As for Brown, Durbin wrote, he was “a crazy man for years,” particularly “for the past ten years to my own knowledge.” Finally, Durbin assured Wise that he was no apologist for the old man’s “crimes or indiscretions” but appealed to consistency with science by asking that “medical jurists” evaluate the prisoner under death sentence.9

Taken as a whole, these affiants and correspondents, regardless of their personal history with Brown or their political opinions, undoubtedly wrote from sympathy. Yet the overwhelming complaint about the old man’s mental instability tended to reflect disdain toward his radical political profile in more recent years. For all of his characterizations of Brown, even Durbin’s letter lacked any real substance, except where it pointed to the old man’s political extremism. If anything, these letters, including those from a bitter former business rival and a political opponent, actually suggest that Brown was respected and even liked despite his radical antislavery sentiments.

Knowing the fruitlessness of charging him with “insanity,” others have more recently suggested that Brown was bipolar or manic, some even doing so sympathetically. Yet there is no evidence of the kind, and typically these claims rely on contemporary psychological speculation. Quite in contrast to Abraham Lincoln, who arguably suffered from some form of depression or mental infirmity, there simply is no evidence for Brown’s supposed mental instability. “I never knew of his insanity,” Brown’s wife told a reporter, “until I read it in the newspaper.” It may be true, as Oswald Villard wrote, that the world owes much of its progress to monomaniacs like Brown. Yet “monomania”—that is, single-minded zeal for a cause—is hardly evidence of mental illness in any sense. “Crazy and insane are loose words,” concluded the Boston Tribune correspondent at the time of the trial. “But I have no idea that Brown was crazy enough to be irresponsible for his actions, or that he will thank anybody for setting up that defense.”10

Of far greater concern to Brown was gaining a delay in order to wait on his Northern counsel. His lawyers thus renewed the request on the second day of the trial, telling the court that it was probable that at least one lawyer would arrive that evening. “The course taken by Brown this morning makes it evident that he sought no postponement for the mere purpose of delay, as he rejects the plea of insanity,” declared the Tribune. “Still, in his opinion, he could have a fairer trial if the defense were conducted by his own counsel than if he were defended by the counsel at present here.” Prosecutor Hunter countered that there was no need to delay, because the old man “had made open, repeated and constant acknowledgement of everything charged against him.” The lackluster Harding also argued that “Brown pretended yesterday afternoon that he was unable to walk, and was brought into court on a bed, yet he walked back to jail after the close of the trial without difficulty.”

These actions by the defendant, Harding concluded, were “mere pretenses for delay, which the court should overrule.” Judge Parker promptly followed suit by dismissing any further motion to delay, but Brown was permitted to lie down while the indictment was read to the newly sworn jury. The lawyers debated the specifics of the indictment for the remainder of the morning session, and began examining witnesses in the afternoon. Brown may not have observed the presence of Senator James Mason in the audience; the prostrate old man lay down on his cot in feigned sleep, as if shutting his eyes in protest.11

The trial resumed at eleven o’clock, Friday morning, October 28, when Brown was led over from the jail. Feebly making his way along the human concourse of guards, he passed through the dark corridor that opened into the courtroom, where once more he lay down on his cot. Although his conduct was “generally regarded as a trick,” the old man was not only expressing a degree of protest. He was also sick and in pain. The bayonet wound in his lower back had inflamed his left kidney, he said, reviving a condition that had bothered him from his youth. When Governor Wise visited him in mid-November, he was still recovering from this affliction and was treating himself, perhaps with some long-used homeopathic remedy.12

While the course of the trial was perhaps inevitable, neither did it flow as speedily toward the gallows as the prosecution had hoped. The winds shifted inconveniently against Hunter and Harding when a young lawyer, looking like a Massachusetts schoolboy, suddenly appeared in Charlestown. George H. Hoyt, a member of the Boston bar at twenty-one years of age, was a die-hard abolitionist and an associate of Brown’s agnostic abolitionist counterpart, Lysander Spooner. Hoyt was used to being discounted for his youth, particularly because he looked like an adolescent. Even twenty-three-year-old Ned House of the Tribune, after observing him from the gallery, described the newly arrived Boston attorney as “quite a youth.” Donavin was also present, remembering Hoyt’s appearance as “young, almost effeminate.” As Hoyt later recalled, even after being accepted by the court as part of Brown’s defense, Judge Parker still believed he was a teenager.13

But if Hoyt was a baby-faced lawyer, he was both brilliant and courageous. Donavin wrote that given “the terrible prejudice and hate which ruled that hour,” it is hard for later generations to realize the nerve it required for him to take on this role. Before he even could appear in the courtroom, Hoyt had to walk the gauntlet, facing both Senator Mason and Prosecutor Hunter. When he arrived in town, he held only a letter from a Harvard classmate with connections to Charlestown. Almost immediately, Senator Mason, who was quietly overseeing the trial, found the young lawyer and introduced himself. Guided by Mason to Hunter, Hoyt presented his letter and requested an interview with the prisoner. However, his personal meeting with Brown was prohibited until after the morning session. “As I well know,” Hoyt recalled, Hunter and Mason had delayed the meeting “for the purpose of ascertaining whether I was a spy or not.”

In fact, he was a spy. Hoyt was recruited and funded by John W. LeBarnes, an affluent Boston abolitionist who thought it unlikely that an inexperienced youth would be suspected of ulterior motives. LeBarnes was the primary mind behind the plan to rescue Brown and his men, and wanted Hoyt to be his eyes and ears in Charlestown and establish communication with the old man. While attending to Brown’s case, he would then provide useful descriptions of the town and its military presence, as well as the particular layout of the jail. Hoyt was able to correspond with LeBarnes during and after the trial, although the plan to rescue Brown never materialized because the old man “positively refused his consent to any movement looking to a rescue.”14

Hoyt was escorted into the courtroom by Mason and was introduced by Brown’s attorney Botts, who announced him as assistant to the counsel. Hunter then made some preliminary protest because Hoyt did not have sufficient proof of his credentials, but Green stated his support of Hoyt based on his letter of introduction, and Judge Parker declared the court’s approval. Botts and Green had also met Hoyt that morning, and now they prepared to be rid of Brown and hoped to dump the case on the young lawyer. They were quite unwilling to “associate with a Boston man in the management of the case” and urged him to assume the defense for the sake of expedience.

Hoyt naturally refused to be put into such a position; he had barely unpacked his bag, he had not yet conferred with Brown, nor had he been able to review the particularities of Virginia law, or even the indictment, now two days into the trial. Furthermore, it quickly became apparent to Hoyt that the prosecution was all but done presenting evidence. “Of course,” he wrote to LeBarnes, “my only alternative was to remain passive and wait for developments.” When Botts introduced him to the court as part of Brown’s counsel, he stated that Hoyt “did not feel disposed to take part in the case,” and the young lawyer took a seat next to the old man’s cot.15

When Hoyt finally was introduced to Brown in the courtroom, Botts mentioned his name and referred to him as a “Boston man who had come to help.” Then “the old man simply extended his hand without opening his eyes and gave no other sign of recognition beside a hearty pressure of the palm.” Hoyt believed that Mason and Hunter suspected his motives and were looking for signs in the old man’s actions that might give him away, but Brown’s discerning response quite disappointed their suspicions.

Furthermore, the young lawyer quickly discerned that despite the long reach of Governor Wise, Senator Mason was actually “the master spirit of the prosecution.” According to Hoyt, Mason “was straining every nerve to have the trial prosecuted in such a manner as would produce the effect he desired to secure in the United States Senate”—no doubt meaning that the Virginia senator was intent on seeing the trial concluded in a manner consistent with the congressional investigation he was instigating in Washington.

Seated near Brown, Hoyt surveyed the faces in the gallery, remembering them as a “bloodthirsty throng” with not a single sympathetic expression. He soon learned that even Brown’s “small appeals for delay” elicited the most malign response from the community. Nor was Hoyt ungracious in his sense that there was “a stern resolve written even upon the jurors’ countenances” to execute Brown. Nearly forty years after the trial, the juryman George Boyer admitted that the jury only discussed the evidence as a matter of form in determining the verdict, since they could have found Brown guilty “without leaving their chairs.” Meanwhile, the young lawyer was overwhelmed by emotion as he observed the old man, “exhausted by fever and loss of blood,” yet with sublime fortitude and absolute resignation, lying helpless and worn before “his passion-eaten” enemies.16

That same afternoon, the prosecution hastened to rest its case, although Hoyt believed no “one was surprised by the sudden termination of the evidence for the State.” Afterward, he concluded that Botts and Green were “parties to an arrangement, perfectly understood by Judge, Jury, prosecuting counsel, and themselves, to the effect that Brown should be hung as speedily as it was possible to bring him to the gallows.”

Both Judge Parker and Prosecutor Hunter wrote retrospectives of the trial in the 1880s, Parker denying that the trial had been hurried, and that there was no reason for Brown’s case to have been granted continuance for the next term of the circuit court. This was an amazingly disingenuous statement, because Brown was wounded and sick and consistently was refused even the slightest delay to recuperate and establish a reasonable defense with lawyers of his own choosing. Similarly, Hunter made the spurious claim that Brown had received “a perfectly fair trial from beginning to end.” Worse, he stated that up to the time of Hoyt’s appearance, the old man “was hurrying the trial and having done with it.” This was an incredible lie, especially because Brown’s constant appeals for delay are a matter of record.

Indeed, it was common knowledge throughout Charlestown at the time of the trial that the prisoner was being rushed to judgment. As Ned House observed, “[t]he reason given for hurrying the trial is that the people of the whole county are kept in a state of excitement, and a large armed force is required to prevent attempts at rescue.” House further stated that beside the growing fear of Brown’s rescue, there was some appeal made to the hasty execution of prisoners in the case of servile insurrection.17

In the meantime, the defense began calling witnesses. However, after several were called to testify to Brown’s humane conduct, the old man became upset. Hoyt says that Brown had “taken great pains” to compile a list of choice witnesses by which he intended “to prove his humanity and his efforts to prevent bloodshed after he was surrounded in the engine house.” However, when called, a number of these witnesses had not shown in response to the subpoenas issued by the sheriff.

Instead, his lawyers presented “some trifling and unimportant testimony,” and in one case they even overlooked a witness in the courtroom, reckoning that they had sufficient testimony. The old man was irate. Key witnesses were missing, and the carefully prepared questions he had given to Botts and Green were disregarded.18 Brown “rose painfully and slowly” from his cot to speak. “May it please the court,” he declared. “I discover that, notwithstanding all the assurances I have received of a fair trial, nothing like a fair trial is to be given me, as it would seem.” Brown noted that he had provided names of witnesses but that it appeared they had not been properly subpoenaed. “I ask if I am to have anything at all deserving the name and shadow of a fair trial—that this proceeding be deferred until to-morrow morning. For I have no counsel, as I before stated, in whom I feel that I can rely, but I am in hopes counsel may arrive who will attend to seeing that I get the witnesses who are necessary for my defense.”

This was, as Hoyt later wrote, a “stinging rebuke” to his Virginia lawyers. He further complained that he would need assistance to do errands relating to his case but could not pay for assistance because he had been robbed of more than $250 in gold and silver at the time he was “sacked and stabbed” by the marines. “I ask at least until tomorrow morning to have something done, if anything is designed; if not, I am ready for anything that may come up.” Then, he “lay down again, drew his blanket over him and closed his eyes, and appeared to sink in tranquil slumber.”

The courtroom was buzzing with reactions from spectators, when Hoyt promptly stood, explaining that he had had no opportunity to consult with Brown and that he had good reason to believe that another lawyer was en route and would arrive in the area that evening. After complimenting Brown’s lawyers, he appealed for a continuation of the case until the following day. Understandably, Botts was defensive about Brown’s remarks, but Hunter interjected, speaking against the old man’s claim. No additional testimony in his defense was necessary, the prosecutor argued, nor should any delay be granted. Then, Botts and Green arose, announcing that they were withdrawing from the defense. They had not wanted the duty from the start, but no longer felt compelled to serve in “such an unwelcome position.”19

As press reports show, Judge Parker accepted the resignations, postponed the trial until the next morning, and adjourned. However, Hoyt recalled that Parker did so “sneeringly,” announcing that he only granted the delay in order to investigate the matter of the subpoenas; otherwise, he would not have done so simply to allow Northern lawyers to study Virginia law. Still, it was a small gain for a losing cause. Brown was pleased, and Hoyt sighed with relief, hoping that one of the seasoned attorneys would arrive soon.

As to Botts and Green, the young spy wrote to LeBarnes that Brown’s defense attorneys had managed his case as good “as the circumstances of their position permitted,” although it was “most fortunate” for the old man that he was not alone when he decided to dismiss them. Less than a decade later, however, he wrote that it had actually become apparent that Botts and Green were moving to rest the defense “and had agreed to submit the case without argument.”

In retrospect, he claimed that the circumstances likely entailed a case of “judicial murder” in which Brown was to be hanged “as speedily as it was possible to bring him to the gallows.” In his self-serving version of these events, Judge Parker later portrayed himself as having stood between the prisoner and those who wanted to rush him to execution. According to Parker, Virginia law prohibited convicts from being executed no sooner than thirty days, except in the midst of an insurrection or rebellion. He claimed that it was widely supposed that Brown would not be granted the thirty-day postponement but that he had taken the unpopular position of allowing Brown the full thirty days. He further claimed that a leading citizen had warned him that the people would not tolerate any more delay “and would tear Brown to pieces before he could be taken from the building.”

Likewise, Parker stated that certain military officers had privately told him that they would only keep Brown from rescue but would not guarantee his safety “if the people decided to take the law in their own hands.” To these threats, Parker portrayed himself as refusing to back down, either to the threats of leading citizens or mobs in the street. He also credited his own influence and admonitions to the people as having been key to sustaining peace in Charlestown during the trial.

However, Hoyt remembered matters somewhat differently. Meeting with Brown in his cell on Friday night, he felt as if he were conferring with “an old lawyer.” Brown was quite perceptive and showed an unusual familiarity with matters of the case but made it clear that he would have nothing to do with “subterfuges” or any notion of winning a continuance by “even seeming connivance at a deceit.” Brown’s pressing concern was Judge Parker. He told Hoyt that he did not believe the judge would allow him more than three days before execution “in case of his certain conviction.”

Taking these words to heart, Hoyt ventured over to speak with Parker in private. Ned House described Parker as a “middle-aged man, short and stoutish,” with a stern countenance and a mild manner. Hoyt found him to be more liberal than other men in Charlestown, although a “full-blooded Southron.” However, when he raised the issue of the prisoner’s inevitable execution, Hoyt ascertained that Brown was correct and that Parker actually had intended to send him to the gallows in three days after sentencing.

The young lawyer first appealed to Parker based on the Virginia Code, pointing out that the three-day execution was only applicable “in time of actual insurrection”; otherwise, there was no authority for an execution until after the expiration of thirty days. Even if an insurrection had been attempted, Hoyt appealed, “it was now quelled” and the country was under guard and patrol, and the alleged insurrectionists were now incarcerated.

Whether or not Parker was surprised by his argument, it seemed to Hoyt that the judge was ashamed of the weakness of his position. However, the young lawyer appealed humbly, asking Parker to reconsider and let him know the following day. After all, Hoyt told him, Brown had neither hope for acquittal nor the slightest desire to escape. “He only desired time to square his earthly accounts, and march out of this life with his own colors flying.” The following day, Parker sent word that Brown would have his thirty days.20

Meanwhile, the appearance of a lawyer from Boston, followed by the virtual dismissal of the Virginia defense attorneys, only intensified hard feelings against Brown in Charlestown. W. W. B. Gallaher, the editor of the Virginia Free Press, was downright disgusted. “This old Posawaottamie scoundrel,” he complained, had “exhibited more impudence . . . than we have ever seen or read of.” (Posawaottamie being a combination of Brown’s Kansas sobriquet “Ossawatomie” and possum, suggesting the old man was faking his poor health.) Botts and Green had undertaken “incessant labor and effort,” and the court had been unusually lenient as well, Gallaher wrote. Yet Brown had only shown himself to be an “ingrate” who had “more latitude allowed him than any other criminal that has ever been arraigned in this court.”

If Editor Gallaher’s feathers were ruffled, the hoi polloi were also getting riled up over the time it was taking to get Brown hanged, their resentment being further exacerbated by the arrival of the suspicious boy-faced lawyer. Hoyt recalled that many people in Charlestown were “irate because more expedition was not used to bring their victim to the halter,” and any appeal made on the old man’s behalf by his lawyers “were made texts for inflammatory appeals to popular feeling.” He wrote to LeBarnes that, although many had to acknowledge the prisoner’s conscientiousness and bravery, the people still wanted him dead. As late as October 30, before the trial was concluded, Hoyt expressed uncertainty as to whether Brown would die on the gallows or be killed “by the rough hand of violence.”

Speaking with the old man in his cell that Friday night, he realized that Brown felt some slight uneasiness over the possibility that he might be “hurried to execution” before he could adequately bid farewell to his family members and “justify himself to the world as he desired.” As he pored over the case late into the night, Hoyt could hear the yells and cheers of “an infuriated and drunken crowd” from the streets below, whose hostility had been stirred up by the prosecution playing to the “worst prejudices” of the populace.

He also realized the vulnerability of his own security after a copy of the local Spirit of Jefferson was anonymously slipped under the door of his hotel room. The paper included an editorial that referred to him as a “beardless youth” and threatened that he should watch his conduct lest he be subjected to the “fantastic amusements” that Southern gentlemen reserved for “Yankee Abolitionists.” Editor Gallaher of the Virginia Free Press also showed his teeth, warning that an “eye will be kept upon this ‘volunteer’ gentleman, as it should be upon others, whether volunteers or not, who are in our midst.” As far as the case was concerned, Hoyt feared that if Brown’s legal support did not appear in the morning, the trial would be ended, instead of being continued into the coming week as he had hoped. The young lawyer felt like “the mouse under the lion’s paw.”

Although Friday night in Charlestown was dark and worrisome for Hoyt, there was at least one incident that betokened the coming light of day. Well after midnight, someone knocked softly on his door, somewhat alarming him because he had heard no approaching footsteps. Hoyt felt for the pistol in his pocket and then carefully opened the door. But the man on the other side of the door greeted him courteously, and introduced himself as Charles C. Fulton, a member of the Associated Press and one of the owners and editors of the Baltimore American. Fulton, who held private feelings of sympathy for Brown, wanted to meet his young attorney and offer whatever assistance possible. Under the circumstances, Fulton proved a valuable resource, describing the trial preceding Hoyt’s arrival, as well as providing information about the town, the public’s feelings, and its leading citizens, along with advice as to his conduct in Charlestown.21

The next morning, Saturday, October 29, turned more happily for Hoyt. “I never offered a sincerer thanksgiving,” he wrote to LeBarnes, “than when the morning light brought to us the eminent gentlemen now conducting the case.” With the opening of the morning session, both Hoyt and Brown had happily greeted two distinguished lawyers.

From Washington came Samuel Chilton, a high-priced attorney of renown whose fee was paid by a circle of Brown’s admirers in Boston, led by the Republican attorney, John Andrew, who was elected governor of Massachusetts in 1860. Chilton’s services had been secured for them through the guidance of Montgomery Blair, who would later serve as postmaster general in the Lincoln administration. Hoyt seemed somewhat in awe of the prestigious attorney, writing to LeBarnes, “We are fortunate in having here Mr. Chilton, of Washington, a Virginian and a very eminent lawyer.” Just as Brown’s letter to Judge Russell of Boston had proven fruitful in the coming of Chilton, his letter to Judge Tilden likewise yielded assistance in the coming of Hiram Griswold from Cleveland. Griswold was a notable figure in Ohio law and politics, being a leading Republican who had served as the reporter of cases for the state supreme court. Unlike Chilton, however, financial arrangements were not made for Griswold in advance, and Judge Tilden actually advised him that he could at least look for compensation from Brown, whose confiscated gold and weapons might provide at least partial payment.22

Unfortunately for Griswold, his willingness to accept payment from the prisoner rather than eat his own expenses came under the critical eye of Ned House, who somewhat scolded the Ohioan in the pages of the Tribune: “I am sorry to say that Mr. Brown’s little property was seriously diminished by Mr. Griswold, the lawyer from Ohio, who received $250 from his client for defending him,” House wrote. “Under the circumstances it would be pleasanter to know that Mr. Griswold had looked to other sources for his reward.”

House took another poke at Griswold after the account of Brown’s payment was published in an Ohio newspaper. This time, Griswold reacted angrily, pointing out that the payment from Brown actually did not compensate him for the losses he incurred while in Virginia. “It may be so,” House responded, “but the question is not of dollars and cents.” Rather, it seemed “very much like plunder from a bereaved and destitute family.” House’s well-placed remarks enraged Griswold, who fired back, charging that the unknown Tribune correspondent at Charlestown was given to taking bribes and that his correspondence was fraudulently contrived in New York.

This slur on the Tribune’s reportage brought Editor Horace Greeley into the fray. “This we will say plainly is not true,” Greeley declared. “Our correspondent is at Charlestown . . . and at Charlestown he will remain till after the execution of all the condemned men, unless he should be forcibly expelled by a Lynch process.” Griswold was hardly silenced, and let loose another polemic in a Cleveland newspaper that was forwarded to House in Charlestown. In his letter, Griswold angrily accused the Tribune correspondent of “puffing” others for pay, “while he abuses me for the want of it,” and claimed to have evidence that the Tribune writer was controlled by “mercenary motives.”

Probably both annoyed and exhilarated by the contest, House returned fire: “This time he ventures too far. I answer that I utterly repel and deny his shameful accusation.” Challenging Griswold to prove that his accusations were true, House charged that Griswold could not “instance one point,” including the claim that he had discovered his identity. “This is no startling triumph,” House concluded sarcastically. “Many persons now know it. . . . Mr. Griswold has his alternative—either to prove his charge, or to accept the contemptible position that must follow his failure to do so.”23

Under different circumstances, Brown might have intervened. But he had no access to the Tribune in jail, and only heard about the controversy after the fact in a letter from Hoyt. Brown responded in a manner of generosity that may have given Ned House pause for reflection when he finally read the old man’s response, which was typically generous: “I have but very little idea of the charges made against Mr. Griswold, as I get to see but little of what is afloat. I am very sorry for any wrong that may be done him; but I have no means of contradicting any thing that may be said, not knowing what is said.” The old man wrote that he could not see any dishonor in Griswold having received compensation like Chilton, “and I am not aware that any blame is attached to him on that score.”24 Brown was much concerned for the well-being of his family, and throughout his final weeks he made notable appeals to friends and admirers for assistance on their behalf, but he was never one to withhold what justly belonged to another man, even when his own loved ones’ needs were at stake.

The trial was snagged almost from the start of Saturday’s session, when Chilton reasonably asked the court for a delay of a few hours, because he had just arrived and had not yet read the indictment or reviewed the previous examination of witnesses. Judge Parker refused, ruling that the trial must proceed, and blamed Brown for the circumstances because he had disrupted the representation of his own case. The present term of the circuit court was drawing to a close, Parker stated, and he had a greater duty to get through with all the cases at hand, “in justice to the prisoners, and in justice to the state.” It was a small sign that despite the arrival of two notable and seasoned lawyers, as Donavin put it, “it was now the sun-down of the scene.”

Most of Brown’s desired witnesses were called and examined, and Chilton made some expert attempts to derail the prosecution, such as submitting a motion that the prisoner be held to only one of the three counts of the original indictment; he also endeavored to challenge the propriety of the treason count.25 After arguments from the prosecution, Parker held to his determined course, directing Brown’s attorneys that they had the option of entering an arrest of judgment afterward, but stated that the trial must continue.

As Brian McGinty observes, Prosecutor Hunter was even more determined to bring the trial to a conclusion, even if it meant continuing through to midnight. After some back-and-forth between the attorneys and the judge, the prosecution opened its case despite the waning afternoon. However, the sun had set, and time shortly triumphed over the weary court, forcing Judge Parker to adjourn. After observing the Lord’s Day, the trial would reconvene first thing on Monday morning, October 31.26

John W. Gallaher, the Herald correspondent, reported that Sunday morning in Charlestown was “still and quiet,” the only activity visible being the good citizens on their way to church. In the early afternoon, the streets became “busy with noise and life”—primarily due to the presence of blacks, who were the first to turn out, probably because this was the least burdensome hour of the week. Gallaher viewed their happy exchanges as if a caricature, describing how some black men, donned in their Sunday best, were evidently trying to please “the gentle ‘Dinahs,’ who smiled sweetly.” The “negroes” had the streets all to themselves, Gallaher wrote, and the “town was as completely in their possession as if Old ‘Ossowattomie’ himself had given it up to them.” Men and women, young and old, “their greetings to each other as they met were loud and hearty,” with such “bowing and scraping and laughing” as he had ever witnessed.

However, this was a status quo racist description of simple, even childlike people without political awareness of the crisis playing out in their town. To be sure, living under the reign of white supremacy, African Americans had long developed the necessary skills to both survive and communicate without arousing the suspicion of their oppressors. While undoubtedly there was ample good fun and socializing going on, the artful manner of sharing information and discussing current events was probably going on right under Gallaher’s nose.

In contrast, the Tribune’s Ned House was a bit more discerning. “People may say what they please of the indifference of the Negroes to the passing events,” House reported, “but it is not true. They burn with anxiety to learn every particular, but they fear to show it.” House recounted his own exchange with an enslaved man at his hotel, the black man having “busied himself the whole morning a day or two ago to extract from me something concerning the prospects of Brown, without appearing to ask a direct question.” After House finally prompted him to speak his mind, he asked, “Well, Sir, what do you think they’ll do, after all, with Mr. Brown?” House told the man that they would surely hang him. “‘Well, now,’ he said, argumentatively, ‘don’t you see it would be a pity to do anything so ‘brupt.’ I told him that if Brown were not disposed of, the people in Virginia would think themselves in a bad scrape. ‘Pity they wasn’t,’ said he, shuffling away very much discomposed.”

Hoyt fell sick on Saturday night following the trial, perhaps in part from the stress of the circumstances. By Sunday morning he had improved and greeted the sunny, “beautiful Sabbath day” by going in advance of his prestigious colleagues to visit the old man—no doubt feeling satisfied that at least the court had been forced to delay until Monday. He found Brown in good spirits too. Hoyt recalled entering the cell and seeing the sun streaming through the barred windows onto the old man’s silvered hair and beard. A doctor was finally attending to Stevens, who acknowledged that while a majority of the raiders had opposed attacking Harper’s Ferry, they had stood with their leader, “as we are likely now to do.”

Hoyt’s conversation with Brown was long and thoughtful, the old man speaking “very freely about his designs and the future of the slave system.” His hanging, he told Hoyt, would do more to end slavery than thirty more years of “peaceful agitation” by William Lloyd Garrison and the other nonviolent abolitionists. Brown told him that he believed the Almighty had put a sword in his hand to smite slavery and that his “judicial murder,” resulting from his attempt to free a large number of slaves, would hasten on an inevitable civil conflict. The pacifist Garrison was not correct, said Brown. Slavery would never be abolished except by violence. Nor was he bothered by the insults of proslavery writers; “all of that he welcomed.” Rather, he was very interested in watching events as they transpired in Virginia and the North, although he had little access to newspapers and relied on his counsel for information.27

After spending hours in conversation, and then in a “closeted” session with Chilton, Griswold, and the old man, Hoyt returned to his room feeling quite moved by the “sublimity” in Brown’s “resignation” and “fortitude in his purpose.” That evening, he wrote to LeBarnes, describing the “uncontaminated simplicity” and “astonishing character” of the old man, but concluded that his fate was sealed, and there was “no chance of his ultimate escape.” Any rescue attempt, Hoyt wrote, would have the saddest consequence, since there were armed patrols and a large body of troops at hand. “If you hear anything about such an attempt, for Heaven’s sake do not fail to restrain the enterprise.”

Later that Sunday afternoon, Jailer Avis permitted some reporters inside the jail, along with the Frederick Guard, who had come over from Harper’s Ferry the night before. With the approval of Judge Parker, the guard had gained access to visit Brown and the other prisoners, the men entering the jail by squads. Descriptions in the Herald and New York Sun present an unusually warm scene, with the soldiers crowding in on the old man, almost as if he were a celebrity instead of a captured enemy under trial.

Brown played the host, rising from his cot with hand extended to greet each one. “Gentleman, I am glad to see you. I will shake hands with all of you!” When asked of his health, he described his wounds, and the problem with his kidney that was giving him pain. The old man then harked to his youth, when he had done nonenlisted service among Virginia companies on the Northwest frontier in the War of 1812. “They were a picked body of men,” Brown told them, “and I remained near them for a time . . . and it was my happiness on several occasions to render them aid and assistance in their sufferings. . . . The Virginia companies were then the finest that I had ever seen.” These were deep memories for the old man, recalling a time when he had helped his father supply “beef cattle” to the front lines.

Brown could also have told them that it was during this period that he had seen a young black boy ruthlessly beaten by his master, and that the disturbing incident had led him to own the antislavery cause for himself. “Gentlemen, how many of you have arrived here?” he asked. “Some thirty of us.” Brown replied. “Gentlemen, I should very much like to see you out of doors at your evolutions, but I am not in a position to see that. However, I am glad to see you as it is.” Brown likewise acknowledged “the manly and truthful manner” in which Captain Sinn of the Frederick Guard had testified in court, saying that he would remember him for his many noble traits of character.

The whole visit had become something of an open house. Now, little Edward Avis had slipped into the cell, finding his way to Brown, who played with the child as he talked to the soldiers. The Avis family resided under the same roof, but clearly the jailer and his “amiable” wife had already warmed to Brown, as did his youngest children, eleven-year-old Braxton and three-year-old Edward. As he smiled and teased the little boy, the old man continued to speak of the hardships that he had endured and of how he had learned to bear them. Meanwhile, outside the jail was surrounded by a large crowd, “but good order prevailed.”28

It was quite a spectacle for a jail cell, especially the cell of the despised and doomed John Brown. Yet the scene not only captured something of his personal charisma and charm—a profile often lost among so many warped and unstudied portrayals of the man by contemporary writers. “He was neither handsome nor eloquent,” recalled one of his Kansas associates. But he was “winning and convincing beyond either.” Certainly, children took to the old man too. “He loved children,” Gerrit Smith later wrote, “and they loved him.” A journalist once found Brown in the home of a Massachusetts antislavery leader and the man’s children “climbing over his knees.” Brown, probably with the faintest of smiles, looked at the man and said, “The children always come to me.”29

CHAPTER 7

LIKE A BLOCK OF STONE

I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, of a design on my part to free slaves.

The final phase of Brown’s trial began at nine o’clock on the morning of Monday, October 31, when the old man was brought in, looking “better than heretofore,” according to one journalist. Still troubled by his kidney condition, he lay down on his cot, which was carried into the courthouse as before. Brown may not have been aware that a friend had made a “flying visit” from New England in time to witness the final day of the trial. Thomas Russell, a judge of the Superior Court of Massachusetts, had met Brown in early 1857, when the latter was fresh out of Kansas and making new friends for the free-state cause in the Kansas territory. Brown established a warm relationship with Russell, age thirty; his twenty-five-year-old wife, Mary (“Nellie”); and their young daughters. Russell had received Brown’s letter from jail but had not been able to attend immediately, though sending help through the assistance of Governor Andrew of Massachusetts. Russell had finally managed to come, accompanied by his wife and armed with a letter of introduction by Caleb Cushing, a Democratic leader in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Russell had come to Charlestown, wrote Cushing, “for the purpose of advising” Brown “as to his legal interests,” and should be received “as a gentleman entitled by his character and standing.” No doubt, on the strength of Cushing’s letter, their brief trip to Virginia went smoothly if not pleasantly.

The courthouse was packed but tense as Griswold addressed the court on the side of the defense, making an extended challenge to the counts of the indictment. In particular, Griswold reasoned that Brown, “a man of indomitable will” and of “sleepless energy,” had only recruited twenty-one men “at the zenith of his power.” If Brown’s effort had failed, Griswold reasoned, this only proved that Virginia would have no more to fear in regard to such invasions. He likewise appealed to the jury to display “moral courage” by handling the case with justice, rising above “petty considerations which influence more ignoble minds.” Chilton’s closing argument was more impressive, the renowned attorney beginning his remarks by admitting “the embarrassment with which he undertook the case.” Unlike his client, he was from Virginia, was associated with slavery, and personally held no sympathy for Brown. However, he challenged the counts of the indictment, arguing that Brown and his men had resisted Colonel Lee and the marines, not the Commonwealth of Virginia. The old man showed neither malice nor intent to commit murder, Chilton declared, and “charged the jury to look on this case, as far as the law would allow, with an eye favorable to the prisoner.”

However, Chilton’s final remarks went beyond the case, to the impact that the verdict would have upon the nation. Unless the “majesty of the law” was supported, Chilton concluded, “dissolution of the Union must soon ensue, with all the evils which must necessarily follow in its train.” It was an insightful conclusion, almost prophetic, although seemingly lost on the court. John Brown’s raid often is portrayed as one of the “causes” of the Civil War. But in 1859, Chilton seemed to believe that Virginia’s treatment of Brown mattered more than the fact of the raid with regard to the well-being of the union. He seemed to be arguing that were the “majesty of the law” to truly prevail in Charlestown—that is, if the old man were sentenced to prison instead of death—the North would be satisfied while everyone in the offended community of Virginia hopefully “would acquiesce in it.” In this way, the spirit of moderation would prevail in the South, to the benefit of the entire union. On the other hand, Chilton suggested, were the people of Virginia to insist on Brown’s death, the verdict would solidify the most radical and divisive factions in the South, further justifying the secession element while deepening the resentment of the North. In short, to spare Brown’s life was to spare the Union; to hang him was to unleash the most destructive currents upon the nation.1

To no surprise, the prosecution held forth a very different notion of the “majesty of the law.” Not only should the old man be held guilty for his malicious and premeditated role in murder, insurrection, and treason, Hunter argued, but also for endeavoring to “take possession of the Commonwealth and make it another Hayti.” It was a loaded, inflammatory conclusion that appealed to the deepest fears of slaveholders—that Brown had intended insurrectionary bloodletting and servile war, the kind of which had taken place in the overthrow of slavery in the Haitian revolution of the early nineteenth century. As far as the humane manner in which Brown treated his prisoners, Hunter only scoffed. This had no more or less to do with the case than did the dead languages. Somewhat incredibly, too, he argued, “we have patiently borne delays, as well here as outside in the community, in preservation of the character of Virginia.” In reality, the state had surrendered only the slightest delays, most notably in the trial having been extended from Saturday to Monday morning.

Otherwise, the old man had been dragged, almost literally in his cot, through a procedure that reflected the prerequisites of slaveholders, not the “majesty of the law.” Indeed, only from the vantage point of slaveholders can we understand Hunter’s notion of Virginia’s supposed patience in this trial, because the real design of the prosecution and the real sentiment of the people was to kill Brown almost immediately, the way they would have executed any insurrectionist. “Acquit the prisoner if you can,” Hunter concluded, but otherwise “let retributive justice, if he is guilty, send him before that Maker who will settle the question forever and ever.”

Throughout these closing arguments, the old man lay still on his cot, with his eyes closed. As House described the courtroom, there was a somber spirit among the trial participants, but a peculiarly informal inclination prevailed among them to prop up their legs. “Beside the Judge, on each side, sat rows of country magistrates, one or two using a fragment of his table for the support of their legs,” House observed, “the rest displaying an unmasked battery of boots all along the railing which edges the platform. . . . Near the center of the room, the lawyers sat around their table, many of them following the usual upward fashion, or passion, as it seems to be here, of legs.”

Another peculiarity of the courtroom was found among the crowded but attentive audience of spectators—what House called “a tendency to chestnuts”—“[t]he cracking of Virginia chestnuts resounded all over the hall of justice,” especially from the gallery, “and the floor was thickly overspread with shells.” In the gallery, two men actually were stretched out full length on the floor to nap; they were nudged periodically when their snores became distracting. House also recognized the presence of Judge Russell in the courtroom, a potential problem since they were acquainted from the journalist’s days in Boston. He would have to greet the judge, who was accompanied by his wife, immediately alerting them to the delicate nature of his presence in Charlestown. House faced a similar challenge when he happened to meet the artist Edwin Brackett, who had come down from Boston on a mission to make a bust of Brown. When Brackett suddenly met House in their Charlestown hotel, the journalist whispered, “For God’s sake, don’t call me by name. Don’t give me away.” The two made like they were passingly acquainted, without giving away House’s identity as the undercover Tribune correspondent, which was now a considerable source of concern to the locals. For the meantime, he was safe, primarily because there were others in town that seemed more suspicious, especially young Hoyt.

FIGURE 7.1 Brown’s trial, by Bricker Russell. James Redpath, The Public Life of Capt. John Brown (1860).

Hunter concluded his remarks at 1:30 p.m., and after closing arguments, Judge Parker directed the jurors to withdraw in consideration of the verdict. Although the jury deliberated only forty-five minutes, they might have returned a verdict much faster except that Joseph Myers, one of the slaveholders on the jury, was upset. Myers misunderstood the judge as having limited their verdict to the charge of first-degree murder and feared this would hang the jury. He was also disgusted because no mention had been made of the jury fixing the punishment, and he feared that Brown would only face heavy fines. “I’ll stay here till I rot,” he said, “before I’ll agree to anything but hanging.” After a message was sent to Judge Parker requesting clarification, they were directed that Brown would be executed on being found guilty of any of the three counts. With this made clear, the jury returned a unanimous verdict. The room was quiet, as all eyes were fixed on the old man, who now sat up to hear the decision. With the pronouncement of a guilty verdict, he turned, adjusted his cot, and then quickly lay back down (see figure 7.1).

Chilton and Griswold immediately moved for an arrest of judgment due to errors in the indictment. With the weariness of both the prosecution and the defense, and another raider’s trial about to begin, Parker adjourned the case for the meantime, returning the prisoner to his jail cell without sentencing. A correspondent of the Herald concluded that Brown could be executed within a few days as one convicted in the midst of slave insurrection, but the “magnanimity” of Governor Wise might extend the length of his last days in Virginia.2 But neither Wise nor the Old Dominion had such magnanimity; as Hoyt had argued privately with Judge Parker, it was only the fact that there was no active insurrection at the time of the conviction that spared Brown immediate execution. Indeed, in historical terms, the prosecution never really proved he was an insurrectionist in the correct sense of the term. The old man knew very well what insurrection entailed and categorically directed his lawyers to oppose the charge; had he intended insurrection, the Harper’s Ferry raid would have proved a far more bloody and devastating incident for Virginia.3

That evening, Brown wrote his first letter home since his defeat at Harper’s Ferry. Most likely, he had waited to write to his family until he had something certain to say about his own fate. “My Dear Wife, & Children every one,” he began, “I suppose you have learned before this by the newspapers that Two weeks ago today we were fighting for our lives at Harpers ferry.” He proceeded to recount the deaths of their sons, Oliver and Watson, and their neighbors, the Thompson brothers. After describing his wounds and other fatalities, he informed them that he had been “tried, & found guilty of Treason, &c; and of murder in the first degree” but had not yet been sentenced: “Under all of these terrible calamities; I feel quite cheerful in the assurance that God reigns; & will overrule all for his glory; & the best possible good. I feel no consciousness of guilt in the matter: nor even mortification on account of my imprisonment; & irons; & I feel perfectly assured that very soon no member of my family will feel any possible disposition to ‘blush on my account.’ Already dear friends at a distance with kindest sympathy are cheering me with the assurance that posterity at least: will do me justice.” After urging them to follow his example and faith in Christianity, he admonished them never to forget the poor “nor think any thing you bestow on them to be lost. . . . Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them” (alluding to the New Testament book of Hebrews 13:3). His jailer was kind, he wrote, and he was closely encircled by “kind hearts & kind faces . . . whilst thousands are thirsting for my blood.”4

The next day, November 1, Brown responded to a letter from a Quaker woman from Rhode Island who had signed her name only as “E.B.” The Quaker expressed her great concern for him in his imprisonment and her desire to offer him consolation. “You can never know how very many dear friends love thee with all their hearts, for thy brave efforts in behalf of the poor oppressed,” she wrote. She added that many of these admiring friends were “non-resistants” like herself, who believed that slavery must be defeated by moral reform, “not by carnal weapons” and bloodshed. “Yet,” she observed, “we know thee was animated by the most generous and philanthropic motives.” Along with a comparison to Moses, the writer also suggested Brown was superior to George Washington, whose valiant efforts only set men free from oppressive colonial taxation. Although she wished that she could defend him, the Quaker concluded that she could only pray for him.5

Few of Brown’s letters from jail reflect the kind of enthusiasm and appreciation that is shown in the old man’s response to E.B., a point that is all the more interesting since she remains anonymous to history. E.B. may have been a prominent antislavery activist in Rhode Island or simply a zealous Quaker who had fallen under the spell of Brown’s public witness and wanted to protect her identity.6

Writing on November 1, Brown greeted her words as “cheering,” invoking God’s blessing on her for her kind expressions, “but more especially for your fidelity to the ‘poor that cry, and those that have no help’” (an allusion to the biblical texts of Psalm 72:12 and Job 29:12). It is also one of his most revealing letters, Brown reiterating his responsibility for the outcome of the raid (“It is solely my own fault. . . . I mingled with our prisoners and so far sympathized with them and their families, that I neglected my duty in other respects”) and preferring to be compared to the flawed Apostle Peter over her allusion to Moses. “You know that Christ once armed Peter [Luke 22:36]. So also in my case; I think he put a sword into my hand, and there continued it so long as he saw best, and then kindly took it from me.” But now, Brown wrote, he was “wielding the ‘sword of the Spirit’ on the right hand and on the left. I bless God that it proves ‘mighty to the pulling down of strongholds’” (allusions to Ephesians 6:17, 2 Corinthians 6:7 and 10:14). “I always loved my Quaker friends,” he added, undoubtedly thinking of his personal history of association with Friends dating back from his more conservative antislavery years in Ohio and Pennsylvania and to the assistance and support he received in his more militant phase following the Kansas struggles. Brown further appealed for assistance on behalf of his “poor, bereaved, widowed wife,” as well as daughters and daughters-in-law, and the widow of William Thompson, who was murdered by his captors during the raid at Harper’s Ferry.

His letter to E.B. has two further aspects worth noting, the first being that his words anticipate his famous “speech” before the court which he made the following day: “I do not feel conscious of guilt in taking up arms,” he wrote, “and had it been in behalf of the rich and powerful, the intelligent, the great (as men count greatness), or those who form enactments to suit themselves and corrupt others, or some of their friends, that I interfered, suffered, sacrificed, and fell, it would have been doing very well.” Second, this is the only letter in which Brown requested a stranger to write again. “I would be very grateful for another letter from you,” he concluded. This request undoubtedly thrilled E.B., and she happily wrote back to him, expressing more approval of his course of action—even to the point of justifying the use of arms “in defense of great principles.”

However, her political remarks were sharp and grating to Prosecutor Andrew Hunter, who had taken upon himself the role of screening all of Brown’s correspondence. E.B. not only criticized President James Buchanan’s “red-taped circumlocution” with regard to slavery but also referred to the prosecution in Brown’s trial as being “more cruel” than Shakespeare’s vengeful Shylock—a criticism that must have offended Hunter.7 In fact, the old man never got to read E.B.’s response. Prosecutor Hunter withheld it, along with ninety-five other letters pertaining to Brown’s trial—many of them being either hateful or supportive letters, false promises of rescue, and vacuous and nonsensical communications, as well as letters politically offensive or those written by spies and informants in the service of Virginia. (Toward the end of the Civil War, he gave these letters to the secretary of the Commonwealth for safekeeping, most likely to protect informants from being marked for revenge by Union soldiers.8) As for E.B.’s first letter and Brown’s response, both seem to have been immediately transcribed by George Hoyt, who then submitted them to The Boston Atlas and Bee for publication the following week.9

A few days later, Brown answered another letter from an admiring female, the feminist and antislavery writer, Lydia Maria Child, who had addressed him as “Capt. Brown” in her communication of October 26, further introducing herself as “an earnest friend of Kansas.” Although Child did not know Brown, the old man had met her husband, David Lee Child, a prominent antislavery lawyer, and pursued some correspondence with him in 1857; at one point, the lawyer had requested a brief account of the 1856 Battle of Osawatomie between proslavery forces and Brown’s men in the Kansas territory—perhaps on behalf of his author wife.10 Besides writing to the old man in jail, Child also wrote to Governor Wise, identifying herself as an abolitionist and expressing her desire to act as “a mother or sister to dress his wounds, and speak soothingly to him,” and asking if he would permit her to “perform that mission of humanity.” However, if Child really wanted to assist Brown, she might have used more discernment and gone about her business without making abolition a point of her letter.

To no surprise, Wise’s response, dated October 29, blended cordiality and contempt—essentially declaring that he would use his influence to permit her but could neither guarantee her safety nor her actual access to Brown. Wise also made it clear that he had no sympathy for her desire to bring succor to an enemy of Virginia. His sharp response was irresistible to Child, who poured forth in a lengthy rejoinder that only made the whole effort seem a grandstand, but when her correspondence turned up in the New-York Daily Tribune, she seemed embarrassed. Writing an “Explanatory Letter” to the editor of the Tribune under date of November 10, Child made it clear that she did not know how her correspondence was published, although it may have been Ned House who sent it to the Tribune after gaining access through unknowing Virginia friends. Regardless, Child claimed that her intention was “to slip away quietly, without having the affair made public.” Perhaps this was true, but Child was hardly subtle. She had also written to William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, proclaiming, “My thoughts are so much with Capt. John Brown, that I can scarcely take comfort in anything. I would expend all I have to save his life. Brave old man! Brave and generous, though sadly mistaken in his mode of operation.” After the fact, she claimed that because Brown “was said to be fast recovering from his wounds, and as my presence might create a popular excitement unfavorable to such chance as the prisoner had for a fair trial,” she had deferred from making the trip until she heard from the old man. Child mistakenly added that Brown’s wife had gone to him in jail, apparently rendering no further need for her to go to Charlestown.

In fact, her “Explanatory Letter” seems stylized; she may have learned from the Tribune that Brown was “fast recovering from his wounds,” but she had hardly been concerned about the impact either her visit or her writings might make on the trial when she first wrote to Brown and Wise. Certainly Mary Brown had not visited her husband until the day before his execution, so there was yet ample time for a woman of action to assist the old man.11 Finally, it seems that Child’s published explanation did not fully reveal her intentions for wanting to go to Charlestown in the first place.

In her letter to Brown, Child had expressed sympathy and admiration for the old man, although she, like E.B., objected to his methods as an advocate of “peace principles.” Nevertheless, Child wrote, she wanted to come to Charlestown. “I think of you night and day, bleeding in prison, surrounded by hostile faces, sustained only by trust in God, and your own strong heart,” she wrote. “I long to nurse you, to speak to you sisterly words of sympathy and consolation.”12 Notwithstanding her sincere and brave intentions, Child probably wanted to obtain exclusive material for a book about the old man, the fact of which was later revealed in the Tribune, in a “Personal” notice stating that she was “already in possession of all the facts and incidents of John Brown’s earlier history, which she has only to complete by the story of his later career.” The notice stated that she intended to write a biography on behalf of Brown’s family; it was also hoped that the announcement would “prevent the publication of other biographies by incompetent persons.” In fact, several weeks prior to the old man’s hanging, there already was a rush to produce new books on John Brown, and Child probably hoped to outdo the other efforts.

The first was a compilation of articles and press coverage by New York publisher Robert DeWitt, advertised in the Tribune as “complete and authentic” and prepared from “the most reliable sources,” with a “verbatim report” of the trial and “correct portraits of Brown and his associates.” The DeWitt book was released before the end of the year under the title The Life, Trial, and Execution of Capt. John Brown. A similar book was hastily prepared from newspaper sources by Thomas Drew of Boston titled The John Brown Invasion: An Authentic History of the Harper’s Ferry Tragedy. However, Drew’s book was not published until 1860 and seems to have been overshadowed by the news of a far more impressive publication, an authorized biography by abolitionist James Redpath titled The Public Life of Capt. John Brown. “Wait and Get the Best,” declared an advertisement for Redpath’s book in the Tribune. “[D]o not waste your money on a pamphlet compilation from the newspapers, but wait and get a genuine Life of Brown, which will do justice to the subject.” Like Child, Redpath wanted to discourage readers from purchasing other works on Brown because a “liberal percentage of profits” from his book would go to the Brown family.13 Apparently, after Brown’s refusal to grant her an interview, Child’s plan was greatly challenged, because her book would lack the one advantage that she might have had over another biographer. But her plan was finally dashed when Mary Brown passed over her, instead choosing Redpath as her husband’s authorized biographer. “I have found it a very thankless business to write a Biography for the benefit of a family,” Child complained in a letter. In the end, she had to settle for publishing her wordy exchanges with Brown, Governor Wise, and the wife of Senator James Mason of Virginia in 1860.14

Of course, the old man wanted Child’s assistance, but not as his nurse or his biographer. In his response on October 31, although he addressed her as “stranger,” he seems to have recognized her as a notable author, referring to her as “one so gifted and so kind.” Expressing gratitude for her sympathy, he immediately proposed “a different course” of assistance. Brown wrote that he had a kind jailer, “a most humane gentleman, who, with his family have rendered me every possible attention I have desired or that could be of the least advantage.” Besides, his wounds were no longer at the stage where they required nursing.

Furthermore, he wrote, making a trip to Charlestown would subject her “to great personal inconvenience and heavy expense, without doing me any good.” Rather than undertaking such a challenging venture, he asked that she might rather raise support for his wife and three youngest daughters, as well as the Brown and Thompson widows whose husbands were killed at Harper’s Ferry. There was also his “middle-aged son,” he added. This son was afflicted with a disability from youth and had suffered greatly in the struggle against slavery in Kansas. Brown was referring to his son, Owen, who went unnamed because he was one of the few Harper’s Ferry raiders who had successfully escaped and was still at large at the time. The old man was careful not to jeopardize him in any way, except to describe his condition as being so bad that he did not have sufficient winter clothing. “Now, dear friend,” he wrote, “would you not as soon contribute fifty cents now, and a like sum yearly, for the relief of those very poor and deeply afflicted persons, to enable them to supply themselves and their children with bread and very plain clothing, and to enable the children to receive a common English education?” Perhaps, too, she might even get others to join her in establishing some kind of fund for their assistance. “I cannot see how your coming here can do me the least good,” he concluded, “and I am quite certain you can do me immense good where you are.” It was a skillful letter, and Brown knew a good opportunity when he saw it. Rather than debate militancy with a “moral suasionist,” he hoped to enlist her as a useful ally to his family after his death.15 Little did Brown, Child, or E.B. know, another noble abolitionist woman was already making preparations to assist the old man and would do so without writing a letter in advance.

Meanwhile, Hoyt had also reported to LeBarnes in Boston. By now the young lawyer had spent sufficient time with Brown and was able to offer other information beside the fact that the old man did not want to be rescued—in fact, had even promised Jailer Avis that he would not try to escape. Hoyt wrote that Brown was still lamenting his mistaken conduct at Harper’s Ferry, particularly in “chaffering” to save lives when he and his raiders “might have got away into the mountains, where no body of men could have captured them.” Besides his own errors, Brown was also “disappointed in his men.” To be sure, the old man was greatly disappointed by John Cook, a raider who compromised Brown’s associates in a confession made after his capture on October 24. Cook’s narrative was odious to the old man, not only because he heard about it after the fact but also because of how freely the raider had given up names and information. However, Hoyt’s reference to Brown’s disappointment pertained more to the large number of white men who had failed to show up after promising to support him at Harper’s Ferry.16 As to the trial, Hoyt thought highly of Chilton and regretted that he would not be representing Brown’s men; “Griswold & I will do the best we can,” he concluded. Hoyt also mentioned that it was widely believed, even by the lawyers, that he represented “an infinitely rich as well as powerful somebody in Boston.”

Although Hoyt was believed to be the agent of a powerful northerner, many more believed him to be the incognito Tribune correspondent who had made such a career of mocking Charlestown’s leading figures. All three Charlestown newspapers had featured editorials suggesting that Hoyt was unwelcome and needed to be watched closely; by mid-November, he would be bluntly advised to leave town. As for Brown, Hoyt’s admiration had only heightened, even as he became certain that the old man would die in Charlestown, either by assassination or execution. In private conversation, Brown expressed sheer annoyance at the idea that his friends were contemplating an escape plot, and instructed Hoyt to “send instant word to them that it could not be accomplished and must not be attempted.” More so, Hoyt observed that while he was surrounded by an armed and hostile people, “Brown did not desire to escape death, but had resigned himself with sublime fortitude,” even to the prospect of immediate execution. “John Brown is too good to live among men,” Hoyt wrote to LeBarnes. “I never imagined it possible for a man to be so desperately cool and calm under such terrible circumstances.”17

The old man was held over one day in between his conviction on October 31 and his sentencing on November 2. The trial of the raider Edwin Coppoc had now begun, and Brown’s lawyers were awaiting the court’s decision on their motion for an arrest of judgment. With nothing to do but wait, he busied himself with correspondence, including an open letter “To my friends in New-England and elsewhere,” appealing for financial support on behalf of his fellow prisoner, Aaron Stevens, to obtain the legal services of George Sennott of Boston, who had arrived the day before with Judge Russell. The note was undersigned by Stevens and probably conveyed to the New-York Daily Tribune through Hoyt.18

On Wednesday, November 2, Brown was called from his jail cell, walking with “considerable difficulty” and seemingly in pain, “although his features gave no expression of it.” Closing arguments had been made in Coppoc’s trial, and now that the jury had retired it was time for the court to pronounce sentence on the old man. With Brown’s return, the courthouse suddenly seemed to swell with spectators. When he entered, he sat down next to his counsel, with his right arm propped upward on the table and his head resting in his hand. House described him as remaining “entirely motionless, and for a time apparently unconscious of all that passed around him,” including the audibly whispered insults and curses (“Damned black-hearted villain!”). Indeed, Brown seemed indifferent, sitting firm with his lips compressed, yet without showing either anger or sternness. “He was like a block of stone,” wrote House.

After some preliminary remarks from Brown’s lawyers concerning points of exception, the clerk directed the prisoner to stand and say why sentence should not be passed on him. The old man barely stood, rising as he leaned forward, his hands resting on the table as “perfect quiet prevailed” in the room. Then, in tones soft and tender, “yet calm and manly,” his voice prevailed: “I have, may it please the court, a few words to say.” He had spoken throughout the trial, sometimes interrupting the lawyers with his own questions and statements. But now he seemed hesitant, and as he began his words were jumbled, “and he seemed to be wholly unprepared to speak.” However, he regained his composure and gathered his thoughts, speaking slowly and with an unfaltering voice: “In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, of a design on my part to free slaves.” Besides his “design,” he hoped to have made “a clean thing of that matter” as he had done late in 1858, when he and his men conducted an armed rescue operation at two sites in Missouri. The operation involved an extended effort, smuggling twelve enslaved people through Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and then by rail to Detroit, Michigan, where they finally were ferried to Canadian freedom. Brown said that he did so “without the snapping of a gun on either side,” a claim that has been called a lie because one of the slaveholders was killed when he drew his gun on Brown’s men. But his point was arguably true, because the rescue involved breaking into two teams, and the party led by Brown did so without gunfire. His point was exemplary, not comprehensive; he simply meant that his liberation plan was not premised on insurrection. “That was all I intended to do,” the old man declared. “I never did intend murder or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion or to make insurrection.” Obviously, slaveholders could not permit the distinction that Brown intended since any effort to take their property constituted “insurrection”—an assumption that many historians have adapted to Brown’s disadvantage.19

In these famous remarks, which Brian McGinty refers to as Brown’s “allocution,” the prisoner also expressed indignation at the prospect of the death penalty, which the old man saw as more a necessity of the slaveholder than the demands of the law. “I have another objection, and that is that it is unjust that I should suffer such a penalty.” “Had I interfered in the manner which I admit . . . in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right, and every man in this Court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.” Notably, Brown has often been caricatured as an “Old Testament” Christian, although at the zenith of his public role, he appealed to the Golden Rule of Jesus Christ, along with his favorite New Testament text, “to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.” He had only tried to live up to these biblical commands, he told the court:

I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted, I have done in behalf of His despised poor is not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done.

These words undoubtedly form the prophetic climax of Brown’s so-called speech before the court, in which the old man essentially rejected the slaveholders’ legalistic claims and charges, turned the judgment of biblical morality back on the entire nation, and then announced his readiness to seal his efforts on behalf of the oppressed with the shedding of his own blood. It was the first pronouncement of its kind for a nation that was barely one hundred years old and still quite steeped in Protestant evangelical sensibility. It was not a written speech, although Brown’s letter to E.B. suggests he had contemplated his final remarks before the court. The old man then conceded that the trial had turned out far better than he had anticipated, and that he was “satisfied” with the manner of his treatment in court. Of course, these words afterward were used to vindicate the justice of Virginia; but Brown’s point was typically optimistic, reflecting his satisfaction with the opportunity it afforded him to speak for the historical record, not the legal process and its unjust conclusion.

Brown’s allocution might have ended here, but he added two more points, once again because his primary concern was the historical record. First, he felt no consciousness of guilt, nor did he accept the verdict, especially as it related to “general insurrection,” the notion of which he denied. Second, that he had not induced the raiders to follow him, and in some cases actually permitted them to join despite “their weakness”—perhaps a reference to Francis J. Meriam, a frail, visually impaired young antislavery zealot who joined Brown’s little army just before the raid. (However, in fairness to Meriam, the young zealot had immediately contributed six hundred dollars in gold to the old man’s depleted war chest, making him quite useful.)20

When Brown was finished, Judge Parker declared that no reasonable doubt could exist of the prisoner’s guilt, and pronounced sentence upon him. He was to be “hanged by the neck until he be dead,” on Friday, December 2, sometime between nine and four o’clock in the afternoon, in a public execution rather than one conducted within the enclosed jail yard. Brown remained composed at the reading of the sentence, although one man in the audience began to applaud and was promptly silenced. According to the Herald, the old man was then escorted back to the jail, “for the first time followed by the sympathy of the people who gazed upon him with pitying eyes.” It may be true that Brown’s words softened the hearts of some spectators in the courthouse, but it is unlikely that there was widespread sympathy for him. According to a secondhand source, a physician in Charlestown observed Brown returning to the jail after his sentencing, and the old man was highly agitated and complaining loudly as he was escorted back to his cell. If this account is true, something had happened to offend him between the courthouse and the jail; whatever it was, it likely pertained to an offense committed against his men or the local black population, since he really was not fazed by insults made against him. Afterward, Brown requested the return of a letter that he had written to his family two days before, in order to add a postscript. When it was retrieved and placed before the old man, he penned the following postscript:

Nov 3d 1859

P S Yesterday Nov 2d I was sentenced to be hanged on 2d Decem next. Do not grieve on my account. I am still quite cheerful

Go[d] bless you all Your Ever

J Brown

The old man then asked that the letter be directed to Mrs. John Brown, “for there are some other widow Browns in North Elba.”21

As Chilton had surmised in his closing argument, Brown’s trial and conviction would have an adverse impact if his Virginia prosecutors persisted in pushing the old man toward the gallows. Horace Greeley was disgusted by the trial, declaring in the Tribune that the “multifarious collection of charges” required much more time than Brown and his lawyers were permitted in making their case. “The prisoner himself is suffering so severely from his wounds that it is necessary to bring him into Court on a cot, and to allow him to lie upon it while the trial proceeds.” He went on to point out that two of the three lawyers for Brown’s defense did not arrive until after the state had put in all of its testimony. Certainly, the old man had a right to be upset because Governor Wise had promised him a fair trial. “What fair trial?” Greeley complained. In a Republican meeting at Second Avenue and Twenty-Third Street in Manhattan, the Honorable Charles S. Spencer likewise “examined critically the trial of John Brown, and pronounced it to be a farce.” Over in Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church, abolitionist Wendell Phillips was welcomed into the pulpit of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, speaking on the theme, “The Lesson of the Hour.” Calling the old man “a regular old Cromwellian dug up from two centuries,” Phillips renounced Virginia’s charge of insurrection. “I ought not to apply that word to John Brown of Ossawatomie, for there was no insurrection in his case. It is a great mistake to call him an insurgent.” Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican, charged that Brown’s trial had been “hurried through to a conviction,” and the trial as a whole was “lame and defective at every point.”22 Bowles charged that “[t]he trial of a man prostrate with serious wounds or sickness is never practiced among civilized men, except in military courts and in time of actual war. He should also have had sufficient time to procure such counsel as he desired. The pretense of fear of rescue is either false or cowardly. Virginia could have held him safe another week, even if he had recovered from his wounds, for though a brave man, he is neither a Samson nor a Hercules. The Virginia court neither gave Brown the time, the opportunity nor the means necessary to a fair trial.”23 In contrast to these sympathetic voices, Bennett, editor of the Herald, berated Brown’s words before the court, declaring that the old man had “pricked the bubble of glory,” which antislavery proponents such as Greeley and Phillips, “and all his other black republican coadjutors have been assiduously blowing for him.” To Bennett’s racist perspective, Brown had set aside “the proffered honors of a martyred hero” by claiming “to be nothing more than a nigger stealer . . . proving himself a pious liar as well as a pious ruffian.”

If Bennett thought the old man was a religious hypocrite, the proslavery clergymen who encountered him concluded that Brown was far more serious about matters of faith, notwithstanding he had no respect for them. Throughout his incarceration, the old man rejected visits from proslavery ministers. As the Baltimore American put it, Brown “refuse[d] to receive any ministers who countenance Slavery, telling them to go home and read their Bibles.” Besides Father Costello, the Roman Catholic priest that he had literally shouted away at the time of his arrest, the old man steadily resisted the visitations of local Protestant clergymen. One of his first clergy visits at the Charlestown jail was made by a Presbyterian minister named Lowrey, who proposed prayer with the prisoner. Ascertaining that Lowrey was proslavery, Brown promptly ordered him to leave. He responded similarly to a Methodist Episcopal minister named James March. “You do not know the meaning of the word Christianity,” he told the minister. “Of course I regard you as a gentleman, but only as a heathen gentleman.” When another proslavery minister was announced, and Brown learned that he held no slaves, he merely tolerated the visit. “Let him come, and I will pray for him,” the old man said. “But he cannot pray for me.’”24

Yet proslavery clergymen seemed intent on proving a point, or perhaps even justifying themselves by winning a prayer with the pious archenemy of slavery. Yet one after another, they found themselves shown to the door of his jail cell. Around the time of Brown’s sentencing, the Reverend N. Green North, a Presbyterian minister, went to visit him, and the two became engaged in a conversation about Saint Paul—North arguing that the apostle’s writings showed no abolitionist ideas. The old man would have none of it. He knew as much about Paul as anyone, Brown said, and unless the visiting clergyman was opposed to slavery, he wanted to hear nothing from him. In another case, Brown was visited by the Reverend Norval Wilson of the Methodist Episcopal Church, along with some of his colleagues. When Wilson proposed prayer, Brown looked up, “his eyes flashing fire from their deep sockets, and said: ‘Mr. Wilson, do you believe in slavery?’” Wilson paused, and in a lofty manner, began to expostulate: “This is a great and a glorious government!”—“But, Mr. Wilson,” Brown interrupted. “I’d like to have a categorized answer—yes, or no. Do you believe in slavery?” Wilson replied, “‘I do, under the present circumstances.’ ‘Then,’ said Brown, with great earnestness, Mr. Wilson, I do not want your prayers. I do not want prayers of any man that believes in slavery. You can pray to your Father that heareth in secret.”

Samuel Vanderlip Leech, a young Methodist circuit preacher in Loudon County, also visited Brown at this time, but was advised not even to mention prayer to Brown because he “wanted no minister to pray with him who would not be willing to die to free a slave.” Leech had early associated with antislavery churches but did not believe himself willing to die for the antislavery cause. He later wrote about the visit, but never divulged the nature of their conversation, although it appears the old man was at least indifferent to the lukewarm young Methodist. “You may wonder, are there no ministers of the gospel here?” Brown later wrote to an antislavery minister in Ohio. “I answer, No. There are no ministers of Christ here. These ministers who profess to be Christian, and hold slaves or advocate slavery, I cannot abide them. My knees will not bend in prayer with them while their hands are stained with the blood of souls.”25

Brown had another visitor shortly after he was sentenced to death. One afternoon, Congressman Boteler, one of the first to have examined him following his defeat at Harper’s Ferry, quietly entered the corridor and approached Brown’s cell without notice. When he looked into the cell, he must have been surprised at first glance. The old man’s feet were unshackled, and he was standing on his chair, peering out of the single, barred window that looked out from the back side of the jail.26 It seems the sound of troops drilling outside had gotten his attention, but he could not easily see them because of the high wall that enclosed the backyard of the jail. By mounting the chair, the old man could peek out over the wall and onto the street where the troops were drilling. Boteler stood quietly watching Brown, who still was not aware of his presence. The old man was thrilled. He broke into a laugh, slapped his leg, and said, “If I had a dozen men like that—I’d make as many of those fellows run as could stand between here and the Blue Ridge.” Suddenly, he must have sensed someone was behind him, for he turned and saw Boteler and then stepped down. Seeming embarrassed, Brown apologized for his discourtesy. “I had supposed I was alone. I hope I said nothing to hurt your feelings.”27 This incident, as relayed by Boteler, was little more than a personal vignette and never found its way to a newspaper.

While Boteler’s observation was overlooked, another episode resulting from the “Harper’s Ferry Outbreak” proved memorable. According to Helen Ainslie Smith, the interest in Brown prompted a “special correspondent” from the Herald to travel upstate to the quiet village of Peterboro, New York, to interview the abolitionist magnate, Gerrit Smith—marking the first contemporary newspaper interview. “The next day,” Ainslie Smith observed, “when the conversation was printed, it made a great sensation and the fashion for interviewing became popular at once.” Gerrit Smith had been sought out because he was one of Brown’s most important supporters; however, he was panicked because his association with the old man had been discovered from his captured papers in Virginia, and he feared it would result in his arrest. By all accounts, Gerrit Smith was a noble and generous man, but he lacked bravery and his emotional stability had begun to implode.

The Herald correspondent found Peterboro bleak and dreary on the day of his visit, but described the village, with its long green and trees, several dwellings, as well as a shop, a grocer, and a hotel, along with Gerrit Smith’s distinguished residence. Interviewing a local Republican, the journalist learned that Smith was excited about news of his possible arrest, and had a black associate standing by for dispatches coming through by telegraph. The man remembered John Brown, too, describing him as a “fine, honest appearing fellow” who generally was liked in Peterboro. Now, Brown was down in a Virginia jail, and his prosperous supporter was worrying himself to despair.

When the journalist finally spoke with Smith, the abolitionist refused to discuss anything about John Brown. “I am going to be indicted, sir, indicted!” Smith said. “You must not talk to me about it.” Another associate informed the journalist that Smith was advised not to speak to the press; but it was generally understood that, were Smith to be arrested, the men of Peterboro would fight to keep him from being taken. It would mean bloodshed to remove Gerrit Smith from Peterboro, the journalist concluded.

Unfortunately, Smith was removed from Peterboro, but not by federal marshals. Having finally become unhinged by fear and apprehension, Smith checked himself into the New York State Lunatic Asylum in Utica. Hearing of Smith’s difficulties, Bennett of the proslavery Herald naturally expressed little sympathy, allowing only that he was a “man of generous but distorted views”; otherwise, his “large contributions kept abolitionists at their work.” As an inmate in a madhouse, the editor continued, Smith was now beyond the reach of the law. “What a pity, that Gerrit Smith’s insanity and Old Brown’s insanity were not discovered a month ago,” he added sarcastically. If only the rest of the abolitionists would similarly meet “their deserts,” Bennett concluded, excitement over the Harper’s Ferry episode “would soon settle down, and abolitionism would be regarded as one of the phases which madness assumes.”28

Meanwhile, Brown presented an unusually comfortable profile despite his status as a doomed abolitionist living out an uncertain number of days at the mercy of Virginia authorities. Gallaher, the Herald affiliate, observed that the prisoner was not manacled and sat comfortably reading his Bible or singing hymns with his cell mate, Stevens. He was “exceedingly free and open” toward those who came to see him in “a kindly spirit,” although such visits were few. More plenteous were the “flocks” of resentful, suspicious citizens, flowing in and out of the jail. Gaping and staring, they showed their discontentment at the old man’s comfort by following Jailer Avis back and forth, until he found it necessary to put them out.

In a sense, everything seemed to be working out for Brown. Even the recovery of his Bible, which he had lost in defeat, suggested a good Providence to the old man. According to Gallaher, “some kind person” had found it at the armory at Harper’s Ferry and made the trip over to Charlestown to place it in his hands. “It is almost needless to say,” he concluded, “that Brown awaits death with the resignation and tranquility which disarm the dreaded phantom of all terror.”29

CHAPTER 8

IN THE UTTERMOST PARTS OF THE SEA

We must part, and I feel assured; for us to meet under such dreadful circumstances would only add to our distress.

“Osawatomie Brown Himself!” declared a newspaper advertisement for Barnum’s American Museum in New York City, just days after his sentencing. “You would almost think the wax figure of John Brown at Barnum’s Museum, was the man himself, it is so like him.” However, if P. T. Barnum wanted to include Brown in his famous museum of the popular and the peculiar, the artist Edward Brackett of Boston had more serious intentions. Even before he knew his identity, the artist had seen the old man walking along the street in Boston one day and had told himself, “There’s a head for a sculptor.” So when news of Brown’s defeat at Harper’s Ferry broke, Brackett was more than eager to go to Virginia “to model his head.” Lacking the resources for this project, he first turned to Brown’s associate, Samuel G. Howe, and the abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips. However, the two men were put off by his request and could only look at him in “dumb amazement,” Brackett later recalled, “as though they thought me mad.” He then turned to another of Brown’s associates, the businessman George L. Stearns of Medford, Massachusetts, who was quite receptive to the idea and shortly financed his sojourn with $120 in gold.

Brackett quickly boarded the train, stopping his first night at the Wager House in Harper’s Ferry, where he signed his name and city of origin—instantly making himself “an object of infinite speculation” among townsmen and militia; whenever questioned or sounded on the subject of slavery, he deliberately gave indecisive answers. The next day in Charlestown, he not only met the incognito Ned House of the Tribune but also Judge Russell and his wife, the couple having come to town in time for the conclusion of Brown’s trial. Though cordially greeted by Senator Mason and Prosecutor Hunter, Brackett soon began to suspect that he was being thwarted rather than accommodated; every effort on his part to gain access to Brown was prevented by sheer procrastination on the part of the authorities.

Brackett evidently confided his concerns to House, who then revealed them in his correspondence to the Tribune. “He had expected to find no objections on the part of the authorities,” House reported. “But, after a few vain efforts to obtain an interview with Brown, hopes began to fade.” In fact, Brackett was getting the runaround, mostly being sent back and forth between Jailer Avis and Judge Parker—both of them seeming happy to assist him, but doing nothing until his “opportunities seemed to be growing fainter and fainter.” At some point, the artist protested, only to meet a cool rebuke from Prosecutor Hunter and Senator Mason, who produced a letter from a Democrat in Boston, alleging that he was both an abolitionist and a spy. This may have jarred Brackett, but he persisted despite cordial resistance.

When a traveling daguerreotype photographer happened to come into town, Brackett thought there might be a breakthrough. After all, he had come to Charlestown to make sketches and measurements of Brown’s head for his sculpture; surely the authorities would not prevent him from having a daguerreotype made of the old man in his jail cell. But “the idea of the camera, too, was met with opposition,” noted House in the Tribune. “Two strange men with a camera inside of a jail was a prospect not to be calmly contemplated.”

It now began to dawn on Brackett that the authorities had no intention of allowing him to complete his mission. For several days his expectations had been kept alive by “gentle encouragements,” only to be crushed by delay and postponement. Undoubtedly under orders from Mason and Hunter, even the friendly jailer had proved an “invulnerable” hindrance. There was “immense opposition” to his mission, Avis told him, and “hundreds of people” from the community had let him know as much. Observing his dilemma, House reported to Northern readers, “Mr. Brackett will be obliged to return without accomplishing his object, for it is wholly impossible to satisfy the jealous Virginians that there is not in his visit here a great deal more than meets the eye.” Indeed, the artist had been told that he was “a marked man,” House added, “and must bear the penalty.”1

House also concluded that one of the reasons for Brackett’s difficulties was his apparent acquaintance with Judge Russell and his wife, who had come down from Boston on November 2, the day Brown was sentenced. Despite their prominence and letters of introduction, even the Russells “were regarded with great suspicion” by townsmen, who afterward lauded themselves for their “forbearance” in allowing the judge and his wife to leave town in peace—especially after the supposedly questionable behavior of Mrs. Russell.

When the Russells arrived in Charlestown on November 2, Nellie Russell, a twenty-four-year-old mother of two small children, remained at the hotel when her husband went to the courthouse. While she awaited his return, she had explored the hotel, only to encounter the friendly face of Ned House, whom she knew from Boston. Undoubtedly, House had quickly apprised her of his incognito service to the Tribune, although this did not prevent them from friendly banter. The two even sat in the hotel parlor, House singing as the judge’s wife accompanied him on the piano. At some point, Nellie began to play “negro songs,” which got the attention of the enslaved people working in the hotel, some of them finding an excuse to enter the room to check out the Northern guests. When Judge Russell returned, he was “considerably alarmed” and begged her to stop before she got into trouble.

After dinner, they were admitted to Brown’s cell, finding him lying on his cot, as Nellie recalled, “looking as calm, rugged and comfortable as ever.” The old man arose to receive them, seemingly surprised that the judge had been accompanied by his wife. “Oh, my dear,” he told Nellie, “this is no place for you!” However, Brown probably was delighted by her presence.

The Russells had hosted him in their Boston home a number of times, especially when he was hiding out from federal marshals in 1857; although he spent much of the time holed up in his room, the abolitionist was sometimes entertained by Nellie when her husband was tending to business affairs. Brown was famously shy around “ladies and gentlemen” but seems to have found the young woman a warm and interested host, and perhaps was somewhat fond of her in his own way. The account of his 1857 visit suggests that he had enjoyed her company—and that she even had evoked a rare and somewhat odd fit of silent, quaking laughter from her rustic guest. In turn, Brown enjoyed teasing the young society wife with toe-curling stories of the frontier and enjoyed watching her amused revulsion when he described the kinds of creeping things he had been forced to eat while in the wilderness, or showed off a bit by unloading and cleaning his guns and handling his knives in her parlor while forewarning bloodshed if the marshals should come to seize him. On a later visit, he had brought maple candy from the Adirondacks and doted over her little girls.

Now, Brown had to excuse himself to lay back down on his cot, but Nellie found him “in the best of spirits,” even declaring that he found no fault about the manner of his coming execution. “The disgrace of hanging does not trouble me in the least,” he told his guests. The Russells were impressed that Brown would present such a calm and brave demeanor, because their visit took place only hours after his sentencing. “Captain Brown appears perfectly fearless in all respects,” Russell wrote immediately afterward in the Boston Traveller, “with no feeling about death on a scaffold.” He discussed the failure at Harper’s Ferry, concluding, “it was through his mercy to his prisoners that he had not taken thousands of men out of bondage; but he stayed to protect them until he was overpowered.” In doing so, he had paid dearly for it. “I have seen my two boys killed,” he told his guests, “and not gently killed.” For a Calvinist, however, neither human activity nor responsibility mitigated God’s overarching, sovereign purpose. Brown thus declared his belief being that every act, “even all the follies that led to this disaster, were decreed to happen ages before the world was made.” The only anxiety he expressed regarded his family’s needs, a theme that dominated his prison letters thereafter. The Russells noted the jailer’s leniency, because Brown was not in manacles or irons, and Avis himself did not monitor their visit in the cell.

However, an “understrapper” (whether a jail guard or a presumptuous spy is not known) shadowed the doorway of the cell to the point of annoyance. Nellie sewed up some of the holes in the old man’s coat and then ordered the man to get it brushed of blood and dirt; he grudgingly cooperated, not being able to refuse a lady. Perhaps it was in the man’s absence that Judge Russell inspected the large chimney in the cell, concluding, “two good Yankees could get these men out and away so easily!” But if he voiced this opinion aloud, Brown probably quashed the idea immediately.

Russell would later tell northern associates that although the jail would not be hard to escape, it would be much harder to get away outside. Besides, the old man did not wish to come out and even thought himself a prisoner “on parole” because he was treated so indulgently that “he would not walk out if he had the chance.” In the end, the Russells could only say farewell. When they parted the jail, Nellie kissed the prisoner good-bye, tears streaming from her eyes. The old man forced out his words. “Now, go,” he said, his mouth trembling. After they returned to their hotel, the locals were irate over the “Lady” Russell, who had dared to speak “words of consolation” to their enemy, and then had the audacity to weep in public over his fate. Resentment over the incident increased to the point that the artist Brackett felt compelled to alert them, admonishing the Russells to “get away quickly.”

Years later, Nellie recalled waiting for the train home at the Harper’s Ferry station and then being approached by Lewis Washington, one of the slaveholders who had been held hostage by Brown in the engine house. Walking with her on the platform, Washington questioned her closely. “Why do you like such a miserable man?” he demanded.

“I think you are a very bad Southerner, sir, to speak so to a lady of her friends,” she replied.

“But why did he come to your house as you say?”

“To bring maple sugar to my children.”

Washington evidently took her answer for naïveté, calling her a “spoiled child” and inviting her to his home to meet his wife. She refused the invitation and assured him that she had no knowledge of Brown’s raid and had only come to see her friend in jail. “He accepted my assurance,” she recalled, “and yet he had a doubt, for as the train left, he said, ‘I am not sure that I do right in letting you go.’”2

With the Russells gone and the rising disgust of the townsmen, Brackett realized that he was losing time and could not afford to trust the pretended hospitality of the authorities, which actually were intent on preventing his artistic mission. Whether from House or another source, the artist learned later that one of the jailer’s assistants had known of Brown from Kansas. Brackett approached the man with his appeal for an opportunity to meet with the old man. The assistant was fearful of being caught and swore Brackett to secrecy but promised to get him into the jail at an opportune moment.

The opportunity arrived during the trial of raider Shields Green, when Jailer Avis had brought the prisoner over to the courthouse. Brackett recalled that he had already prepared a drawing of a “conventional head,” which he took along with his instruments when the word was given. Rushing up the little steps of the jailhouse, Brackett was met by Griswold, Brown’s Ohio lawyer, who hurried him passed the reception room and into the corridor of the old man’s cell. Griswold was the only one to enter the room, because the artist had promised the assistant jailer that he would not set foot in the cell. The lawyer entered and explained Brackett’s presence and intention of modeling his head. Brown, “who had no personal vanity,” did not greet the prospect of being modeled, seeming quite indifferent to the whole idea. He felt that his work was done “and that his personality would soon cease to be of any moment whatever, and seemed inclined to dismiss the matter.” Then Griswold interjected: “It is at the desire of your Boston friends that Mr. Brackett comes.” Suddenly, the old man’s expression changed, and “he ceded at once when he understood it was the desire of Phillips, Howe, and Stearns that a bust should be made.”

The artist seated himself just outside the cell and requested Brown to pull his chair close to the door; the old man sat, just on the other side of the threshold. With his subject close enough to touch, Brackett quickly began to sketch, while directing lawyer Griswold as he made each measurement with the artist’s instruments. “These I noted down in their several places on my sketch,” Brackett later said, “photographing the subject on my brain the while.” The work completed, the old man was returned to his Bible, and Brackett quickly retreated to his hotel, now prepared to make his departure as soon as possible.

As Brackett was packing his bag to leave, Ned House quietly appeared at his door and, with a serious look, asked if he might come in for a moment. Closing the door, House suddenly produced a handful of foolscap sheets, filled with his latest Tribune correspondence. He had used ingenuous methods to smuggle his reports to Greeley in New York, often sending them under a misleading cover to a Tribune associate in Baltimore, who then forwarded the reports to New York. But resentment toward his correspondence was heating up in Charlestown, and even House was concerned that some Virginians were beginning to catch on. House asked Brackett for a great favor, and the artist agreed to help. He took off his pants, and House began to wrap the long sheets of his reportage around the artist’s calves and thighs, and then helped him back into his trousers. “In that costume,” Brackett recalled, he made his way on the train to Harper’s Ferry, and then to Baltimore, where he took the New York train.3

Arriving in the city, Brackett went immediately to the Tribune office at the corner of Nassau and Spruce Streets in Manhattan. After Brackett asked to see Horace Greeley in person, the editor immediately received him into his office when he heard that the artist had just arrived from Charlestown. Thinking he would merely get a firsthand report from his guest, Greeley was surprised when Brackett told him that he was “pretty heavily clad” and wanted to “undress a little.” Greeley was put off but consented, at which point the artist dropped his pants and “disrobed” himself “of a whole week’s correspondence.” Recognizing the work of Ned House, Greeley laughed aloud.

Perhaps among the papers wrapped around Brackett’s legs was House’s description of the Russells’ departure and his mocking reference to Prosecutor Andrew Hunter, who afterward remarked that Nellie Russell “was only shielded by her sex,” because there was allegedly evidence implicating her conspiracy with Brown. “A man in her position, he says, would have found inconvenience in getting away.” House concluded playfully, “Do you think I shall get away at all?”4

Although Brackett and the Russells had happily departed Charlestown, two women were now intent on reaching the old man amid an increasingly tense and worried town. “Guards and sentinels have been stationed out every night, for the past two weeks,” wrote one observer on November 4. “At any time of night the measured tramp of infantry can be heard as though national war were declared,” House reported in the Tribune. “It is evident, however, that a feeling of irrepressible uneasiness still lingers here. The streets by day are filled with groups of people discussing, with profound seriousness, the chances of renewed attacks, escapes, and insurrections.” Although many townsmen played down the need for a military presence, House wrote, they were grateful for the presence of so many bayonets, and it was clear that the people of Charlestown would increasingly exchange comfort for the security that juxtaposed a “martial spirit.”

One of the jurors in Brown’s trial later recalled that the town was full of “excitement” and that “many people were afraid the negroes were going to rise up and murder every white man and woman and child.” At night, streets were guarded by armed patrols that demanded immediate proof from wandering citizens, otherwise arresting people without distinction, even as the town became more and more intolerant of strangers. “It is perfectly clear,” House wrote, “that the subsidence of excitement is only an uncertain calm that might at any moment be broken in upon by fresh turbulence.”5

Mary Brown, who had not wanted to involve herself in the raid, was now persuaded to leave her Adirondack farm to see her husband. Although Brown had not asked her to come, Mary’s visit was prompted by the urging of the Reverend Thomas W. Higginson, one of his most brave and forthright supporters. While visiting the Browns in North Elba, Higginson urged Mary to go to her husband in the hopes that she might persuade him to reconsider an attempt at escape, and possibly prove “a valuable medium of communication, should he finally yield to the wishes of his friends.”

According to Higginson, Brown’s friends had not given up on the idea of a rescue, even if the old man was intent on facing the gallows. He, along with LeBarnes, Franklin Sanborn, James Redpath, and Richard Hinton, were still plotting a possible rescue as late as November 28, and urged Mary to make an effort to persuade her husband to reconsider. On November 4, two days after she departed North Elba in the escort of Higginson, the latter wrote to the Brown family that it was a “great thing” that their father’s execution was postponed for a month and that it could prove “a sign for the future”—either that his sentence might be commuted to incarceration or it might provide sufficient time for Brown to change his mind if the death sentence was upheld.

The hopeful friend and the dutiful wife thus made the trip up to Ausable Forks, the better part of twenty miles, on a broken-down buckboard wagon, then down to the narrows of Lake Champlain, where they were ferried over to Burlington, Vermont. The next day, they arrived by train in Boston, where she was interviewed by a reporter from the Worcester Transcript, who described her as “a large and noble-looking woman . . . worthy of being John Brown’s wife.” She told the reporter that she had “always prayed to God that her husband might fall in battle rather than by the hands of slaveholders,” but that she did not regret his capture, “for the sake of the words he has been permitted to utter.”

Escorted to the American House Hotel, she was then greeted by a group of nearly thirty antislavery friends at a reception. Higginson wrote that she impressed her hosts by her “simplicity & dignity.” The simple antislavery wife was feted with kisses, money, and gifts—including handkerchiefs, gloves, and shoes, the stylish apparatuses of a society she barely knew. Mary also had an opportunity to meet the greater number of her husband’s most important supporters in one place, including Higginson, Sanborn, Howe, and Stearns (Theodore Parker was in Europe, and Gerrit Smith was still recuperating in an insane asylum). She also chatted with Judge Thomas and Nellie Russell, the latter describing her “pleasant” meeting with Brown and cheering Mary about the prospects of seeing her husband.

In preparation for her journey, she was given letters of introduction, prepared by the lawyer Hoyt, intended for hotelkeepers in Harper’s Ferry and Charlestown, as well as Sheriff Campbell and other leading citizens in the community. Higginson then telegraphed ahead to George Sennott, another lawyer who had gone to Virginia from Boston to represent Brown’s men in court. From Boston, she would travel by steamboat to New York, where she was to be escorted the rest of the way by a young abolitionist from Philadelphia named Hector Tyndale. As Higginson noted, the way to Virginia had been fairly well “smoothed” for Mary Brown, and he had every reason to expect that Brown and his wife would be reunited in the safe but sorrowful confines of his Charlestown jail cell. He wired Governor Wise from Worcester, requesting permission on Mary’s behalf, also mistakenly assuming that Lydia Maria Child had already preceded her to Virginia, so that Mary would face “no difficulty.”6

But news of his wife’s visit had quite the opposite effect on the old man, who nearly panicked, sending lawyer Sennott running to the telegraph office. “Mr. Brown says [‘]for God’s sake don’t let Mrs. Brown come,[’]” he wired to Boston. The telegram did not reach Mary in Boston; Higginson then wired to Philadelphia but once more missed her. She had already boarded a southbound train and was only stopped when she reached Baltimore, thanks to Hoyt (back in Boston on an errand), who had wired ahead to Charles Fulton, the sympathetic editor of the Baltimore American. Fulton made sure to stop Mary from proceeding, and she went back as far as Philadelphia.

Initially, Brown’s opposition puzzled Higginson, particularly because Judge Russell and lawyer Hoyt had been so encouraging. “It can hardly be a mere matter of sentiment on his part,” he wrote to an abolitionist associate, “nor can there be any fear for her safety, because Judge & Mrs. Russell were treated very kindly.” Higginson concluded that perhaps there had been a new development in his case, or that Brown may have feared that authorities might find a way to use her as a witness in court. “In any case his wishes should be regarded, at least temporarily,” he concluded. Higginson then wired back to Sennott, asking for some kind of an explanation that was to be conveyed somehow by the incognito Ned House of the Tribune; but due to a snafu, probably on Sennott’s part, the response was delayed for over a week. For the time being, then, Mary was stalled at Philadelphia, where she was hosted by a number of prominent abolitionists, including William Still, J. Miller McKim, and Lucretia Mott.7

Higginson undoubtedly felt responsible for Mary’s situation, because he had undertaken to get her down to Virginia in the first place. Relying on communication with the prominent McKim, he sent her greetings on November 8, suggesting it was best for her to remain in the City of Brotherly Love for the time being, especially since she could stay with friends rather than incur the expense of a hotel. He also assured her that he had updated her family back at North Elba, had sent them some money, and would continue to stay in touch with them.

On November 12, he wrote to McKim, “consigning Mrs. Brown” to his care for guidance, adding, “[A]lthough of course neither you nor I can claim any authority over her.” However, Higginson thought Philadelphia was the best place for her to remain and opposed any notion of Mary returning to North Elba as long as she had a chance to see her husband. As for the old man’s opposition, Higginson concluded that Brown’s reason for opposing Mary’s visit was “pecuniary,” something he believed was “natural” to the old man. Staying in Philadelphia would be good for her, allowing her to receive monetary gifts and good advice and to make “permanent friends” that would continue to support her and her family. She would also be in the “best position for communicating with her husband & with us,” he concluded.

To no surprise, Brown could speak for himself on the matter of keeping his wife away from Charlestown. “If my Wife were to come here just now,” he wrote to Higginson and Howe on November 4, “it would only tend to distract her mind, Ten fold; & would only add to my affliction; & cannot possibly do me any good.” Furthermore, the trip would exhaust the little resources of the family to buy bread, clothing, and fuel throughout the coming winter, which was considerably longer in the Adirondacks. Rather than help her travel, Brown asked them to “persuade” Mary to remain at home, at least until she could learn “further from me.” He had already written to her and would continue to do so, he added. “Her presence here will deepen my affliction a thousand fold. I beg of her to be calm, & submissive; & not to go wild on my account.” His remarks were decidedly patriarchal and unflattering, particularly since he had hardly hesitated in urging his wife to come south when he was making preparations for the raid.8 On the same day, he similarly wrote to Samuel Howe: “I lack for nothing & was feeling quite cheerful before I heard she talked of coming on—I ask her to compose her mind & to remain quiet till the last of this month; out of pity to me. I can certainly judge better in this matter than any one else.”9

On the other hand, notwithstanding his headstrong and patriarchal manner, Brown was justifiably concerned. He could not protect his wife from insult or abuse in Virginia and probably was concerned that Mary might break down under the stress of the trip, particularly being denied the bodies of her two sons, Oliver and Watson, one of which had fallen prey to some malicious students from the Winchester Medical School.10 An antislavery woman who met Mary in Philadelphia remembered her as looking “stunned with grief.” While she may not have been given to hysteria, Brown knew his wife well enough to know that she was under great emotional distress. Nor was he certain whether her presence would strengthen or discourage him in the remaining weeks of his incarceration.

Evidently he had written a letter to her at the same time he had written to Higginson and Howe, although this letter (perhaps too strong and deeply personal for the Brown family to share with posterity) seems lost to history. However, Brown wrote again to his family in North Elba on November 8, also intending that it be directed to Mary because he wrote of her both in the first and third person.

I wrote most Earnestly to my dear and afflicted wife not to come on for the present at any rate. I will now give you my reasons for doing so. First it would use up all the scanty means she has or is at all likely to have to make herself and children comfortable hereafter. For let me tell you that the sympathy that is now aroused in your behalf may not always follow you. . . . We must part, and I feel assured; for us to meet under such dreadful circumstances would only add to our distress. If she comes on here she must be only a gazing stock throughout the whole journey, to be remarked upon in every look, word and action by all sorts of creatures and by all sorts of papers throughout the whole country.

Having appealed to the understanding of his children, he then addressed his wife: “O Mary do not come, but patiently wait for the meeting (of those who love God and their fellow men) where no separation must follow.” It is a tender letter, filled with words of comfort and admonitions to remember the oppressed and the sufferings of the righteous, but it was purposefully done to make certain that Mary did not venture any farther.11

Shortly afterward, George Hoyt returned from Boston, having stopped in Philadelphia en route to Virginia. His role as Brown’s attorney had come to an end, but he had enthusiastically volunteered for the purpose of assisting the prisoner in the recovery of his personal property, much of it having been seized or scattered following the raid. While in Philadelphia, Hoyt had met Mary too, while she was still a guest of the black abolitionist William Still on Locust Street. “Tell my husband, I can spare him for the sake of the cause!” she told the young lawyer. “I can resign him to God, sure that it is His hand that strikes the blow!” Hoyt wrote to LeBarnes that her every word breathed “the spirit of trust and resignation.” When he said good-bye, Mary’s lips quivered, her voice trembled, and she wept freely, “but the words were firmly spoken and were worthy of the wife of John Brown.”

Hoyt conveyed her message to the old man, prompting another letter to Mary on November 10. Writing in a more reasonable, relaxed manner, Brown wrote to his “Dear devoted Wife,” explaining that he was informed of her current stay in Philadelphia with friends. He wrote that although he had a great desire to see her, he had “many strong objections” to her coming at that point and had already stated them in his previous letters. “I am under renewed obligation to you my ever faithful & beloved wife, for heeding what may be my last, but earnest request.” Writing was still difficult for him, he said, and he could not give “full particulars” as to “our disaster.” Yet still was the great purpose they had long shared in life:

I will here say that the sacrifices you & I have been called to make in behalf of the cause we love, the cause of God & of humanity, do not seem to me as at all too great. I have been whipped as the saying is; but am sure I can recover all the lost capital occasioned by that disaster by only hanging a few moments by the neck; & I feel quite determined to make the utmost possible out of a defeat. I am daily & hourly striving to gather up what little I may from the wreck.

Brown directed his teenage daughter Annie to copy his letters for the other members of the family because he could not “muster strength to write them all.” Then he expressed the hope that after Virginia had “applied the finishing stroke to the picture she has already made of me (in order to ‘establish Justice’),” Mary might come to gather up the bones of her husband and sons. “Write me won’t you?” he wrote before signing the letter, “Your affectionate Husband, John Brown.”

The following week, Mary received another letter, this one from the black poet, Frances Ellen Watkins, who wrote from Ohio on November 14. “My Dear Madam,” Watkins penned, “I want to say something to you, the noble wife of the hero of the nineteenth century.” Declaring her sympathies as a black woman, Watkins thanked her for her noble and brave example, concluding with “[f]rom the prison comes forth a shout of triumph over that power whose ethics are robbery of the feeble and oppression of the weak.”12

According to the Baltimore American, there was “considerable stir in town” on Saturday, November 5, when it was announced that “Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, an authoress and poetess of some repute, had arrived in the afternoon train.” However, it was quickly learned that the visitor was not Child, but rather a “Mrs. Spring,” described as a fine looking, well-dressed lady of about fifty years of age. The paper also reported she was accompanied “by a young man, who represents himself as her son, who is also of very genteel appearance.”13

In fact, forty-eight-year-old Rebecca Buffum Spring was from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where she lived with her husband, Marcus Spring, a New York businessman. She was another daughter of the renowned abolitionist Arnold Buffum, although not as prominent in the antislavery movement as her sister, Elizabeth Buffum Chace, in Rhode Island. Rebecca was also a friend of Lydia Maria Child, the Springs also being Quakers, “followers of the policy of physical non-resistance.” As she recalled, like so many other abolitionists, she was challenged by both the public and private sin of slavery and found it hard to be “actionless” amid slavery’s “reign of terror, violence and bloodshed.” Using the excuse of health concerns, the Springs had previously traveled in the South, had visited Cuba, and had interviewed both slaves and slave masters in order to observe the system at “close range.”14

The Springs had more recently traveled in Europe, and had never heard of “Osawatomie” Brown and his Kansas exploits while overseas. When news of the Harper’s Ferry raid broke, Rebecca was immediately concerned after she read that her friend Lydia Maria Child intended to bring aid to the imprisoned abolitionist leader. Against her husband’s initial objections, she found opportunity to embark on her mission of mercy, anticipating that she would “be hidden by Mrs. Child.”

The “little bit of a woman” set out for Virginia without making advance arrangements, taking along her sixteen-year-old son Edward. On reaching Baltimore, she was indirectly warned by another Quaker, who whispered that Lydia Maria Child “better stay at home and mind her own business.” But the daughter of Arnold Buffum was not easily intimidated. “Perhaps she thinks as I do,” Rebecca responded. “When men fight and hurt each other, women should go and take care of them.”

The unwelcomed travelers proceeded from Baltimore to Harper’s Ferry, where they arrived at nine o’clock in the evening, and immediately retreated from the cold night at the Wager House hotel. Mother and son found the atmosphere in town was still volatile, the streets being full of men and soldiers, and the mood of the civilians still quite bitter and fearful. Without revealing her intentions, Rebecca discussed the raid with others in the hotel, learning that the notion of Brown’s insanity was widely rejected. In preparing for bed, an enslaved woman in the hotel quietly informed her that they were under surveillance; they were warned to guard their words because an officer was listening in the next room through a hole in the wall.

The next morning, they boarded the train to Charlestown, where Rebecca was repeatedly mistaken for Lydia Maria Child. She first went to inquire at the home of a respected Quaker in the area named David Howells, hoping that he would assist her in finding Child. But the man was frightened and expressed his fear in blue-lipped rage. “I want it understood that I have nothing to do with such matters,” he scolded. “This is all our own country,” she countered. “No, it is not. Nothing of the kind!” the man shouted as he stamped his foot. She later realized that Howells was fearful of mob violence, because it was publicly known that he had no sympathy for slavery. When he showed her to the door and the light of day poured into the shadowed entrance, she saw his face twitching with anxiety and realized that now she was completely on her own, “baffled and lost” in “an atmosphere of hostility.”15

Although initially mistaking her for Lydia Child, Ned House observed Rebecca’s first movements in town, noting how “the town palpitated” at her approach. Alone but determined, she went directly to the jailhouse, only to be turned away “while a crowd of armed men over the way surveyed her movements with the closest care.” As the rumor spread that she was Lydia Maria Child, a “blaze of excitement immediately brightened as if freshly oiled,” and House became concerned that even Southern chivalry might fail. “Certainly, she will meet only disappointment here,” he concluded, “for the resolution seems to have been fixed to give no access to any applicants from abroad.”

The editor of the local Virginia Free Press sarcastically observed the visitation of the “distinguished” female visitor, concluding that Charlestown was now “filled daily with strangers, anxious to get a look at the notorious miscreants.” In a “weak moment,” Rebecca regretted that she had come. Not only was she disappointed by the absence of her friend Lydia Child, but now she also had no means of reaching Brown amid an intimidating situation. “The street was fast being crowded by very rough-looking people, and the military were all out,” she recalled. “At every corner a cavalry officer was stationed and, oh, there were just thousands of people.”16

Returning to the hotel, Rebecca was advised by a sympathetic hotelkeeper that she might find Brown’s doctor, but inadvertently encountered the local Justice of the Peace, who suggested she write a note to Sheriff Campbell. The following day, Campbell responded, refusing to permit her to meet Brown. “I also understand from Capt. Brown, that he does not wish to see you, or any one else,” Campbell wrote. The sheriff likewise appealed to the burden of his office and the possibility of censure should he permit her entrance to the jail.

Defeated, she turned again to the hotelkeeper, who advised her to go to the defense attorney George Sennott. But the Boston lawyer was walking on eggshells amid so much hostility and was quite angry at first because she had taken it on herself to visit the prisoner. In turn, Rebecca was offended by Sennott’s hostile reaction, which probably was worsened by his heavy drinking. She thought the angry lawyer, a large, thickset man, had an unusually small head, which reminded her of a “table with an apple on top.” When Sennott cooled down, he seemed more sympathetic to her story and decided to help her with a request to Judge Parker.

After two days of struggle with the “inexorable” Sheriff Campbell, Rebecca and Edward finally were granted an afternoon meeting with John Brown; she was also informed that the old man wanted to see her. Throughout this time of waiting, she had repeatedly sent Edward to the jail with little packages for the prisoners, including linen and arnica, and other comforts. While these kind gestures had probably softened the old man’s resolve to keep visitors away, they had the opposite effect on the mob, which was watching every detail with resentment. Observing their reaction, the hotelkeeper warned her that the sight of her son going back and forth from the jail had aroused the anger of the men on the street and that he might not be safe if this continued.17 Just prior to the meeting with Brown, Rebecca and Edward encountered Jailer Avis on the street, but even he did not want to speak to them in public. When they retreated to the hotel, Avis questioned Rebecca’s identity, apparently fearing that she was Lydia Child. “I have been told not to let that lady into the prison,” he said.

Mother and son made their way to the jail but not before gathering a bunch of autumn leaves and pinning them together on coiled thorns, a kind of thorny crown for an old martyr. She also brought John Brown a half-opened rose. Escorted by the justice of the peace, they climbed the front stairs of the jailhouse, carrying their “gifts from the woods,” and probably were relieved to pass by the reception area.

The space, which also served as the guardroom, was filled with unfriendly men, seated and talking near a blazing iron stove. But just as Rebecca and Edward were being greeted by the friendly Avis, he was suddenly called over to the courthouse, leaving them to wait in the most uncomfortable circumstances. The hot room was filled with cigar smoke, and the men spoke obnoxiously, probably with the intention of intimidating the genteel guests. Avis finally returned after thirty minutes, bringing back Aaron Stevens, the badly wounded raider who shared Brown’s cell. Prosecutor Hunter had tried to put him on the witness stand, but the raider was in such poor shape that he kept fainting and falling on the floor until Judge Parker felt constrained to return him to his cell.

Avis then brought them across the corridor into the jail section and opened Brown’s cell with a large key nearly one foot long, the iron barred door moaning out a grating, metallic tone from its heavy hinges. Entering the cell, Avis stepped back and seated himself on a bench in a corner of the room. As Stevens was returned to his bed, Rebecca and Edward entered and approached the old man, who was reclining on his cot. Brown stood, somewhat feebly assuming the posture of a host, and greeted his guests while leaning on the bedstead. Rebecca was surprised at the old man’s expression, which she found both calm and amazingly cheerful. After Brown’s hanging, Rebecca would write to Prosecutor Andrew Hunter that she had expected at first to find a “rough, hard man,” but instead had found “the most beautiful Christian graces.” Indeed, she had hoped to bring “some holy light into the valley of the shadow of death” but, rather, found an aura of the divine, which transformed her pity into veneration.18

Brown had reclined again on his cot when Rebecca explained that she had expected Lydia Child to introduce them and that it was unfortunate that she was not there. He smiled and explained that he had written to tell Child not to come to Charlestown, although “she was very kind.” He told her that he was afraid that both Child and his wife would be “harassed and annoyed” if they came, and this would trouble him deeply. He also told her that he wanted it understood by everyone that he had been well treated by Jailer Avis and that “if I had been under the care of father or brother, I could not have been better treated than by Capt. Avis and his family.” She found that it was impossible to hang the autumn leaves on the wall, since every nail had been removed from the cell, and finally mounted them on the bars of the cell window. When she handed the rose to him, Brown laid it beside him on his pillow. Rebecca pulled up a chair near his cot and they began to talk, the woman plying him with questions, and the old man answering freely. He seemed to be put at ease when she took out her knitting and began to work as they spoke.

Brown told her that he had “labored, and waited, and suffered” for twenty years but had failed when the opportunity came to set the captives free.

“I do not now reproach myself,” he said. “I did what I could.”

“The Lord often leads us in strange ways,” the Quaker responded.

“Yes,” Brown said in a manner that she felt was almost sublime. “I do not think I can better serve the cause I love so much, than to die for it!”

“It is not the hardest thing that can happen to a brave man to die,” she responded. “Do you not dread your confinement, and are you not afraid that it may wear you down, or cause you to relax your convictions, or regret your attempt, or make your courage fail?”

“I cannot tell,” the old man replied, “what weakness may come over me, but I do not think that I shall deny my Lord and Master Jesus Christ, as I certainly should if I denied my principles against slavery. Why, I preach against it all the time,” Brown said, turning to the jailer seated quietly at the edge of the room. “Capt. Avis knows I do.”

A smile came to Avis’s face. “Yes,” he replied.

Perhaps inevitably, Rebecca asked Brown if he had been motivated by revenge.

“No, indeed,” he said. “I sleep peacefully as an infant, or if I am wakeful, glorious thoughts come to me, entertaining my mind.”

He had faced death before, he said, and was not disturbed by the death sentence. As to bravery, the old man refused to accept commendation. He believed there was only a “constitutional difference” between those who could endure hardship and those that could not. He had known a great deal of hardship in life, and the only “unconquerable weakness” he knew was the fear of being taken “into an evening party of ladies and gentlemen.” He much preferred a meeting of men with guns.19

After an hour, outside observers had become restless, and an angry mob began to form in front of the jailhouse. Worried that their “manifest indications of impatience” might explode into violence, Sheriff Campbell finally came and interrupted the interview, telling Avis that the guests would have to leave immediately. Brown promptly stood up, saying, “The Lord will bless you for coming,” and the two were guided back across the corridor and past the stuffy guardroom, while the sheriff, impatient and disgusted, rushed them out the door. Jailer Avis whispered to young Edward that there were rumors that the mob might assault the jail at night, and he thought it best for them not to return. “Your mother can write, and send him books and hymns. He is an intelligent and religious man, and will appreciate them.” Without escort, mother and son now stood just outside, on the small landing of the front stairway, looking out over a sea of angry people, who threatened “with their fists and glared with eyes filled with hatred.” But as they descended the steps, the crowd moved aside, allowing them just enough room to pass along the rough, marble sidewalk and return to the hotel.

The night had fallen, and the jailhouse was as surrounded by darkness as it was by the hatred of the mob that lingered on the street. Inside, the old man unfolded a paper that his kind visitor had placed in his hand before departing. In the light of a single lamp, he began to read a little story that had been copied out in long hand. The story was “In the Uttermost Parts of the Sea,” by the Danish writer, Hans Christian Andersen. Andersen wrote the story in 1855, the year Brown had first gone to the Kansas territory to protect his family from proslavery thugs on the frontier. Around the same time, the Springs had visited Denmark and met the famous author, and a Danish friend subsequently translated and sent a number of his stories to the Springs in the United States, including the one given to Brown.20

The story tells of great ships having gone far to the distant coasts around the North Pole, and the struggles of the sailors as they pushed northward through ice and snow in the absence of sunlight. As winter set in and the ships could no longer move through the freezing waters, the sailors retreated to snow huts, which they fashioned like beehives on the shadowed plain of ice. “The northern lights shot forth red and blue flames, like continuous fireworks, and the snow glittered, and reflected back the light, so that the night here was one long twilight.” When the moon shone at its brightest, natives approached on sleds, giving furs and skins to the sailors, “so that the snow-houses were soon provided with warm carpets, and the furs also served for the sailors to wrap themselves in, when they slept under the roofs of snow,” while outside it was freezing cold.

In one such hut, two sailors laid themselves down to rest, the younger of the two embracing a Bible given to him by his grandmother when he had left home. Every night the Bible was the pillow under his head, and every day he “read the book, and while stretched on his cold couch,” the words of Psalm 139 would come to his mind: “If I take the wings of the morning, and fly to the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Thou art with me, and Thy right hand shall uphold me.” The words of the Psalmist brought sacred rest to the lonely sailor, “and under the influence of that faith which these holy words inspired, sleep came upon him, and dreams, which are the manifestations of God to the spirit. The soul lives and acts, while the body is at rest,” Andersen wrote.

In his inspired dream, the sailor heard familiar melodies and felt the summer breeze around him. Suddenly, he became aware of a ray of brightness shining through the frozen roof above, and he saw “the pinions of a mighty angel, into whose beaming face he was gazing.” Suddenly the walls of his snow hut receded and he found himself on “the green hills and meadows of home, with its ruddy woods, lay spread around him in the quiet sunshine of a lovely autumn day.” Now he saw a peasant’s hut and recognized his own home, and saw his grandmother and the pretty daughter of the village blacksmith. In that moment, his grandmother was showing her a letter that had arrived from the cold regions of the north. The old woman and the young girl laughed and wept over the letter, and the sailor, “far away, amid ice and snow, under the shadow of the angel’s wings, wept and smiled with them in spirit; for he saw and heard it all in his dream.” “And from the letter they read aloud the words of Holy Writ: ‘In the uttermost parts of the sea, Thy right hand shall uphold me.’ And as the angel spread his wings like a veil over the sleeper, there was the sound of beautiful music and a hymn. Then the vision fled. It was dark again in the snow-hut: but the Bible still rested beneath his head, and faith and hope dwelt in his heart. God was with him, and he carried home in his heart, even ‘in the uttermost parts of the sea.’”21

Despite Avis’s concerns of the previous night, the jailhouse was not mobbed. According to Ned House, Jailor Avis was afterward “put through a scorching course of interrogations” but had “the courage to beat down the noisy complaints” of the bitter crowd. The following morning, the lawyer Sennott brought news from Brown that encouraged Rebecca and Edward. Not only had the arnica and the white castile soap she brought done a great deal to help the old man, but he was also beginning to sit up and write letters with greater comfort.

In retrospect, she believed that her visit had “aroused a sense of honor, a sense of humanity, a sense of responsibility, and perhaps a sense of shame” in Brown’s captors. Notwithstanding the old man’s hyperbolic remarks in praise of Jailer Avis, there is good reason to believe that his kindness to Brown was measured. He may have acted kindly toward him and allowed him more liberty within his cell than those outside wished, but Rebecca Spring had found Brown’s wounds insufficiently dressed, his pillow bloodied, and his hair yet soiled. Nor had he been given a change of fresh clothing since his defeat on October 18. If nothing else, then, perhaps allowing “enemies” like the Russells and Rebecca Spring to see the prisoner had prompted his captors toward greater kindness and attention.22

Now, Sennott told them, Brown had a letter to his wife that he wanted her to carry for him to Philadelphia. At this news, Rebecca was further emboldened and sent a note to Judge Parker, who personally escorted them back to the jailhouse. When she entered Brown’s cell, she found him seated and writing at a little table. His hair was washed and brushed back from his forehead. Looking up from his writing, he looked like “an inspired old prophet,” “as if he had been illumined by the letter which he was writing. His expression was of great earnestness, cheerfulness, and faith.”

While they spoke, Avis seems to have allowed them privacy, leaving Edward sitting on the bench near the entrance of the cell. The young man began to sketch Brown as he was, seated at the small table, with poor Stevens lying in the bed behind him. The lifelike drawing provides the most candid and authentic view of the old man, but the young artist was not just sketching a poignant scene (he omitted his mother from the picture). At the bottom of the picture he hurriedly made a small diagram of the first floor of the jailhouse, probably hoping it might provide Brown’s allies information in the event of an escape. The boy’s sketch seems to have served no use, although it may have prompted Ned House to do the same.

In preparing for their departure from Charlestown, Edward Spring also prepared sketches of the main thoroughfare of Charlestown and the interior of the jailhouse, which Greeley promptly published in the Tribune. The journalist was quite taken by Rebecca Spring and her brave mission to minister to the old man and perhaps rode with them on the train straight through to Baltimore. In later years, she believed that House never published coverage of her visit in the Tribune after her earnest request. However, actually he had made several entries in his correspondence about the brave Quaker’s visit to Charlestown, which only served to frustrate townsmen all the more. “Observe the frowns, the cold-blooded glares that follow the visitor as she moves away,” House wrote of Rebecca Spring’s visit to John Brown. “A man might well quail before them.”23

Before Rebecca made her last, silent farewell on the morning of November 9, Brown handed her his letter to Mary—the same letter in which he had implored his wife not to make a premature visit to Charlestown. However, he seems to have been inspired to add a postscript, written that very morning:

P. S. I cannot remember a night so dark as to have hindered the coming day: nor a storm so furious or dreadful as to prevent the return of warm sunshine and a cloudless sky. But beloved ones do remember that this is not your rest; that in this world you have no abiding place or continuing city. To God and his infinite mercy I always commend you.

Ever Yours

J. B.

Nov. 9

As his tender little postscript suggests, Rebecca Spring had indeed brought light into John Brown’s dark jail cell. Her brave, relentless effort to visit the captive abolitionist had pushed through the stormy, furious night that surrounded him and brought “warm sunshine and a cloudless sky.” Like the sailor in Andersen’s tale, too, John Brown had a Bible, a resting place, and warm thoughts of his loved ones back home. He had also been visited by something of an angel. For the rest of his fleeting days the sky was clear before him and the journey home as welcome as it was certain.

■

CHAPTER 9

THE DAYS AND NIGHTS IN CHARLESTOWN

I saw fit to stay in that beggarly hole two days longer than I wanted to.

By the second week of November, it seemed to Ned House, the Tribune’s undercover correspondent, that people in Charlestown were “congratulating themselves” about the decline in excitement despite all evidence to the contrary. The trials of Brown’s men were not yet completed, and the town had come virtually under martial law. Increasingly, people were irritated and given to venting in “loud-sounding expressions of wrath,” even as half the town’s business was suspended and women generally were obligated to stay indoors. “The excitement growing out of the Harper’s Ferry invasion has absorbed every thing else,” complained the editor of the local Virginia Free Press. Business of every [kind] has been paralyzed, and it is very difficult for one to content himself over five minutes at any one duty.”

At dawn, the rattling of drums awakened Charlestown. It seemed to House that Sharps rifles had taken the place of walking sticks, and visitors in town were increasingly “hemmed in by vulgar scrutiny.” In the evening, patrols were doubled on the streets, and now pedestrians were subjected to interrogation. By dark, even familiar citizens were restricted from moving about town. House complained that he could not walk much beyond his hotel, the only option being to sit in a smoke-filled barroom filled with drunken, “blatant boors,” loudly mouthing in “foolish frenzies.” (In the revision of decades, Judge Parker would claim that his presence in town had exerted a kind of ethical influence on the citizenry, but at the time, House observed that their loud, drunken raging went “unchecked” by his presence.) “Thus pass the days and nights in Charlestown,” the journalist wrote cynically before smuggling his report off to Greeley in New York.1

By the end of the second week, however, all the trials had concluded yet still without restoring calm. “Many had vainly hoped that, with the departure of the Judge to another country, and the final disposition of the prisoners prior to their execution, the Reign of Terror would come to an end,” House wrote on Friday, November 11. In fact, excitement had only increased in Charlestown. The journalist believed that part of the reason for this upsurge of tension was due to the influence of northern newspapers.

Many townsmen were upset by the uneven portrayal of their community between the two most prominent illustrated New York–based papers, Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. The former was widely praised in Charlestown, largely due to the fact that Harper’s correspondent and artist was David Hunter Strother, the pale, sickly looking Virginian also known as Porte Crayon. As House observed, Strother conveyed the “rarest rhetorical ferocity” on the subject of the Harper’s Ferry raid, and his sketches of Brown and his men reflected “the most approved cut-throat air.” In contrast, the people of Charlestown were neither flattered nor pleased with their portrayal by Leslie’s capable artist William S. Jewett. In contrast to Harper’s “true Virginian,” they had only “words of scorn and reproach” for Jewett. House wryly observed that towns people generally felt that Leslie’s illustrations had failed “to stamp utter villainy” on the faces of Brown and his men while neglecting “to impart that dignity of bearing and physiognomic grace to which all Virginians are supposed to be entitled.”2

However, besides offending the “jealously sensitive” citizens of Charlestown, Jewett had also become the unwitting target of suspicion in connection with the offensive reports regularly appearing in the antislavery Tribune. Of course, throughout Brown’s incarceration, the Tribune’s Charlestown correspondence was largely the work of Ned House, writing under the guise of a proslavery journalist. House was probably exaggerating when he wrote that Charlestown’s growing obsession with newspapers was so pronounced that the military were called out on the arrival of the mail; however, it is true that the Tribune was banned from the mails and that its circulation in town was strictly prohibited.

To no surprise, the ban did not prevent copies of Greeley’s paper from reaching Charlestown surreptitiously, although it could spark episodes of rage when it fell into the hands of the most passionate Virginians. Most notably, House seems to have delighted in watching a certain “military gentleman,” perhaps Colonel J. Lucius Davis, the governor’s appointed military commander in Charlestown, explode in rage on reading one of his Tribune reports. As he described it (more than once) for Tribune readers, the angry officer was so infuriated that he had quite publicly bitten off a page of the newspaper, tearing it into ribbons with his teeth.

Although some people in Charlestown initially had dismissed the Tribune correspondence as the fraudulent concoction of a writer in New York City, the precision of the reports steadily told otherwise. By the second week of November, Colonel Davis and others had become determined to expose the despised Tribune correspondent and otherwise drive out Northern foes. Very shortly, Mayor Green appointed a committee with the particular assignment of visiting suspicious outsiders in order to encourage their immediate departure from town. At the top of their short list was Leslie’s Jewett, followed closely by Brown’s boy-faced lawyer, George Hoyt.

Although Hoyt’s initial purpose was to spy, his service in that regard had greatly diminished by this time. Acting more as an assistant to Brown’s senior lawyers and hoping to remain in town to help the old man, Hoyt posed no threat to Virginia. However, the unpopular young attorney was still suspected of having some “nefarious” purpose in Charlestown, such as helping Brown to escape. “This Committee, by the way, intends to include Mr. Hoyt of Boston in its attentions,” House reported. He did not think that Hoyt and Jewett were in “absolute danger,” but thought it possible that they would meet with some inconvenience. “Mr. Hoyt cannot rid himself of the terrible taint of Abolitionism, and the artist will find The Tribune odium heavy to bear.”3

To make matters worse, area residents were worried over a series of incidents involving the destruction of farm property, beginning with the burning of a barn and stable in neighboring Berkeley County in late October. During the night of November 3, arsonists struck the property of farmers in bordering Clarke County, destroying three large straw stacks; the following night, the granary and the carriage house of another resident were set ablaze. Not many days afterward, the first of a number of attacks took place in Jefferson County, where Brown and his men were incarcerated. A wheat stack on a farm in nearby Shepherdstown was set afire, at the loss of more than one thousand bushels.

Actually, the fires were the work of local blacks, expressing solidarity with the prisoners and perhaps signaling for the continuation of his liberation effort. However, there was a greater inclination on the part of many Virginians to imagine the fires were the work of phantom white abolitionists. Despite evidence of black activity, “miscreant vagabond whites” or “Northern peddlers” were rounded up here and there, but afterward discharged. In his correspondence to the Tribune on November 17, House thus declared that “the most natural explanation of the recent fires is, that they were the work of the Negroes, who are not incapable of mischief, and who, whatever may be said to the contrary, have not that supreme indifference to passing events that the Virginians would pretend.” Two days later, he noted “a rumor that one incendiary has been detected, but, as he proved on inspection to be a chattel, the discovery has been closely concealed, for the present at least.”4 From the start, slaveholders were either unprepared or unwilling to acknowledge the real impact that Brown had made on their allegedly loyal slaves; now they faced a similar crisis in explaining these arson attacks without admitting that supposedly contented blacks were the real “incendiaries.”

In fact, repeated acts of arson and destruction of slaveholders’ property would continue into early December, but only targeting farms in Jefferson County, suggesting more than just discontent on the part of enslaved people. Late in November, the Baltimore American reported a “bold attempt” was made to set fire to the property of a farmer near Charlestown. Although unsuccessful, the incident followed attacks on the property of three of the jurors who had served during the trials of Brown’s men, as well as the burning of a barn five miles outside Charlestown overnight on November 24–25. The culminating attack would come shortly after Brown’s hanging in early December, when the property of slaveholder George W. Turner, killed by the raiders at Harper’s Ferry, was set on fire, and his brother’s livestock likely poisoned.5

Because the “numerous incendiary fires in the neighborhood” were popularly portrayed as the work of lingering “emissaries” of Brown, leaders in Charlestown were further prompted to drive out strangers and suspicious Northerners, including lawyer Hoyt and artist Jewett. The fires, along with the reportage of the Tribune, became the provocation for Mayor Thomas Green’s proclamation on November 12 that strangers would not be tolerated unless they could provide “a satisfactory account” of themselves; strangers without excuse were to be brought immediately before authorities “to be dealt with according to law.”6

Hoyt, who had acted as the junior counsel to Brown’s lawyers, did a number of errands to Baltimore, Washington city, and Philadelphia. After reporting to Boston, he promptly returned to Charlestown on November 10, with the stated intention of assisting the old man in recovering his lost and scattered property so that it could be sold and the proceeds given to his “destitute and heart-stricken family.” However, this was a pretense to some degree, since George Sennott, the lawyer for Brown’s men, was already intending to gather Brown’s possessions with the old man’s approval and the assistance of Avis the jailer.7

According to Sennott, Brown intended to have as many as possible of his scattered Sharps rifles gathered and shipped to Boston—probably to be returned to his supporter, George L. Stearns. In this Brown was being conscientious to a fault, since Stearns had placed these guns at his disposal. The Boston magnate originally had financed the weapons for the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee, but when the latter failed to pay for them, he foreclosed and placed them in Brown’s hands in 1858. Now, rather than recovering the weapons for his family’s financial benefit, the old man seems to have wanted to alleviate some of Stearns’ loss.

However, Brown soon got a telegram from Hoyt in Boston, directing him to do nothing until he arrived back in Charlestown, giving the impression to the old man that his Boston friends were sending some special message. Sennott was annoyed when Hoyt then showed up in Charlestown with “nothing to offer,” having thus rendered a needless interruption and loss of time for the recovery effort. Ultimately, only a few of Brown’s items were retrieved. Sheriff Campbell and Jailer Avis promptly recovered his field glasses, a watch, a new stove, and a cow from his rented Maryland farmhouse. But almost all of the two hundred Sharps rifles were irretrievable, even though Sennott had hoped to reclaim half that number. In his Tribune correspondence, the observant House thought that only twenty rifles were certain to be recovered, “the rest having been carried off by various persons.”8

Sennott was also annoyed that Hoyt had made it public that he was returning to Charlestown with the intention of remaining until Brown’s execution. “[T]he people were warned that he had telegraphed his intention to stay in Charlestown,” Sennott complained afterward. Hoyt’s indiscretion not only was annoying to Sennott but also exacerbated the bad feelings mounting against him in Charlestown. House recognized that Hoyt stood “in the most obnoxious position of any Northerner here,” but local circumstances and prejudice combined to the detriment of Jewett and Sennott as well.9

For his part, Hoyt knew that his return was publicized in advance of his arrival, but he was determined to stay a little longer in Charlestown. Not only did he wish to recover Brown’s possessions, but he still also held materials pertinent to the senior counsel’s pending petition to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. But when he set foot in Charlestown, the young lawyer immediately observed the absence of even the “forced civility” that he was previously shown. Now he met “the inhospitable frown” and walked the streets in the face of insult, “offensive and opprobrious epithets, and denunciations.” In general, he found Charlestown “in a state of wild excitement,” and feared that mobs might even attack the jailhouse and lynch Brown and his men. The old man’s lawyers evidently had become aware of another foiled conspiracy to break into the jail and lynch the prisoners, so Hoyt’s apprehensions were not unreasonable. It also occurred to him that he might be tarred and feathered by angry townsmen.10

Things quickly unraveled for Hoyt and Jewett, and nearly so for Sennott. Despite their official efforts on Brown’s behalf, Sennott and Hoyt suddenly found themselves prevented from having free access to the jail. By order of Prosecutor Hunter, now they would be prohibited from all private conversation with the old man unless supervised by the jailer. Hoyt was told that there were fears among the authorities that he might slip Brown some suicidal device or poison. However, House reported to the Tribune that the rationale for this stricture was to prevent secret communication between Brown and his “Northern friends.” Meanwhile, Hoyt began to hear hints that he might receive “a notice to quit,” and Jewett was now being accused of being one of the “incendiaries.” Concerned that they were implicated by the mayor’s proclamation regarding unwanted strangers, Hoyt and Jewett thought it best to consult Colonel Davis, the governor’s aide-de-camp. Davis was a peculiar figure, certainly one of House’s favorite local personalities to lampoon. Not only was he “the incarnation of pompous dignity,” but he was also “profuse in whiskers and mustache,” with two, long braids of hair that he brought forward and tied in a bow over his forehead with “startling” effect.11

The colonel immediately told Hoyt and Jewett that despite his role as peacekeeper in town, even he could not protect them in the certain event of mob violence. With this veiled threat, he advised them to leave town for their own sakes, and for the sake of Virginia—advice that neither man greeted well. Rather, Hoyt and Jewett “manifested a careless unconcern,” further galling Davis with their “winks and furtive smiles.” Almost immediately, however, the two thought better of the colonel’s advice. “Deeming it no valor but sheer foolhardiness to brave the populace,” Hoyt wrote afterward, “Mr. Jewett and I packed our bags and quitted the municipality of Charlestown, the County of Jefferson, and the gallant old Commonwealth of Virginia.”12

When Jewett finally returned to the safety of his office at Leslie’s in New York City, he did a somewhat humorous three-panel cartoon of his expulsion, featuring a short, comical colonel, “inviting” him to “absquatulate” from Charlestown. However, his publisher, Frank Leslie, was hardly amused at having his artist run out of town. He complained first to the Tribune, declaring that Jewett had served no paper but Leslie’s, and that he had gone on an impartial mission to capture the “scenes and incidents” of Charlestown. Leslie then sent a missive to W. W. B. Gallaher’s Virginia Free Press, declaring that suspicions about Jewett were “entirely unfounded.” As Leslie’s proprietor, he averred that Jewett never contributed even “a single line” to the Tribune and that as a publisher, he had been “perfectly unprejudiced without abuse to the North or to the South.” Leslie concluded by asking Gallaher to publish his letter as “an act of justice . . . being perfectly assured that my many thousand readers and friends in the south will unhesitatingly endorse it.”13 The letter was published, apparently to good effect. Albert Berghaus, Leslie’s chief artist, was shortly dispatched to Charlestown and covered the remaining days of the John Brown episode without opposition.14

George Sennott was determined to stay in Charlestown until the completion of his work, deliberately waiting two days longer before departing on November 14. When he left, Sennott held Brown and Stevens’s legal documents and notes, suggesting a great deal of trust on the part of the prisoners. Stopping in Philadelphia, he published a strategically motivated piece in the Philadelphia Press, probably anticipating his return to Charlestown for Stevens’s trial in early 1860.15 Feigning a measure of sympathy for townspeople amid their crisis, he also expressed his belief that Hoyt and Jewett acted “unadvisedly” in consulting the opinion of Colonel Davis and might have remained because they also had well-known business in town.

Privately, Sennott was naturally more blunt about the whole affair. In writing to Samuel Howe, one of Brown’s more important supporters, he was full of admiration for the prisoner. He wrote that he had “gained the entire confidence” of “old Captain Brown” and even had it in the old man’s writing. “I shall keep it as long as I live, and leave it to my children, if I ever have any, as the most honorable possession I can leave them.” He once more pointed out that Hoyt and Jewett need not have departed Charlestown so hurriedly, “foolishly” allowing the mayor’s proscription to fall on them, and even more foolishly to consult a “crazy militia colonel” such as Davis. Perhaps Sennott was simply more hard-nosed. In his letter to the Press, he wrote that he had “very civilly” assured Davis that he was responsible for his own safety, but in reality he simply told the colonel to “mind his own affairs.”

As to departing from Charlestown, Sennott privately expressed complete contempt for the town and its people, telling Howe, “I saw fit to stay in that beggarly hole two days longer than I wanted to.” Watching the scene unfold, House knew that Sennott’s time in Charlestown was shortened, but he almost seemed to gloat in reporting how the Boston lawyer had held out two more days. “Mr. Sennott refused to go, and did not go,” House wrote in the Tribune. He then predicted that with Hoyt and Jewett gone, people in Charlestown would begin to accuse Sennott of being the mysterious Tribune correspondent, a prophecy that shortly came true.16

After Sennott’s departure, Charlestown turned upon him with contempt, just as they had done in the case of Hoyt. Among the worst was the vindictive W. W. B. Gallaher of the Virginia Free Press, who blasted Sennott as a “notorious abolitionist.” Placing him in the same company with the departed Hoyt and Jewett, Gallaher dismissed all three men as “rascals” who had betrayed the “civilities of our people” by letting loose their “venom.” As to Sennott’s gracious letter to the Philadelphia Press, in which he expressed a measure of sympathy for the fearful people of Charlestown, Gallaher found only hypocrisy. As far as he was concerned, Sennott was the undercover correspondent who was “defaming” Charlestown “with falsehoods” in the pages of the Tribune. “These letters profess to be written in this town, but this is a mere ruse on his part,” Gallaher declared. “We can only say that Mr. Sennott must keep out of this town.” House must have laughed to himself after reading Gallaher’s diatribe. “It seems that my predictions that Mr. Sennott would next be visited with the ignominy of suspected Tribune correspondence, is verified,” he wrote. “This is the unkindest cut of all.”17

Meanwhile, Ned House, the real Tribune correspondent, published something of a yawn, facetiously noting how Charlestown had started to become quiet with Sennott’s departure. If affairs continued “in this dull way,” he concluded, “I may as well depart also.” Of course, House was not about to leave, already having thrown down the gauntlet after Hoyt’s and Jewett’s departure from town. “The Tribune correspondent will remain at Charlestown, will cleave to it, will still invoke the hospitalities of its community, and will never forsake it,” House declared. He would remain, sending off his despised correspondence to the Tribune “until the whirlwind of excitement which now agitates it shall subside.” In other words, only when the old man was finally hanged would his work in Charlestown be completed, at which time the town would return to “the flat stagnation of its customary life,” and its inhabitants once more would be folded into a “dreary desolation” of no interest to any journalist.18

By all accounts, House was pushing the envelope, not only by belittling Charlestown as a stagnant, dreary, and desolate place but also by almost daring its leaders to find him—hidden in plain sight as he was among them, even enjoying their hospitality. It was a bold act, and one that might have backfired on him except for a bit of good fortune.

It is unlikely that Ned House could have remained indefinitely in Charlestown without his identity being compromised at some point. Not only was there the ongoing danger of being recognized and identified in Virginia, but also the possibility that Southern sympathizers in New York might discover his affiliation with the Tribune, bringing his reportage to a sudden conclusion. Then there was the threat of surveillance. The Wise administration had gone so far as to retain spies, especially Robert W. Bowyer, a New York investigator, who was referred to the secretary of the Commonwealth by someone at the New York Herald. Bowyer had his own associates working with him on the case, and it was he who personally reported to Governor Wise from Montreal that the abolitionist Frederick Douglass had safely departed for England on November 12.

Apart from spies, proslavery friends of the South also were watchful and willing to pass on any bit of information to Virginia authorities. One such informant warned the governor’s office that the antislavery journalist, Richard Hinton, had passed through St. Louis en route to Harper’s Ferry in early November. The informant provided Hinton’s own card, identifying him as a “rank abolitionist” who “glories in having been one of Brown’s men in Kansas,” and further promised that Hinton would be closely watched.

A similar informant, identified only as T. Barnard, nearly exposed the mysterious Tribune correspondent, having sent a telegraph to an official in Richmond in mid-November that the elusive reporter was named House. Fortunately for Ned House, however, Barnard presented somewhat confused information, including the mistaken notion that House had returned north on the same train with Sennott on November 14. Furthermore, the informant wanted to remain anonymous and hesitated to provide his sources, which may have hurt his credibility. Or it may be that officials assumed that Barnard had confused House with Hoyt, who already had returned to Boston. Whatever the case, Barnard’s tip evidently was overlooked, allowing Ned House to continue his clandestine Tribune correspondence for the duration of Brown’s life.19

Whether busy in his books or buried deep in thought, John Brown was largely kept from the whirlwind of journalistic activity and political controversy that he had inspired. Apart from the newspapers made available to him—perhaps local papers or proslavery New York journals such as the Herald or Observer—he busied himself by reading the Bible, which he curiously marked with ink dots or parentheses around certain verses, making neither marginal notes nor comments.20 He also enjoyed reading historical books like Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and perhaps John Beard’s The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture: The Negro Patriot of Hayti. However, Sheriff Campbell cut away the hard covers from these books as a precaution, much to Brown’s displeasure, just in case there were “fine steel saws” hidden inside them.21

The only real connection to the outside world for him was the mail he received from family, associates, and strangers. Brown was permitted to receive “numerous kind letters,” as he put it, “from friends in almost all directions.” Yet all of his letters were carefully examined and reviewed before being handed to him, including letters from his immediate family. While Brown was ostensibly shielded from reading hateful Southern screeds, he was also kept from reading anonymous letters from supposed supporters that rendered threat and insult to Virginia authorities, the likes of which the old man considered the work of cowards. “[N]o man condemned the sending of such letters more emphatically than he does,” Brown’s lawyer Griswold wrote. The old man was particularly disgusted to learn that anonymous threats had been sent to the governor. “They come from no friends of mine. I have nothing to do with such friends,” he told Ned House and other visitors. “Why, gentlemen, of all the things in the world that I despise, anonymous letters are the worst.”22

In one incident, however, he nearly lost his famous composure when a guard refused to hand him a letter from his wife, Mary, probably because authorities had not yet screened it. Momentarily outraged, nevertheless Brown “caught himself, closed his mouth, put his hands into his pocket, and walked back inside his cell,” still visibly shaken but remaining reserved in his “Spartanlike way.” When he did receive a letter from his family, he read it over and over again, sometimes gazing “into vacancy for hours after he had finished.” If deeply moved, he showed no sign of sorrow, except for an occasional “twitching of the face.”23

One such letter undoubtedly came from Mary, written on November 13, from the estate of Rebecca Spring, the woman who had visited him the previous week. After being turned back at Baltimore earlier in the month, Mary would remain in Philadelphia as a guest of various antislavery leaders, particularly James Miller McKim, Lucretia Mott, and William Still. These circumstances must have been a mixed blessing for his needy wife, dependent as she was on the kindness of abolitionist strangers, some of whom not only disdained her husband’s “violent” methods but also had hesitated to welcome her. According to Susan Lesley, both McKim and Mott “were quite determined not to identify themselves in any way with John Brown, so much so that they declined to go and see” Mary on her arrival.24

While the white Philadelphia abolitionists overcame their pacifist prejudices sufficiently to render aid to Mary Brown, they were strangers to her husband—particularly abolitionists like McKim and Mott. John Brown knew antislavery people in Philadelphia, but he had moved almost exclusively in black circles when visiting the city before the raid, because he was looking for fighters, not pacifist orators.25

Nor was Brown free of his own inner conflicts regarding the predominant nonviolent abolitionist leaders. Shortly before his hanging, he wrote to Mary that he was glad that she could meet “such old ‘Pioneers’ in the cause” such as Lucretia Mott. He actually had met “the faithful old Lady” some years before, when he had tried to fight off a racist mob that was harassing her in Boston. “After I interfered,” he recalled with a note of pride, “the police immediately took up the matter” and quickly put a stop to the mob (something of an ironic illustration in favor of Brown’s argument for the use of force against slavery). On the other hand, he could be very critical of the reigning abolitionist set, from William Lloyd Garrison to Wendell Phillips, and other notable orators, all of whom he believed had “satisfied their consciences with talk” instead of action.26

After her husband’s death, when Mary was forced into the uncomfortable position of choosing between the counsel and support of either the Philadelphia or Boston abolitionist circles, she tended to favor those who were not pacifists.27 Perhaps she was only following her husband’s close associates, because most of his “Secret Six” were from the Boston area.28 But Mary may also have done so to put some necessary space between herself and the assertive Rebecca Spring, who had visited her husband in jail and afterward “summoned” her as a guest at her New Jersey estate.

When Mary was called to stay with the Springs in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, she found herself in an awkward, if not vexing, situation. Rebecca Spring had kindly and bravely ventured down to Virginia to comfort her husband in jail, considerably improving his circumstances—a visit that also received attention in the press. It may have pained Mary somewhat that even the most prominent interview with her, conducted by abolitionist Theodore Tilton for the New York Independent, had to include an extended account of Spring’s visit too. Certainly Mary appreciated Spring’s kindness, although her feelings as a wife were wounded. As her biographer observes, Mary’s letter to Brown from Perth Amboy suggests the whole affair was galling: “I am here with Mrs. Spring, the kind lady who came to see you, and minister to your wants, which I am deprived of doing. You have nursed and taken care of me a great deal; but I cannot even come and look at you. O, it is hard! But I am perfectly satisfied with it, believing it best.” Of course, she was putting the best face on her complaint, even though she was hardly smiling.29

Furthermore, for all of her progressive views, Rebecca Spring was also a society woman, “confident, elite, well-dressed, and highly conscious of her role as a ‘charming lady.’” In retrospect, she portrayed herself in Charlestown as a “little bundle in gray,” although actually she was a woman of means and her appearance was hardly so humble. As something of a privileged liberal, she enjoyed the luxury of experimenting with ideas and projects and held a passport marked by adventures across Europe and beyond.30 Her husband, Marcus Spring, was a senior partner in the successful dry goods firm of Bailey, South and Company in New York City. That she allegedly defied her husband’s wishes by going to see Brown in Charlestown perhaps marks both her courage and her privilege as well. Furthermore, in every narrative of her trip to Virginia, Rebecca portrayed herself and her husband as being unfamiliar with Brown until news of the Harper’s Ferry raid. In fact, Marcus Spring had conversed with Brown around 1857 and probably was solicited by him for financial support for the free-state cause in Kansas.31

In contrast, for all of her traits of spiritual and social nobility, Mary Brown was the real “bundle in gray,” or nearly so. Despite the fact that she was only about forty-three years old at the time of her husband’s death, one Philadelphia reporter described her as “a stout, elderly lady, wearing a plaid blanket shawl, and having nothing very remarkable in her appearance.” After seeing her in church in Philadelphia, Susan Lesley described Mary’s attire as “that of a very poor woman.” While unflattering descriptions of Mary Brown are too familiar to historians, even the more gracious description by abolitionist Passmore Williamson suggests her modest appearance. Describing her as a “deeply religious” woman who was devoted to the Bible and “very lady-like in her actions,” Williamson nevertheless concluded that she was “a plain country woman” of “rather coarse appearance.”32

Undoubtedly, Mary Brown was a simple woman who shared her husband’s conventional Calvinist beliefs and spent most of her days birthing, rearing, and feeding her children. Like her husband, she had an uneven schooling, although Brown considered her “a good economist, and a real, old-fashioned business woman.” Throughout twenty-six years of marriage, Mary had enjoyed only a brief respite of prosperity over against years of struggle. Having married at barely seventeen years of age, she struggled at times with being the young, resented stepmother (she was only five years older than Brown’s eldest son), while also mothering her own children—all the while bearing up under her husband’s ambitious business ventures across several states. Consequently, her experience in the larger world was somewhat less than that of her husband, whose business travels and notable reputation as an authority in fine sheep and wool have typically been overlooked.33

However, after his rise to notoriety as a free-state guerilla in the later 1850s, John Brown was further seasoned by travel and interaction with influential and studied individuals, and enjoyed other opportunities accompanying his measure of fame in the North. Meanwhile, Mary had remained home in their Adirondack farmhouse, paying the price of his absences and sufferings in quiet fireside prayers and tears. She dutifully followed his instructions from a distance and saved his letters for history, although she herself was often overlooked.

We know little about Mary’s stay with Rebecca and Marcus Spring, except that the two women busily prepared “a box of clothing and little comforts” for her doomed husband. Undoubtedly, Mary had to hear extended, repeated accounts of Rebecca’s trip to Virginia and her description of the old man and the circumstances surrounding his incarceration. Having to hear intimate details of her husband’s condition probably grated on Mary’s soul, and she may have found her hostess just a bit much. In one case, she seems to have risen up against the assertive generosity of the Springs, who wanted to send an expensive suit for Brown’s burial clothing. Knowing that her husband preferred simple clothing, she insisted on a cheaper suit instead. In another case, Rebecca imposed her own wording upon Mary’s November 13 letter to Brown. The particular issue has been lost because her letter survives only in a published version, probably edited by Mary herself. However, this episode may further suggest that Mary was put upon by her hosts and likely felt relieved when it was time to return to Philadelphia, where she remained until the time of execution.34

If Mary’s letter thinly veiled her frustrations, it also showed the depth of feeling and support that she held for her husband and his effort:

I have often thought that I should rather hear that you were dead than fallen into the hands of your enemies; but I don’t think so now. The good that is growing out of it is wonderful. If you had preached in the pulpit ten such lives as you have lived, you could not have done so much good as you have done in that one speech in the Court. It is talked about and preached about everywhere and in all places. You know that Moses was not allowed to go into the land of Canaan; so you are not allowed to see your desire carried out. Man deviseth his way, but the Lord directeth his steps.35

Three days later, Brown responded to his wife, expressing his great appreciation to “Mrs. Spring” but adding that although he was grateful, he was far more comforted by whatever could be done “to relieve the wants, or mitigate the sufferings of my poor distressed family.” Indeed, Brown seemed more concerned that Mary had met the kindly Sarah Wattles during her initial stay in Philadelphia. Sarah’s family were antislavery people from Ohio, with whom Brown had become close after they migrated to Kansas. The old man had an ongoing debate with Sarah’s father, Augustus Wattles, who had been a member of the Ohio antislavery society and an advocate of nonviolent opposition to slavery. “I have been at your abolition meetings,” Brown would tell him, “and your scheme is perfectly futile. You would not release five slaves in a century; peaceful emancipation is impossible; the thing has gone beyond that point.” Wattles would later testify that Brown told him of his own plan, which was “to put arms in the hands of the slaves; give them their choice, [and] stand behind them so as to protect them in a free choice.” In the summer of 1858, Brown had stayed with them for a few weeks, recuperating from the malarial ague.36 The Wattles were “like Angels of mercy,” he wrote to Mary, further advising her to let Sarah Wattles copy his letter and send it back to her family in Kansas. “I would write them; if I had the power,” he concluded.

In the remaining portion of the letter, Brown turned his attention to family concerns, particularly the education of their daughters, Anne (nearly sixteen years old), Sarah (thirteen years old), and Ellen (five years old). Although declaring his inability to “dictate in the matter,” he then proceeded in a lengthy discourse about his preferences for their schooling—an overbearing habit quite typical of Brown as the dominant figure of the home. “Although I may never more intermeddle with your worldly affairs,” he wrote the following week, “I have not yet lost all interest in them.” Yet this was an understatement. Given his overpowering, even imperious tendency, Brown would have happily supervised his farm and family in the minutest of ways, even from the afterlife, were it possible. In one case, he would nearly do so. Shortly before his execution, Brown gave a note to his wife, not only directing her as to the best route back home but also giving her specific hotel and shopping instructions for the journey. When she reached as far as Vergennes, Vermont, with his body in tow, she noticed that his note instructed her to stop and “buy a little fish” before proceeding home. According to the Tribune, the good wife did exactly as she was directed.37

As to their daughters’ education, Brown expressed his preference that his children would receive a “very plain but perfectly practical” schooling. “I do not mean an education so very miserable as that you & I received in early life,” he wrote, “but practical.” By today’s standards, Brown was merely suggesting that the girls, like his sons, would receive formal schooling that suited working people, not elites. He did not expect his children to become rich but still hoped they would be able to transact life’s business “comfortably & respectably,” subordinating literary appreciation with practical business and manual skills “to meet the stern realities of life with a good grace.” Not that he would deny his daughters a quality education, but he only wished that they learn the “music of the broom” before they learned piano. He likewise told Rebecca Spring that it was his “earnest hope” that his daughters would become “strong, intelligent, expert, industrious, Christian house keepers,” what he called “matter of fact women.”38

Throughout much of his letter, it seemed as if he had overlooked Mary’s plaint with no intention of addressing her expressed desire to see him once more. In her letter, she had lamented that at their last parting that previous June, she did not think that she had taken his hand for the last time. “I do not want to do or say anything to disturb your peace of mind,” she wrote, “but, O, I would serve you gladly if I could.” However, these words found their mark, and despite his preference that she would not come to Virginia, he finally yielded to his wife. “Now in regard to you coming here,” he wrote,

If you feel sure that you can endure the trials, & the shock; which will be unavoidable (if you come): I should be most glad to see you once more. But when I think of your being insulted on the road; & perhaps while here; & of only seeing your wretchedness made complete: I shrink from it. Your composure; & fortitude of mind may be quite equal to it all; but I am in dreadful doubt; of it. If you can do come: defer your journey till about the 27th or 28th, of this month. The scenes you will have to pass through on coming here; will be any thing but those you now pass with tender, kind hearted, friends; & kind faces to meet you every where. Do consider the matter well before you make the plunge.39

The idea of her coming to Charlestown was, as he put it, a “most painful subject,” and despite his willingness to receive her visit, he made comments to others suggesting that he preferred that she stay away. “She has not yet come here, as I have requested her not to do at present, if at all,” he wrote to his family in North Elba. “She may think it best for her not to come at all.” To Rebecca Spring he said that the extensive “prison rules” and the demands put on the jailer might further discourage Mary from coming to see him. However, he was probably making excuses to convince himself as well. On November 26, the old man would write to his wife, “if you now feel that you are equal to the undertaking do exactly as you FEEL disposed to do about coming to see me before I suffer. I am entirely willing.”40

Even with the departure of their unwanted northern guests, Charlestown could not manage a sigh of relief. Not only did the disturbing Tribune correspondence continue to gall the community, but suspicion about “incendiaries” in Jefferson County was also increasingly identified with rumors of invasion by armed abolitionists. These antislavery hordes were thought to be intent on liberating Brown and his men and reportedly were making their way to Charlestown from points north and west.

In fact, some effort had been undertaken to liberate Brown, although “the ardor of his friends” failed to translate into action, mainly due to insufficient funds. In the most hopeful case, a small army of willing German mercenaries in New York was gathered, although there simply was not enough money to finance them. On the other hand, despite the promise of monies to be raised, Irish laborers in Boston were indifferent to a proposed scheme to rescue John Brown. The immigrants responded that they would neither fight for nor against blacks, telling the recruiter that if they wanted to liberate Brown and his men, they should do it themselves. In anticipation that recruitment would fare better farther west, the lawyer Hoyt made a hurried visit to Brown’s old stomping grounds in the Western Reserve, only to learn that “nothing whatever was on foot in Ohio.”41

While the hopes of Brown’s closest friends for a rescue were crushed before the end of November, fear of invasion among Virginians had only escalated throughout the month. Along with the ongoing arson attacks, a major source of apprehension was a number of letters written from Brown’s admirers suggesting escape plots, or even that an invasion of Virginia was underway. Although a portion of the letters withheld from Brown appeared to be the work of practical jokers or unbalanced people, some of them provoked concern. Prosecutor Hunter was particularly mindful of a letter sent from Urbana, Ohio, addressed to Brown, and written in code. When it was deciphered, its message urged him to keep in good spirits, promising that his friends were mustering to come to Virginia.42

There were also alarming reports from allegedly credible sources, that armies numbering from the hundreds to nearly three thousand were heading toward Virginia from various points in the free states. Perhaps the most notable was the news that a large number of armed men were coming from Wheeling, in northwestern Virginia, an area “suspected of strong Anti-Slavery opinions,” with a burgeoning movement in favor of the Republican Party.43

According to House, real panic was sparked locally after a worried farmer near Harper’s Ferry heard screams in the middle of the night, and fled into town to report an attack upon his neighbors. After investigation, it was concluded that he had only heard the cries of whippoorwills; nevertheless, a general panic had ensued, shooting out “streams of affright in all directions.” Given rumors of invasion and the recent arson attacks, fears in Charlestown were further exacerbated. The most “enormous stories” began to circulate, House wrote, including the notion that the recent fires were intended to “withdraw the attention of the people from the town, to give better opportunity for a proposed attack by Northerners.”

By November 17, House reported “beyond a doubt” that the fires actually had been caused by local blacks, “who, however ignorant of the fact their owners may be, have a pretty effective and secret Free Masonry among them.” In retrospect this episode is telling: blacks were far more organized, knowledgeable, and assertive than whites were prepared to admit, and the slaveholding society was far more fragile and frightened than it appeared on the surface.

With the sum of these fires, rumors, and seemingly trustworthy reports of attack, Colonel Davis finally panicked. On the evening of November 19, he sent a telegram to Governor Wise, requesting that “Five Hundred Men Armed and equipped instantly” be sent because a large body of armed attackers were approaching from Wheeling. Later in the evening, Davis wired again, believing he had received reliable word that the attackers would not march until the morning. Wise responded, urging Davis to excite no alarm but to err on the side of caution. Before midnight, Davis sent off another telegram to the governor, this time reporting a false alarm. It seems his scouts had belatedly returned with word that no enemy was approaching Charlestown after all. Not only had many “local spy companies” been formed, the colonel concluded, but now the majority of his scouts also believed the many fires had been set “by Negroes.” Somewhat sheepishly, Davis concluded by thanking the governor for his appointment and stating that he would “try to fill it well.”44

Meanwhile, although Brown was largely kept from reading newspapers, he could not have missed news of the rising fears in association with local “incendiaries.” The old man probably understood the significance of the fires, and feared that the arson attacks would be associated with his influence. Under such stress, the local population could turn lawless and violent in reaction. Although such a reaction could target the old man and his raiders in the jailhouse, there was now sufficient militia in town to squash any mob action; more likely, local whites might vent their anger and frustration on vulnerable and defenseless blacks. On November 21, Brown wrote to his wife that the arson attacks were now “almost of daily and nightly occurrence in this immediate neighborhood” and were “a source of much disquietude” for him. Although his “friends” did not set the fires, he wrote, “we shall be charged with them.” It is likely, then, that these concerns were embedded in the note that he sent to Prosecutor Andrew Hunter on November 22, in which he made a peculiar, passing reference to “the slaves we took about the Ferry.”45

To be sure, the old man’s letter to Hunter was not mere pretense. The prosecutor had recently come to the conclusion that Brown’s courtroom allocution on November 2 had contradicted his original explanation for the raid, given at the time of his arrest, during an interview with Governor Wise on October 18. To no surprise, when word of Hunter’s criticism got back to Brown, the old man became intent on addressing the issue—first writing to the Prosecutor, and then asking him to come over and speak with him in jail.

The gist of Hunter’s criticism was that Brown had originally stated his plan was to arm enslaved people for self-defense, with the intention of advancing his liberation movement into the South. However, in denying that he was an insurrectionist before the court, it seemed to Hunter that Brown had made a convenient change. In his allocution, the old man had denied any violent intentions, and compared his Virginia plan with a raid that he had previously conducted in Missouri, in which he had killed no slaveholders and carried eleven blacks to freedom in Canada.46

However, the contradiction was only apparent, especially because slaveholders considered any forceful effort to seize their human property as an act of insurrection. In actuality, Brown had downplayed the use of violent means in his courtroom “speech” because he, unlike slaveholders, made a distinction between arming slaves for self-defense and arming them for outright insurrection—the latter involving aggressive war on slaveholders, if not proslavery whites in general. Brown may have admired Nat Turner, who led a devastating insurrection in Virginia in 1831, but the Turner revolt left more than fifty whites massacred, including a good many children.47 The old man had no desire for this kind of bloodletting, and his actions at Harper’s Ferry prove that he was intent on avoiding insurrectionary violence, although willing to fight slaveholders in self-defense when advancing his liberation movement.

In this regard Brown denied the intention of insurrection in his famous courtroom “speech.” As Brian McGinty has observed, his allocution was “neither deceptive nor fraudulent, merely imperfect.” In his explanatory note to Hunter, the old man thus argued that his words in court were not scripted, nor were they fully explained in the manner that he would have preferred, but still he had intended to speak truthfully. He desired, as he put it, that Hunter would “make such use” of his letter to “correct any wrong impressions I may have given.” When the prosecutor later visited Brown in jail, it was clear to him that the old man hoped that he would “vindicate his memory in that respect—to publish it or to make it known.”48 Brown’s words did not persuade Hunter, although he acknowledged that the old man had won the respect of his captors, especially Governor Wise.49

Yet if there was misrepresentation in Brown’s words, it was in the deliberate phrase “the slaves we took,” which actually contradicted the essential nature of his mission and affirmed the claims of slaveholders. Why would he say that he had taken slaves? This was tantamount to admitting that the enslaved men who fought with him at Harper’s Ferry actually had been seized and coerced. The phrase “the slaves we took” is not only peculiar among all of Brown’s surviving letters and statements, but it favored the myth of slave contentment that abolitionists so despised.

That Brown employed this language perhaps was his way of trying to ameliorate conditions—as if to affirm the slaveholders despite the arson and unrest that evidently was arising from enslaved people. He knew full well that the black support he received “about the Ferry” had been volunteered, not coerced. The black men who left their masters to join him, did so both willingly and, in some cases, quite enthusiastically. Yet if John Brown were to say that he had taken their slaves, perhaps the slaveholders, in a state of panic, would be less inclined toward harsh measures.50 Brown was probably relieved when his letter was shortly published in a local newspaper, The Spirit of Jefferson—a kindness extended by Prosecutor Hunter, who understood that “Brown desired it to be published.”51 It is impossible to assess if his words had any direct bearing on the response of whites in Jefferson County, but it is worth noting that local blacks seem not to have been targeted as a result of the fires. It is at least reasonable to conclude that Brown’s ploy got the attention of local slaveholders and assuaged their worried minds to some degree.

The panic and overreaction in Charlestown were doubtless a source of embarrassment, not only to Colonel Davis but also to people in Jefferson County. Even the proslavery Herald was blunt in declaring that these invasion reports were undoubtedly “humbug.” Far worse, Ned House was scrupulously documenting every shudder and cry in the night in the pages of the Tribune, already having portrayed the rumors overtaking the town as having “swollen into awful proportions.” As for the colonel, House wrote that Davis had now “lost command of himself” to the point of appearing “ridiculous.”

Worse for the colonel, he had also sent for help from other sources, such as requesting the superintendent of the Harper’s Ferry armory to enlist a local militia group called the Mount Vernon Guards. Other troops had also been ordered to Charlestown from Alexandria, Virginia; even the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad consented to send a “posse” to guard the Harper’s Ferry Bridge from invasion. When it was clear that reports of the invasion were but rumors, people in Harper’s Ferry and Charlestown immediately expressed displeasure, criticizing Davis for soliciting reinforcements before he had sent scouts to check out the reports. “They think they have been made to appear ridiculous before the country,” observed the sympathetic New York Herald.52

In his correspondence of November 19, House showed no mercy to Colonel Davis, whom he had previously dubbed, along with one of his officers, “Colonel Romulus and Major Remus.” Troops were now “hurrying” to the aid of the colonel, he wrote, facetiously questioning how all these troops would be used “in the event of another fire.” Even the governor was coming to Charlestown, House concluded, and he hoped that Wise would promptly “depose the Colonel and assume command himself.” For the time being, Davis might be at ease, but rumors continued to float about of invasions and attacks. “As fast as one explodes,” House noted, “a dozen take its place. I think they rise spontaneously in this community.”

Now, even the friendly Herald was bemoaning that these rumors of invasion and rescue were so ridiculous that they “ought not to frighten a party of four-year-old children.” Meanwhile, Tribune correspondents in Baltimore and Washington city reported that Governor Wise, now en route to Charlestown, acknowledged that although the rumors were probably unfounded, he still preferred “to have fifty times too many men to having one too few.” The governor was aboard a special train, due to arrive in Charlestown on the afternoon of November 20. However, the governor was being discreet. Not only was he determined to strengthen the security of Charlestown, but actually was more concerned for the one great moment of Virginia’s vindication. “Prepare for the execution on 2nd [of December],” he sent to Davis by telegram on November 19. The governor thus directed that he wanted a sufficient number of local militia, trained and drilled, to guard the gallows and pass ways when John Brown was hanged.

Although Governor Wise was concerned about the rumors of invasion and local arson attacks in the vicinity of the jail, his return to Charlestown probably was not prompted by Davis’s overreaction or the summoning of additional forces to town. Rather, Wise seems to have made a return trip to Charlestown because he had received word that Brown’s execution was now legally certain, and he wanted to make sure that all preparations were finalized. The governor was probably confident all along that the old man would be hanged, but he had to wait for final word from Virginia’s Supreme Court of Appeals. Although found guilty and sentenced to death on November 2, Brown’s lawyers subsequently filed a writ of error, hoping to nullify the judgment of the circuit court of Jefferson County.

The writ of error was generally used to identify any technical or actual “mistake” that disadvantaged the accused. Samuel Chilton, Brown’s eminent defense attorney, filed the petition on November 18 as the last attempt to save his client’s life. Chilton’s petition contained a variety of complaints, but his main argument was that Brown could not be found guilty of treason, since he owed no allegiance to Virginia. The following day, November 19 (the same day that Wise and Davis telegraphed back and forth over the rumored invasion), the Supreme Court of Appeals issued a denial of the petition. As Brian McGinty observes, state law required the Supreme Court of Appeals to issue an opinion in writing, preserving it with the record of the case. But Brown’s appeal was denied without even an oral argument or opinion, adding insult to injury. The blunt, unreasoned denial of the Supreme Court of Appeals essentially was the action of slaveholders toward an insurrectionist, not an expression of the constitutional and legal system that regularly operated for whites in the State of Virginia. Brown’s death penalty was now both final and absolute in legal terms, and the day of execution would shortly be finalized.53

Probably on Saturday, November 19, when the old man likely was notified that the writ of error had been rejected, he sat down at the small table near the barred window of his cell and wrote a short letter to his family. “My Dear Wife and Children, I have just learned that I am to be hanged . . . God’s will be done. I do not know yet when I am to die, but I understand about the first of December.” Asking them not to grieve for his fate, Brown reminded them that it was God’s will, and that his own conscience was clear. “Put all your trust in him who knows every sparrow that falls to the ground,” he wrote. “May God protect and keep you all in his tender mercy. Your affectionate Husband and Father, John Brown.”54

Certainly it was his normal practice, and likely the custom of his training, to sign letters with his full name. Yet in his jail correspondence, there is a deliberate sense of the old man’s intent to make his letters serve the historical record. He once told his daughter Annie that he liked common names and would just as happily have been called John Smith as John Brown.55 But in the wake of the raid and his trial, and now the growing unrest surrounding his incarceration in Virginia, John Brown had begun to transcend the commonality of his own name.

CHAPTER 10

EDITORS, LETTERS, AND OLD FRIENDS

Allow me here to say that notwithstanding “my soul is amongst Lions,” still I believe that “God in very deed is with me.”

Shortly before he learned that the Virginia Supreme Court had upheld the death sentence in his case, the old man was given a peculiar questionnaire and asked to supply answers. It is not clear why David S. Eichelberger, the publisher of Charlestown’s Independent Democrat, used this method instead of an actual interview with the prisoner. Most likely, restrictions had been imposed on the press, perhaps in an attempt to minimize Brown’s public voice. Regardless, the old man answered many of the editor’s questions, typically intent on improving the historical record of the raid. His response seems to have been reliably transcribed for publication, complete with Brown’s typical emphases and published in the Independent Democrat on November 22.1

In the first question, Eichelberger asked if his “foray” at Harper’s Ferry had arisen solely from his belief in “the heinousness of slavery per se” or if he had also been driven by a feeling of revenge based on his personal losses in Kansas at the hands of proslavery enemies. Brown responded that his plan arose exclusively “from my abhorrence of the accursed system,” adding that he was “a very plain man” and did not understand the significance of the term per se. “I make no pretensions on that scene of learning,” he wrote.

When asked about the justice of his likely death sentence, he answered that the real question of justice primarily pertained to slavery. “I merely abominate your false priorities,” he penned, “and the barbarous enactments you have been from time to time driven to pass in order to sustain that false position.” As to his own likely execution, the old man simply wrote that he felt no shame “on account of my doom,” adding that “Jesus of Nazareth was doomed in like manner. Why should not I be?”

Was he ready to die under the law, and was he a member of any church denomination?

“Am entirely ready so far as I know,” he wrote, “and am a member of the Congregational Church.”

In fact, Brown had retained his denominational membership since making a profession of Christian faith at the age of sixteen. His involvement in the Congregational Church had had its ups and downs over the years, largely due to the conservative political orientation and racial prejudice of many Congregationalists. However, despite his radical political views, John Brown had retained a traditional confessional Protestant and Calvinistic outlook until the day he died.2 “I must yet insert a reason for my firm belief in the Divine inspiration of the Bible,” he wrote to his children. “I wish you all to consider it, most thoroughly; when you read that blessed book; & see whether you cannot discover such evidence yourselves. It is the purity of heart, feeling, or motive: as well as word & action which is every where insisted on; that distinguish it from all other teachings; that commends it to my conscience.”

In conversation with Simpson Donavin of the Baltimore Daily Exchange, Brown similarly affirmed his belief in the divine character of the Bible. “I entered his cell one morning, and found him reading the Bible,” Donavin recalled. “I remarked, ‘You are never without a companion.’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘and the best of companions.’” Nodding toward his opened Bible, Brown added: “This is the fountain of all truth and therefore the fountain of all comfort and joy. How wretched a man must be who is destitute of a religious faith.” Brown further declared that a man without the Christian faith seemed to him “like a mariner in the frailest of barks on the most turbulent of seas surrounded by arctic darkness” with neither chart nor compass. “This book contains the love of loves and the law of laws. Human contradictions of it are void, and should not be obeyed,” the old man concluded.3

Interestingly, despite his strident Protestantism, when Eichelberger asked if his men were “infidels or atheists,” Brown responded that he was only concerned that his men were “religiously opposed to slavery.” In fact, none of the Harper’s Ferry raiders, including his own sons, shared his traditional Calvinism; some clearly embraced ideas about religion that the old man disdained, especially Spiritualism. Yet it was also characteristic of him to work with people of differing religious viewpoints as long as they were devotedly antislavery. In the weeks prior to the Harper’s Ferry Raid, Brown’s views were “frequently criticized” by his own men, although this only seemed to have pleased him. Osborne Anderson recalled that Brown expressed gratification “to see young men grapple with moral and other important questions, and express themselves independently.” To be sure, he was grieved by the apostasy of his adult children, although he seemed to have been particularly bothered more by the blithe and self-confident ease with which some of them had overthrown the faith of their fathers.4

Brown was less interested in providing personal information in the interview, perhaps owing to his determination to publicize his intentions and purposes at Harper’s Ferry. After twice declining autobiographical questions, he gave answers as concise as they were telling:

Q. Give your opinion in regard to southern slavery.

A. I am doing my best at that.

Q. To what political party do you belong?

A. To God’s party (I think.)

Q. Are you in favor of William H. Seward for the presidency?

A. I care but very little about any political leader as such. I however know of no reason why I should not respect Mr. Seward very highly as a man of integrity, honor and ability.

Q. Do you believe in the equality of white and black?

A. Yes, God forbid I should doubt it; further than is occasioned by their dreadfully unfortunate circumstances.

Q. Had you been successful in freeing the Negroes from bondage, what did you propose to do with them?

A. The same precisely as I would do with other men; do them justice as God requires.5

If the questionnaire from Eichelberger was unusual, then a request made by W. W. B. Gallaher, editor of the local Virginia Free Press, was even more curious. Gallaher had received a copy of the Spiritual Telegraph and Fireside Preacher, perhaps from an associate in New York. The paper featured a transcription of a sermon by Henry Ward Beecher, the famous antislavery preacher from Brooklyn, New York. Beecher’s sermon was titled “The Nation’s Duty to Slavery,” delivered from the pulpit of Beecher’s own Plymouth Church on October 30, included remarks about Brown.

Perhaps Gallaher sought some clever means of competing with Eichelberger’s questionnaire interview; or maybe he saw an opportunity to exploit Brown’s words against Beecher, who was among a small circle of prominently despised antislavery figures. “I would die content if I could see Greeley, Fred Douglass, Emerson, Garrison, and Beecher strung up alongside old Brown,” one Virginia official reportedly declared.6 Sometime during the second week of November, Editor Gallaher sent the Spiritual Telegraph to Brown, either by mail or by messenger—perhaps by the hand of his relative, John W. Gallaher, the Herald correspondent, still on his post as a jail guard.

Brown had met Beecher twice in the mid-1850s. According to Brown family history, the old man initially sought out Beecher’s assistance, perhaps when he was first setting out for the Kansas territory in the spring of 1855. Brown was probably as surprised as he was offended when Beecher refused, especially considering that the renowned preacher was associated with rifles given for free-state defense, popularly known as “Beecher’s Bibles.” By the later 1850s, however, Beecher had blinked, yielding to his conservative bent, even to the point of admitting to a “hold back” position.

Both men undoubtedly had large egos, and the conversation probably became intense—the celebrity preacher finally dismissing Brown by saying, “I am Beecher.” The old man’s family remembered how these words galled him. Later, after Brown became known as a Kansas hero, and the free-state cause had become a rallying cry in the North, he chanced to meet Beecher once again, this time while on a train. Now, he found the famous preacher “effusive in his feelings for Kansas” and apparently quite happy to encounter the famous “Osawatomie Brown.” This time it was Brown’s turn: the old man evidently disdained every word of admiration from the back-pedaling Beecher. As his daughter Sarah later put it, “He was Brown.”7

In his sermon, Beecher had taken his text from the prophet Jeremiah (6:16–19), “Hear, O earth: behold, I will bring evil upon this people, even the fruit of their thoughts, because they have not hearkened unto my words, nor to my law, but rejected it.” “This is a terrible message,” Beecher thundered, for God had spoken through the prophet to his ancient people, who were “selfish and unjust and covetous,” while the religious establishment was “whelmed in the same sins.” Sins and “mischief had been glossed over and excused and palliated and hidden, and not healed,” he declared, a message of “remarkable pertinence” to a nation corrupted and divided by slavery. Recently, he continued, the nation had been surprised by the “burning fragment” that had struck Harper’s Ferry—a small army of men had attacked the State of Virginia “and undertook to release and lead away an enslaved race!”

Beecher voiced a note of sympathy for the brave Virginians, whose courage was “caught at unawares.” However, the preacher thought the seizing of the town and armory by such a small group of invaders was more consistent with Aesop’s fables than with a prophetic oracle, because “it all stood in the courage of one man.” He then recounted Brown’s story, likely based on faulty news reports, concluding that the old man’s impulse to attack Virginia was born from his losses and sufferings in the Kansas struggles of 1855–1856. While sympathetic with the abolitionist, Beecher declared his disapproval of “his mad and feeble schemes” and disdained “the folly of the bloody foray.” Now none should pray for Brown to be spared from the gallows. “Let Virginia make him a martyr,” and despite his blundered and miserable work, his noble soul would redeem all things on the gibbet “and round up Brown’s failure with a heroic success.”

As to slavery, it was “a great sin” and a “national curse,” and the nation was “bound by the great law of love” to consider its duties to four million enslaved blacks. Yet any approach to slavery would have to avoid “acrimony and bitterness” between master and the slave. Nor should the “breeding of discontent among the bondmen” be encouraged but, rather, “Christian quietness and patient waiting.” Indeed, Beecher continued, men who incited slaves were not themselves to be trusted and typically were neither men of honesty nor conscience. Alluding to Brown, the preacher declared that no individual would bring relief to the slaves by any “organized plan to carry them off, or to incite them to abscond.” On the other hand, a fugitive should be received in the North if he was “willing to dare and suffer for it.” Worse of all, Beecher avowed, were insurrection and servile war. The “most cruel, hopeless, and desperate of all conceivable follies” was “to seek emancipation by the sword and by blood.”

The rest of the sermon merely followed out Beecher’s evident conservative outlook, and besides some words in favor of protecting the marriages of enslaved people and slave families, his conclusions were little different from the more generous proslavery preachers of the South. Obedience to masters was the best prescription for slaves in the South and “everywhere, the world over!”

Beecher’s “Harper’s Ferry” sermon clearly revealed his digression into conservatism, including the preacher’s demand that the servant “must obey his master” and never throw off the control of the master based on “mere impulse.” Worse, Beecher’s racism was quite evident. The “Africans in our land,” he concluded, were but a vast, undisciplined horde lacking “cohesive power enough to organize themselves into a government, and maintain their independence.” What was best for them was a “regulated liberty” based on the “consent of their masters.”8

Brown clearly read Beecher’s sermon with mixed feelings, finding commendable aspects as well as points of hearty disagreement. Seated with pen in hand, the old man pored over the sermon transcript, making brief remarks, the first of which scored Beecher’s unreliable portrayal of invading proslavery forces in Kansas having “carried death to a multitude of cabins.” There were notable killings of free-state men and many more violent attacks by proslavery thugs, but the preacher was engaging in hyperbole. His remarks were “not well posted,” Brown wrote simply. In contrast, he agreed with Beecher’s description of the one-sided governmental presence in the territory, the federal forces acting “on the side of the wrong doers, not on the side of the injured” and acknowledged a reference to the killing of his son, Frederick Brown, by a proslavery leader in 1856. To these statements, Brown wrote, “Truth.”

Overall, Beecher’s portrayal of the Kansas episode was untrustworthy, Brown noting that the preacher “does not understand the subject.” Beecher was likewise “mistaken in the man,” when it came to describing the supposedly vengeful impulse that drove Brown to Harper’s Ferry. Still, when he felt the preacher had touched a point correctly, he wrote, “Truth,” and even “Good” where Beecher prescribed the old man’s hanging as a martyr for the antislavery cause.

As to the preacher’s disdaining of insurrection and the “breeding of discontent” among enslaved people, Brown dashed off, “I never counseled to insurrection.” Similarly, he wrote that Beecher held forth “False assumptions” in hesitating to support slaves in seizing liberty from their oppressors. Likewise, Brown disagreed with Beecher’s essentially racist description of enslaved blacks despite agreeing that intelligent people should fight for their independence. “False theory intermixed,” Brown wrote. Similarly, the old man resented Beecher’s notion of a “regulated freedom” being the ideal condition for blacks in the South. “Not strictly true,” he wrote, adding, “See Indians.”

Brown had known and been befriended by Native Americans from his youth, once even defending them from bullies in northwestern Pennsylvania, and it is not surprising that he would welcome sympathetic local “sachems and priests” into his jail cell in Virginia, because he had probably communicated with them in the weeks prior to the raid. His father, Owen Brown, had protested the relocation of indigenous people from Ohio to points farther west in earlier days. In 1856, after surveying boundaries on behalf of the Ottawa nation in the Kansas territory, Brown and his sons forcefully evicted proslavery squatters from Indian land. When the old man’s sons visited a band of the Sac and Fox nation, recently forced to move from Missouri to northeast Kansas, they asked their hosts why they had not built houses and barns like the Ottawa or had schools and churches like the Delaware and Shawnee did. “Why do you have no preachers and teachers?” they asked. The chief, disgusted by “regulated freedom,” answered, “We want no houses and barns. We want no schools and churches. We want no preachers and teachers. We bad enough now.”9 For years, Brown had observed the repression of indigenous people in the United States, which is why he had mandated the inclusion and participation of “proscribed and oppressed” Native Americans in his Provisional Constitution, the founding document he prepared for his South-wide liberation movement.10

The old man’s running comments throughout the Beecher sermon also reveal a pattern of thought that historians often have overlooked, given the caricature of John Brown as a rabid terrorist full of religious fanaticism and violent rage. In fact, he was not only a gentle and soft-spoken man but also a perennial optimist. In disagreement, he was often inclined to parse a difference, showing respect and granting credit to his opponents when possible. Of course, there were issues, such as the evils of slavery and racial prejudice or the divine authority of the Bible and absolute predestination, which simply were nonnegotiable to John Brown under any circumstance. Yet even in these matters, he was often inclined to see the glass half-full—“ever the pensioner of hope,” as Boyd Stutler once called him. For instance, Brown wrote to his father in 1856 that there were many antislavery Southerners in Kansas who nevertheless were racists and who wanted to exclude blacks from the territory. Yet these were “half right in regard to Slavery,” he wrote. “Some of them are very earnest Free State men,” he added. “We are glad to have them begin to get right.”11 This kind of tendency in Brown enabled him to compliment his captors, commend the conduct of his trial, warmly greet Virginia volunteers, and even find some good in the pages of the New York Herald, when he could just as easily have heaped contempt and scorn on everything surrounding him.

To be sure, Brown had consistently shown proslavery clergymen to the door of his jail cell and certainly refused to pray with them lest he authenticate the slaveholders’ religion. Nor would he spare Beecher when the minister portrayed him incorrectly. “An utterly false assumption applied to this case,” he wrote in response to the claim that men like Brown, who “tampered” with slaves, were dishonest. To another statement, Brown scribbled, “Boastful and false insinuation as applied to me.” He might add “very well” when he agreed and admit that Beecher was “wise” at points, or even stretch to the point of calling him a “brave” man. But anyone reading his comments could not miss the fact that John Brown had found the famous preacher “mistaken” and capable of “vile” assumptions.

Most important, the old man continued to maintain that he had “never counseled to insurrection,” and even declared that he was “willing to be weighed in an even balance against Beecher” when it came to supporting the free blacks of the North. The Brooklyn preacher could have had no idea of the extent to which John Brown had both interacted and collaborated with blacks in the North, years before he ever became a famous Kansas freedom fighter. Finally, to Beecher’s closing invocation of God speeding the day of liberation, the old man wrote, “So says old Brown. Amen.” When Brown completed his review of the sermon, his comments were passed to the editor Gallaher, who then seems to have forwarded an introduction and transcription to the Herald, which published Beecher’s sermon excerpts and Brown’s remarks on November 23, under the title “Beecher on Brown, Brown on Beecher.”12

Shortly before his hanging, he had an opportunity to read his comments in the Herald and was vexed to find that several of his statements had been substituted with false insertions. Given his determination to leave an accurate record whenever possible, he was frustrated by this ruse. When he finally saw his wife, Brown directed her to make a public statement “through a proper channel,” stating “that his annotations of Mr. Beecher’s Harper’s Ferry sermon, as they appeared in The Herald, were so altered, by the addition of some parts and the suppression of others, as to render the printed report altogether unreliable.”

Although the newspaper with Brown’s actual handwriting is apparently lost to history, it is possible to identify a few false insertions in contrast to his authentic remarks in the Herald. This is particularly true of comments that lack his tone of reserve and balance and tend to mock and chide Beecher in an uncharacteristic manner. For instance, where the minister mentions how he would preach to the slaves of the South, the comment seems awkwardly inserted: “Why don’t Beecher come South to preach?” This is followed by similar polemics: “Let the champion come here to preach,” “How can he stay away?” and “Come on, Beecher.”13 Nor were these deceitful interpolations simply a hoax, since evidently they were done to provoke hard feelings and abuse Beecher at Brown’s expense. In this sense, the scheme somewhat foreshadowed tactics used by the surveillance community in the twentieth century, when false reports were published in newspapers to create or exacerbate existing tensions between civil rights activists. The abuse was most likely undertaken by W. W. B. Gallaher, acting in the capacity of a correspondent, but possibly it was also done with the tacit approval of someone at the New York Herald.

When the Herald’s reportage of Brown’s remarks was greeted with cynicism in some quarters, the Charlestown editor attempted another ploy to cover his tracks. On November 29, just two days before the execution, Gallaher wrote a respectful letter to “Gen. Brown,” including a copy of his published remarks in the Herald, actually begging him to prepare “an acknowledgement of their authenticity” in his own handwriting. Then, in a stroke of perfect hypocrisy, he closed by assuring Brown that he had not meant any offense and hoped he would “receive this in kindness as it is intended.”

However, the old man could not be easily flattered or fooled and probably smelled the scent of treachery on the young editor’s letter. The following day, he wrote in response, stating that even at a “moment’s glance at what Purports to be my remarks on Beecher’s sermon,” he had discovered “a most Gross and intentional Misrepresentation” of his words. He had no time to expose them, Brown wrote further, although his words had been “treated with as much fairness as I have by the paper I have met with.”14 No doubt, it was afterward that Brown made a point of telling Mary to convey his complaint to a reliable newspaper, considering the ruthless manner in which he had already been portrayed in the pages of the Herald. However, the old man’s refusal was a perfectly worded rejoinder that implicated both Gallaher and the Herald. No doubt frustrated by Brown’s refusal to authenticate his scheme, the Charlestown editor continued plotting—especially after the old man’s complaint was conveyed in the antislavery New York Independent on December 8, less than a week after his execution.15

If Gallaher could not get Brown’s handwritten support, he now contrived some written witnesses that appeared to affirm the tainted Herald report. On December 10, after Brown was safely buried, he obtained written testimony signed by Brown’s doomed cell mate, Aaron Stevens. But this was a sleight of hand, because Stevens stated only that the old man had written comments on Beecher’s sermon, not that the Herald’s transcription was trustworthy.

The editor likewise obtained an affidavit from Jailer Avis that included the sentence “I also certify that I heard Captain Brown deny that his comments were incorrectly printed in the New York Herald.” Avis’s statement was witnessed by the Herald’s unidentified correspondent, John W. Gallaher, listed only as “Jail Guard.”16 Furthermore, there is good reason to believe that the jailer’s actual words were “I heard Captain Brown deny that his comments were correctly printed”—suggesting that his statement was intentionally misrepresented in the Herald.17 These cunningly contrived testimonies seem to have put the controversy to an end, at least as far as Herald readers were concerned. W. W. B. Gallaher never reported the truth of the incident, although he lived until 1903. Instead, he set aside Brown’s letter, shortly giving it away as a gift, after which it effectively vanished from history for 153 years.18

Meanwhile, correspondence had continued to flow into the little jail, and despite Prosecutor Hunter busily screening and withholding letters, the old man had received more mail than he could answer. Although he naturally wrote to his wife and children, he sometimes responded to sympathetic strangers whose words he had found compelling. When George Adams of Boston, Massachusetts, wrote with expressions of great Christian sympathy, Brown made a grateful response. Although Adams did not approve of the “outbreak” at Harper’s Ferry, he had been won over by Brown’s “unwavering faith in God and fidelity to principle,” “fearless answers,” and “faithful testimony against slavery.” Adams assured the old man that his family would not be forgotten, admonishing him to “[l]ook only to God for aid in, these your trying hours,” and promising prayers on his behalf so that “you may die as you have lived since a prisoner.”

Brown greeted Adams’s words warmly, granting his request “for a line from you” in a response dated November 15. “You request a few lines from me, which I cannot deny you, though much at a loss what to write.” Although he felt Adams had done him “more than justice” in his remarks, Brown continued, “I do certainly feel that through Divine grace I have endeavored to be ‘faithful in a very few things,’ mingling with even those much of imperfection.” He was “unworthy even to suffer affliction with the peoples of God,” he added, yet he had been honored by “Infinite grace.”

He also thanked Adams for his assurance that his “poor shattered heart broken ‘family will not be forgotten.’” As far as his incarceration, Brown wrote that he had enjoyed “many opportunities for faithful plain dealing with the more powerful, influential, & intelligent classes” of Virginia and continued to believe that a sovereign God yet reigned over the affairs of men and nations. “May God take care of his own cause, & of his own great name,” the old man concluded, “as well as of them who love their neighbors.”19

When news of the raid and Brown’s defeat reached New England, there were divided opinions in his native Connecticut, perhaps exemplified by a sanctimonious dispute that took place in a prayer meeting near the town of Groton. According to one observer, the Republican brethren “prayed with great unction for the peace of John Brown’s soul.” In response, a critic poured forth in prayer on the “other side of the house,” invoking the name of that “traitor to his country—O-l-d John Brown!”20

Brown’s relatives were naturally shocked to hear of the debacle at Harper’s Ferry, and followed every available news report to learn more of his fate in Virginia. An elderly Connecticut cousin named Naomi Barbour wrote to Brown’s younger half-brother, Jeremiah R. Brown, on November 21, inquiring of more information about “your dear brother John.” Barbour expressed her regret that John “should expose his life in what would seem so hopeless an undertaking,” yet she felt confident that he had been “actuated by purely benevolent motives, and a heart felt desire to benefit an oppressed and down trodden race.” Although certain of Brown’s integrity and the value of his martyrdom, she was worried for his family and wondered “how the friends of cousin John feel in regard to his case.”21

Barbour’s brothers were similarly moved by the tragic outcome of the raid, although the more famous of the two was appalled and scandalized.22 On November 20, Heman Humphrey, a prominent clergyman and former president of Amherst College, wrote something of a sympathetic letter to his younger cousin. However, his missive reeked with incredulous disdain and a scolding piety that was pitiful if not offensive. Addressing Brown as his “poor wounded and doomed kinsman,” Humphrey lamented that they could do nothing for him since sentence had been passed upon him, and that he had undertaken an impossible if not mad venture in Virginia, despite his good intentions. “All your friends are amazed that you did not see it,” he wrote, adding that he did not think his actions were consistent with the “John Brown of better days,” when he was in his “right mind.”

As if this condescending presumption were not bad enough, the elderly clergyman now questioned the integrity of his cousin’s faith. “I take it for granted that you will now anxiously examine yourself whether you are in the faith.” Although he did not believe Brown “had murder in his heart” in his effort to liberate slaves, Humphrey was astonished that he “did not consider that it could not be done without wading in blood.” The letter quickly becomes something of a browbeating, with Humphrey opining at length along about the need to prayerfully wait for the end of slavery and the wrong of taking “the avenging sword into our own hands.” Along with more questions concerning Brown’s spiritual standing before God, Humphrey finally admonished his cousin as to the hopelessness of his case and the vanity of hoping for human deliverance.23

The letter probably was galling to John Brown, especially coming from a family member. Of course, he was well acquainted with pious conservative evangelicals like his prominent seventy-four-year old cousin. There was no lack of antislavery Christians in the North who lamented and prayed but who insisted that blacks manifest divine patience in waiting for white slaveholders to repent and emancipate them. Brown may have read one such sermon transcription in the Herald, from the Reverend Hugh Henry Blair, minister of the Associate Presbyterian Church on Charles Street in New York. Preaching on Sunday, November 6, Blair had expressed hope that slavery would end in “God’s own time” and appealed for that “glorious liberty” that would free the souls of slaves from bondage and raise them “far above all thoughts of this world to the consideration of their grand eternity.” The clergyman likewise appealed for the souls of “misguided men” such as Brown, who had “sinned against the laws of the land,” to be “enlightened.”24

Still, Humphrey was a close relative in a family generally known for its contempt for slavery, and perhaps the abolitionist hoped for more from his esteemed kinsman. Only two years before, Brown had warmly written to Humphrey, hoping to draw his interest in raising support for the free-state cause in the Kansas Territory. It is unlikely that Humphrey responded positively to being asked to raise money for armed struggle, and Brown probably was being overly optimistic by even asking. At the time, Humphrey’s public counsel on responding to violent proslavery intrusion in Kansas was that good people ought “to go into the streets and cry murder,” and besides that, they could only pray. Of course, John Brown had no respect for such pious “milk-and-water principles.”25

Although Humphrey had proven little more than one of Job’s comforters, Brown wrote back to this “Dear and Honored Kinsman” with a tone of reserve and respect. Typically, he expressed interest in finding some value in Humphrey’s “faithful advice,” as well as sympathy for “all my sorrowing friends in their grief and terrible mortification”—essentially rejecting their misplaced pity. Then, after setting aside any notion of madness, Brown wrote that his cousin had further labored “under a mistaken impression as to some important facts.”

First, he pointed out that the only reason for his failure at Harper’s Ferry was due to his own tactical mistakes, especially “in yielding to my feelings of humanity in leaving my proper place and mingling with my prisoners to quiet their fears.” In other words, neither Humphrey nor his opinionated friends in the North were in a position to say that his plan at Harper’s Ferry was impossible. “Of this you have no proper means of judging, not being on the ground, or a practical soldier,” he wrote.

As to his present condition, Brown continued, he was “quite cheerful” and that actually it was for his cousin “to reconcile your own mind to the ignominious death I am about to suffer, and to mitigate your sorrow.” There was an edge to these words, as if Brown was saying to critical friends and relatives that they had the greater problem in these circumstances, because he was sufficiently equipped for the final hour. “[F]or many years I have felt a strong impression,” he wrote, “that God had given me powers and faculties, unworthy as I was, that he intended to use” for the deliverance of others. Besides, Brown asked, “[i]f you do not believe I had a murderous intention (while I know I had not), why grieve so terribly on my account? The scaffold has but few terrors for me.” Balancing rejoinder with further words of appreciation and gratitude, he continued by asking that if God “intends to use me in a different way, shall I not most cheerfully go?”

Finally, Brown corrected two important errors assumed in Humphrey’s letter. First, he contradicted reports that had falsely attributed his actions to revenge. “I bless God that I am able even now to say that I have never yet harbored such a feeling.” Second, the “impression that we intended a general insurrection is equally untrue,” he wrote. Having made his defense, he bid farewell, committing Heman Humphrey to “the God of our fathers.”26

Brown had deftly responded to his pious cousin, serving his errors back to him without disrespect or lack of piety. Considering Humphrey’s pejorative tone, it was an impressive feat of self-discipline to respond without unleashing a stinging rebuke. Privately, however, Brown did vent his feelings somewhat in a letter to his younger half-sisters, Marian and Martha, a few days before his death. “Dr. Heman Humphrey has just sent me a most doleful Lamentation over my ‘infatuation’ & ‘madness’ (very kindly expressed), in which, I cannot doubt he has given expression to the extreme grief of others of our kindred. I have endeavored to answer him kindly also, & at the same time to deal faithfully with my old friend.” However, Humphrey’s discouraging epistle had not shaken him. “I have experienced a consolation & peace which I fear he has not yet known.” Sometimes, he concluded, God hides understanding “even from the wise & prudent”—apparently including his esteemed cousin.27

Happily, Heman’s younger brother, the Reverend Luther Humphrey, another Congregational clergyman, took a very different approach toward his incarcerated cousin. Writing from his home in Portage, Ohio, Luther informed Brown that he had been following his case in the New-York Daily Tribune and could not see “any ground why you should be sentenced to death for a single one of the counts presented in your indictment.” Nevertheless, he wrote, Brown could find comfort in God, who “knows well what were your motives, in what you have done & whether it was the best course or not he will over rule it all for his glory.”

Rather than chiding about patience and nonviolence like his elder brother, Luther Humphrey emphasized that the Bible throughout “condemns oppression in all its forms, & God is on the side of the oppressed, & their sighs & groanings have come up before him & he has seen all their tears.” Just as God had delivered the Hebrews from Egyptian captivity, he wrote, so would “the same Being” surely deliver “those who are oppressed in our own country, & it will not be in the united power of earth & hell to prevent their deliverance.” Although he had failed in his effort, Humphrey assured him that God would accomplish deliverance “in his own good time & way.” Meanwhile, he concluded, “[w]e may well exclaim with Jefferson, ‘I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just.’”

As to Brown’s fate, Humphrey wrote, his blood and the blood of his sons would “cry out to the Lord from the ground” and that the biblical promise to believers would be his, that “[a]ll things shall work together for your good” (an allusion to Romans 8:28). Asking for a letter from his cousin, he promised to continue to pray for him and his “remaining mourning, & afflicted family.” They would all meet one day in heaven “with all the blood bought throng & with them unite in praise to the Redeemer forever & ever.” Then Luther Humphrey bid him “Farewell! Farewell!”28

Brown happily responded to the affirming letter of his cousin Luther, observing that he was the first member of their extended family going back to the Mayflower’s Peter Brown to face capital punishment.29 Yet this was no cause for grief, he told his cousin, reminding him that their grandfather, Captain John Brown, had died in 1776, during the Revolutionary War, “& that he too might have perished on the scaffold had circumstances been but very little different.”30 Likewise, the great English Protestant John Rogers had “perished at the stake a great & good man as I suppose.” It was true enough, he continued, that a good man dying on a stake did not prove all other condemned men necessarily good or bad. Yet he was sure of God’s strengthening and comfort and felt neither “mortified, degraded, nor in the least ashamed of my imprisonment, my chain, or my near prospect of death by hanging.”

As to his life, Brown wrote that he would have reached sixty years were he allowed to live until May 9, 1860. Still, he had enjoyed life and “been remarkably prosperous, having early learned to regard the welfare & prosperity of others as my own.” He had never slept much, he added, so he supposed he had “enjoyed full an average number of waking hours” with those who lived far longer. His health was “remarkably good” and he never had need of reading glasses, among the many other “unmerited blessings” he had enjoyed. Considering how easily he might have been left to spoil his life’s work, he would not “risk another voyage,” even if he had the chance. “Thanks be ever unto God, who giveth us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord,” Brown closed with a biblical allusion familiar to both men (1 Corinthians 15:57). “And now my old warm hearted friend, ‘Good bye,’” he ended, signing it, “Your Affectionate Cousin, John Brown.”31

If Brown was pleased with the letter from his cousin Luther Humphrey, he was delighted to hear from another old associate. On November 15, he was handed an unexpected letter from his old schoolteacher, Herman L. Vaill, a sixty-five-year-old Congregational minister from Litchfield, Connecticut. The letter carried Brown back decades to his teenage years. At the time, Vaill, a young teacher at twenty-three years, served as an instructor at the Morris Academy. The school had been founded in 1790 by General James Morris but was then under supervision of the notable mathematician and linguist the Reverend William Weeks.32

In 1816–1817, John was a teenager in his sixteenth year, with some ambition to enter the Christian ministry. He had found his way east, alternately riding a single horse, with his brother Salmon and another friend from Hudson, Ohio. In Connecticut, he enrolled in a preparatory school, designed to prepare young men for college. John probably had hoped to attend Amherst College, where his cousin Heman Humphrey later served as president. However, the experience was daunting for the young frontiersman. His early years frequently had entailed short-lived seasons of schoolhouse study, often interrupted by the demands of work or the allurements of woods and field. This was especially the case for John, who, at eight years old, lost his mother, and whose father was doubtlessly consumed with business affairs, often leaving his son to his own devices. Ill suited for study, he moved to Plainfield, Massachusetts, where another attempt at schooling was disappointed; his final effort was the Morris Academy.

Vaill probably made a good impression on John. A young Congregational minister with strong antislavery convictions, Vaill had even taught school in Georgia for a time but left the South with sheer contempt for slavery, that “unrighteous & ungodly thing.” He seems to have taught at Morris around the same time that he was an instructor at the Foreign Mission School, which had been established for the education of “foreign youth,” preparing them for ministry and professions overseas. The school was established on a farm in Cornwall, northwest of Morris, during the year that young John was at the academy, so it is possible that he was brought into contact with the twelve young men that comprised the first class at the Foreign Mission School. From the onset, the school had a diverse student body that often was composed of Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiians, Native Americans, and other nonwhites. The school actually was quite successful for a time, until two Native American students courted and married the daughters of local white families. It was afterward suggested that the institution was no longer needed because of advancements in the mission field, but more likely the Foreign Missions School was closed due to racist opposition.33

Already devoted to the Puritan faith, teenage John participated in prayer meetings, perhaps lifting his voice in supplication amid a racially mixed body of believers. Meanwhile, he struggled to overcome “the disadvantages of his early education,” a contest that proved too difficult. Along with the inadequacy of his primary training, John had begun to develop difficulties with his eyes—an irritating affliction that quashed his schooling and periodically afflicted him throughout his life. “From Fifteen years & upward,” Brown later wrote, he had “felt a good deal of anxiety to learn; but could only read, & study a little, both for want of time & on account of inflammation of the eyes.” As another contemporary concluded, were it not for the difficulty with his eyes, “John Brown would not have died a Virginia culprit upon a Virginia gallows, but in all probability would have died on a feather bed, with D.D. affixed to his name.”34

The former teacher and the student had met one time since those early days, when Brown was operating a wool commission house in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the late 1840s. The two had a chance encounter and enjoyed a long conversation sharing remembrances of the past and “an interchange of opinions relating to the truth as it is in Jesus.” Now, he addressed John Brown as a friend “in bonds,” assuring him that “good people” in the towns of Goshen, Torrington, and Winchester and those in the vicinity “do most cordially sympathize with you in all your sorrows, and remember you most devoutly in their supplications unto God.” Notwithstanding the promises of Holy Scripture, Vaill continued, it was given to some of God’s children sometimes to die by violent means. The old preacher thus assured him that “Our Heavenly Father has a great many ways by which He calls His children home” and that regardless of the mode of death, “His love to them is still the same.” Asking Brown for a letter in return, Vaill concluded, “Be of good cheer, then, my brother; and living or dying, all will be well.”35

“My Dear steadfast Friend,” the old man responded on November 15, expressing gratitude for Vaill’s words of counsel. “Allow me here to say that notwithstanding ‘my soul is amongst Lions’ [quoting Psalm 57:4] still I believe that ‘God in very deed is with me.’” Assuring Vaill that he felt neither condemned by God nor degraded by his imprisonment nor the “prospect of the Gallows,” he had rather “had a great many rare opportunities for ‘preaching righteousness in the great congregation’” [alluding to Psalm 40:9].

Referring to the jailer Avis, Brown then wrote that “his family & assistants have all been most kind, & notwithstanding he was one of the bravest of all who fought me, he is now being abused for his humanity.” The old man was aware that Avis’s kindly treatment was seen as near indulgence by many in Charlestown. From close observation, Ned House noted that towns people could not understand it and called Avis “to frequent account,” remonstrating and even threatening him.36 “So far as my observation goes,” Brown wrote, “none but brave men are likely to be humane to a fallen foe. ‘Cowards prove their courage by their ferocity,’” a phrase that may reflect Brown’s reading of Sir Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon Buonaparte. Scott so describes the “infernal triumvirate” of the French Revolution—Danton’s murderous rage, Robespierre’s vindictive vanity, and Marat’s bloodlust. “Marat was, like Robespierre, a coward,” Scott concluded. “Such was the strange and fatal triumvirate, in which the same degree of cannibal cruelty existed under different aspects.”37

As to his own forceful struggle against slavery, Brown believed that Christ, “the Captain of liberty as well as of salvation,” had seen fit “to take from me a sword of steel after I had carried it for a time” but now had “put another in my hand (‘the sword of the Spirit’) & I pray God to make me a faithful soldier wherever he may send me, not less on the scaffold, than when surrounded by my warmest sympathizers.”

Regarding his failure at Harper’s Ferry, Brown wrote that he had always believed that even the worst outcome would have some value. Still, he was “a good deal disappointed” with himself for “not keeping up to my own plans,” the result of which was the loss of his two “noble boys & other friends.” Now, he had very little concern for the time and manner of his death, and was “of good cheer.” Closing the letter, he greeted his friend for the last time, in the name of the “God of the poor and oppressed. . . . Farewell till we ‘meet again.’”38

Vaill and his associates in Connecticut received Brown’s response with great enthusiasm, including the Reverend Leonard Bacon, who wanted to publish the letters of Vaill and Brown in the New York Independent. Unfortunately, Vaill had not made a copy of his own letter, leading him to write to Brown again on November 21, requesting that his original letter be returned for the purpose of transcription. Unfortunately, Vaill’s second letter never reached Brown, being withheld by Andrew Hunter. The prosecutor may have been offended by the minister’s comparison of Brown to the martyrs of “Bloody Mary” in England or simply did not want his prisoner to receive the copy of The Litchfield Enquirer included by Vaill. Because Brown knew nothing of Vaill’s request, the old minister’s letter was not published in The Independent on November 24. Instead, Brown’s letter was published under a short introduction based on Vaill’s reminiscences, composed by Bacon under the title “A Prisoner of Jesus Christ.”39

Around November 19, a proslavery man from Kansas named Smith Crane arrived in Charlestown and almost immediately was grilled for information. Crane told of open discussions about rescue plans and the immediate availability of at least five hundred desperate free-state men standing ready. Brown was the “idol of the anti-slavery ruffians of Kansas,” he declared, and had only “to give the command and they would follow.” Furthermore, Crane claimed to have stopped over in Bellair, Ohio, where he had fallen sick during his eastward trip. While convalescing, he said that he had overheard a plot involving the invaders using the railroad.

This report, plus news of a warning telegram from a proslavery federal marshal in Ohio, once more ignited fear in Charlestown. The Baltimore American reported that on Sunday, November 20, crowds of anxious citizens thronged the streets “from morn till dewy eve.” Gripped as they were by apprehension over another possible invasion, they took little notice of the sunshine and unusually fine weather. Once more worried to distraction, Colonel Davis now sent another wire to Governor Wise in Richmond, requesting that he dispatch troops immediately for the defense of Charlestown.

Meanwhile, rumors of invasion were spreading throughout Virginia, and even Richmond was “in as great a state of excitement” as it had been at the time of the raid. According to the correspondent for the New York Herald, even the governor’s residence was “attended all night by people asking questions.” In response, Wise took prompt action, procuring a special train from Richmond, and loading it with hundreds of militia and cavalry.40 No doubt perceiving that Charlestown might be coming apart at the seams while the whole of Virginia watched with dread, the governor himself boarded the train, determined to head off the crisis.

■

SECTION III

WHEN IN THE PERFECT SCHEME OF GOD

When in the perfect scheme of God,

It shall not be a crime for deeds

To quicken liberating creeds,

And men shall rise where slaves have trod.

—HOWELLS, “OLD BROWN”[1]

1. Howells, “Old Brown.”

CHAPTER 11

VIRGINIA QUAKES, THE SOUTH TREMBLES IN SYMPATHY

Let them hang the old hero and he will haunt them still.

The governor’s trip from Richmond was neither hasty nor direct, although his approach belied his concern over the possibility that Virginia might be invaded. According to Angela Smythe, the governor’s notable trip to Charlestown was segmented, taking “almost 24 hours, including travel and delays,” crossing two states and the District of Columbia by steamship and three different railroads. Turning the intervention into something of an event, his trip seems a political maneuver intended to have demonstrated his strength as a putative presidential candidate, as well as Virginia’s determined and resolute posture before the nation. As Smythe notes, “Wise’s presence on this journey ensured that the deployment’s progress was chronicled in leading newspapers.” Along with his aides, Wise had gone first from Richmond to Washington city, where he paraded for two miles along Pennsylvania Avenue ahead of the Richmond Grays, showing off their newly issued Miníe rifles from the Virginia state arsenal. After the parade, Wise and his troops continued their trek to Charlestown (see figure 11.1).

The governor’s train finally arrived late in the afternoon on Sunday, November 20, and was greeted by Prosecutor Andrew Hunter. The correspondent of the Baltimore American noted the names of several of the militia groups on the train, including the Richmond Grays, Company F, the Virginia Riflemen, and the Young Guard, along with well more than one hundred horsemen. The correspondent added that Wise had received a wire en route from Governor Salmon Chase of Ohio, who warned that a large number of men reportedly were attempting a rescue assault on Charlestown. Wise telegraphed in return that if the invaders were permitted to cross the state line, he would hold Chase personally responsible and have him tried for treason.1

The Tribune’s Ned House, still hidden in plain sight, was also present at the station when Wise arrived in Charlestown. He reported afterward that the governor seemed “anxious and nervous” when greeted by Andrew Hunter. According to one source, a letter from Wise at the time revealed that he “was not altogether animated by ambitious motives in getting up the parade of troops and display of chivalry on the border of his State, but was really terrified, and with the whole population was fully persuaded that the North were advancing in large armies to rescue the prisoners and lay waste the land.” The Herald similarly reported that Wise had no doubt of a “determined and thorough organization through out the northern and western States” planning to rescue Brown and his men. His concerns were based on a number of communications from “responsible parties” in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York, urging him to be prepared for invasion.

It also seemed to House that Wise’s encounter with Colonel Davis upon arrival was “not strictly favorable,” and that their conversation was too brief and “energetic” to be positive. He also noted the presence of the governor’s son, Obadiah (“Obie”) Jennings Wise, the editor of the Richmond Enquirer (the governor was part owner of the paper as well). Despite his powerful influence, the younger Wise was subordinated to the role of private in Virginia’s Company F because a state law proscribed duelists from holding political office or officer’s rank in the military. Obie had participated in eight public duels; otherwise, his father might have placed him in command of all the forces in Charlestown.

As Smythe has observed, it is likely that the legendary presence of John Wilkes Booth in Charlestown was because of Obie’s nod of support, with the final approval of the governor himself. The man who would later assassinate President Lincoln was obsessed with military glory and had an extensive association with the Grays, including close friendships with some of its members. Furthermore, the celebrity presence of Booth in Charlestown was public knowledge among Virginians. The Baltimore American journalist thus noted in his correspondence that Booth, “a son of Junius Brutus Booth,” had “shouldered his musket and marched with the Grays to the reported scene of deadly conflict”—an overstatement because Booth had not gone to Harper’s Ferry, “the scene of the deadly conflict.” Still, his decision to don a military uniform and abandon his post at the Richmond Theater cost him his job, and afterward, it took influential friends to persuade the theater manager to rehire the handsome actor.2

Although it was impossible for Wise to have placed his son in command of the gathering forces at Charlestown, it was equally impossible for Colonel Davis to have retained his role as commander. The peculiar looking officer had so fumbled in his role that he had become something of a laughingstock—largely due to the reports coming from Ned House in the Tribune. Mocking headlines such as “1,000 Men in Arms . . . A Chivarlous Colonel . . . Virginians Enraged at Him. They Feel Humiliated” must have been more than irritating to Governor Wise. From the ongoing incidents of arson to rumors of invasion, Davis seemed more inclined to cry for help than to rally his forces in the face of possible attack. “This became an embarrassment to citizens who blamed Davis for making the Old Dominion appear more ridiculous than ever in the eyes of the world,” concluded the Tribune. “They are both ashamed of him and of themselves.”3

FIGURE 11.1 Portrait of Governor Henry A. Wise, published the same month of Brown’s hanging. New York Illustrated News, December 24, 1859.

However, Wise may have been more embarrassed when the Tribune reported that Davis boasted of his friendship with Obie and that recently he had stood as his second in a duel. House had merely reported what Davis himself had revealed, but revelation of Davis’s part in a duel put the governor in a bad way because the Virginia law penalizing duelers also extended to those standing second in such contests. When Davis’s association with the younger Wise in an “affair of honor” became publicized, the governor had to cover his violation of the law, quickly replacing Davis “in a delicately worded order of substitution” by the appointment of General William B. Taliaferro (whose Italian surname was Virginianized as “Tollifer”).4

It was pretended after the fact that the reason for Davis’s replacement was due to Taliaferro’s higher rank or that it was known all along that Davis was only acting as an “advising officer.” But when Taliaferro arrived in town on November 22, Ned House could not restrain his sarcasm. Under the heading “Cheering Prospects,” he declared, “I have the satisfaction of announcing the expected restoration of this place to a tolerable condition of decorum. Col. Davis has been done for. His reign is ended.” Contrary to claims that Davis had volunteered to resign his role, or that he never was the official commander, House pointed out that Wise had needed to “regulate the deficiencies of Col. Davis’s rule” and that the colonel himself was quite dejected about the outcome. “Great things are looked for from the new General,” House concluded, “and the old Colonel is already passing from popular regard. Le Roi est mort. Vive le Roi.”

House’s gibes seem merciless, but they were not without warrant. Davis’s own indiscretion had exposed the governor’s uneven handling of the law, suggesting the illegal appointment had been made in keeping with Obie’s wishes. Nor had the colonel proved a capable leader of men, even in the battle against shadows and rumors. To top off the episode in terms nearly burlesque, after the sun almost literally had set on Davis’s command, a guard thought he had seen an approaching figure in the darkness of night and shouted a command to halt. When the threatening figure continued moving toward him, he discharged a warning shot, arousing soldiers and civilians to readiness. However, the approaching figure was only a cow, the news of which gave Ned House even more delightful ammunition. When the story broke in the pages of the Tribune, the headline proclaimed “The Charlestown Fright . . . A Sentinel Challenges a Cow. She Refuses to Halt.” The Northern press was generally amused, and antislavery papers such as the Huntingdon (PA) Journal had a field day relaying the story, complete with a mocking woodcut sketch of the soldier and the incoming cow.5

Meanwhile, the contest over who would provide the prevailing interpretation of John Brown was well underway, most notably between the Tribune and the Herald. Greeley’s Tribune took the position that Brown was something of a Don Quixote, “who, in spite of his delusions, and the absurdity of his enterprises, always preserves our respect, and even veneration, by the display of many of the noblest qualities of human nature.” Brown had “infected the good people of Virginia with a delusion as great as his own,” and it now seemed “impossible for them to get over the terror which his bold seizure of Harper’s Ferry inspired.” Indeed, Virginia was “strongly impressed” with the idea of an army of liberators invading Virginia disguised as peddlers, while another invasion of “desperate Abolitionists is expected from the North, marching in battle array, to storm the Jail at Charlestown, to liberate Brown, and to place him at their head for the accomplishment of his original enterprise.” In another article, the editor predicted that 1860 would witness a memorable conflict between the advocates and opponents of slavery. “The question—‘Shall Human Slavery be further diffused by the power and under the flag of the Federal Union?’ is now to receive a momentous if not a conclusive answer.”6

On the other hand, the right-wing Herald delivered a constant stream of proslavery reportage, drawing on its extensive correspondence as well as reprinting articles from other papers. Throughout the last days of John Brown, the Herald offered an array of stories that were intended to diminish the old man and to discredit any sentiment of racial equality or the abolitionist cause. For instance, making good use of recent political difficulties faced by President Geffrard of Haiti, the editor Bennett railed against any notion that blacks were ready for freedom. Under the heading “Nigger Capacity for Self-Government,” Bennett thus opined that blacks would never have “the capacity to understand the difference between a despotic and a representative system of government” and understood only “the arguments of a brute force.” Free institutions were jeopardized in Haiti for the same reason that any appeal to “insurrection in our Southern States” had fallen stillborn. With the intention of further discrediting abolitionist claims, the Herald likewise conveyed articles from the Richmond Enquirer that glorified slavery. One such report told of an elderly “colored” woman named Margaret, who reportedly returned herself to slavery in Richmond after being emancipated nine years previous and working as a free woman in the North.

As far as circumstances in Charlestown were concerned, the Herald editorial on November 22 explained that the people of Virginia had been “easy victims of some practical jokers in their midst.” To be sure, the panic was ridiculous and the people of Charlestown had become reactionary to the point of accusing innocent people, menacing strangers, and censoring the press. Yet some allowance had to be made for the “natural exasperation of the people of Virginia at seeing their State invaded by a band of crazy desperadoes,” the editor concluded. “Let somebody take care of Colonel Davis, and let Brown be hanged without any more fuss.”7

Yet there was a certain irony in the Herald’s role as the leading conservative and proslavery newspaper in the country. Although malign and racist in intent, the paper’s scope of condemnation was so broadly focused and its reportage so expansive that the Herald inadvertently provided a great deal of information about Brown, his admirers, and abolitionism. Nor is this a point for historians alone; even the old man’s contemporaries recognized the amount of antislavery raw material in the Herald, especially regarding the John Brown episode—material that reached people who otherwise would never read an antislavery journal. As Brown’s old friend Herman Vaill observed, “[w]here the Tribune and Independent cannot go, & where living preachers of God’s testimony against oppression may not open their mouths . . . James Gordon Bennett’s Herald will be a witness for the martyr, & Gov. Wise & all Virginia & all the South, as far as they read . . . will tremble in their shoes.”

Perhaps this was no truer than when Bennett published pieces from Frederick Douglass’ Paper, such as an editorial from November 11 titled “The Reign of Terror in the South.” Presented with the contemptuous title “Undisguised, Outspoken Abolitionism,” the Herald featured the entire editorial of the famous black abolitionist without interpolation, ironically permitting Douglass’s voice to ring out with stunning clarity. “[T]here is a John Brown in every slaveholder’s conscience,” he wrote. “Nor can Virginia courts and executioners cast him out. Let them hang the old hero and he will haunt them still.” Mocking any attempt to prove the old man insane, and denying any notion that Brown was compelled by the “impulse of mad revenge,” Douglass declared Brown a believer of both the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, and “a true standard of heroic philanthropy.” It was not John Brown who was mad, he concluded, but rather, “[t]his age is too gross and sensual to appreciate his deeds, and so calls him mad; but the future will write his epitaph upon the hearts of a people freed from slavery because he struck the first effectual blow.”8

With Wise’s arrival there was now a military presence in Charlestown numbering one thousand armed men, including volunteers from other towns in Virginia, such as Winchester, Alexandria, and Mount Vernon. It was understood that the governor’s visit was to be short and meaningful, as House put it somewhat sarcastically, “to inspire the military with some of his own heroism, and to give encouragement and strength, by his own presence, to the shriveled senses of the Charlestown people.”

The next day, Monday, November 21, the governor oversaw a “grand military parade and review,” the local Herald affiliate describing him as appearing “elevated with the responsibility that fate had thrown upon him,” moving with “stately dignity along the line. . . . Here was no longer the mere Governor of a confederated State, but the chief of a great Commonwealth.” Afterward, ordered the Richmond military to return home—evidently persuaded that the threat of invasion had proved hollow or at least that Charlestown had sufficient forces on the ground.

However, leaders in Charlestown were not as confident and protested so much that Wise remanded his order, leaving some Richmond units along with the Petersburg Artillery. Following the formalities, citizens watched the impressive drilling of the Richmond Grays but afterward may have been a little intimidated when the soldiers were turned loose in town, full of raucous laughter and games in the streets. Observing these uniformed visitors, House thought the troops were displeased over being made to remain in Charlestown; meanwhile, the citizens had their own dilemma. On one hand, to send away the soldiers prematurely might expose Charlestown to an attack. On the other hand, to keep the soldiers meant the town would be crowded with strangers—young men to be housed and accommodated—and tolerated in their noisy games, “uproar,” and drunkenness. “The town-people are in the condition of the gentleman who drew the elephant in a raffle,” House noted wryly. “[N]ow they have got them, they don’t know what to do with their guests. . . . the people are beginning to consider whether paying by loss of sleep and gain of anxieties for the luxury of a military encampment is not enjoying it at a little too high a figure.”9

In the afternoon, Wise and his staff held a long interview with Brown and the other prisoners, the main objective being to urge them to prepare for death because “the sentence of the Court would be carried out without any interference on his part.” The old man was not fazed by Wise’s determined words. Sitting, perhaps with his Bible resting on his knee, his resignation and tranquility must nearly have disarmed the governor. Declaring himself ready to die, Brown further justified his course of action, expressing regret only for his tactical errors at Harper’s Ferry. Likewise, he cordially greeted members of the newly arrived militia, although the infusion of curious soldiers became irritating. He reminded his guests that he and his fellow prisoners were not a “monkey-show.”10

After Wise and his troops departed, Brown was surprised to receive another visitor, this one a friend from the past whose association dated back to the 1830s. Morrow B. Lowry was from a Scots-Irish family that had settled in northwestern Pennsylvania as far back as the purchase of the Erie Triangle from New York in 1792.11 For many years the Lowrys and a few other families were locked in conflict over settlement rights with the Pennsylvania Population Company (PPC) of Philadelphia, a conglomerate of eastern capitalists. Due to the failure of the State Assembly to establish consistent and fair procedures for acquiring title to land, along with circumstances of war with Native Americans, the Lowrys and others had lost claims to their lands against the PPC, which had bought up huge tracts and sent their own settlers using an alternative system permitted by the state.12

When Brown came to northwestern Pennsylvania in 1826, he was a young husband, a father, and an aspiring frontier entrepreneur. However, he seems to have thrown himself immediately into an effort to instigate the old claimants, including a Lowry relative, to bring suit against the state.13 As brash, presumptuous, and ill fated as were his actions in this case, it was characteristic of John Brown from his youth to fight bullies and to defend the underdog. As one of his siblings put it, one of Brown’s “chief characteristics” was a “remarkable sensitiveness to wrong and injustice.”14 However, even if Brown’s first effort at slaying giants failed, this episode marked the beginning of a successful and respected career in northwestern Pennsylvania, and probably won the admiration of Lowry’s family. Morrow Lowry was thirteen years younger than Brown, and he was still a young man when the latter left Pennsylvania to return to Ohio in 1835. That he would venture so boldly into Virginia to visit the most hated man in the South suggests his interest was rooted in the memory of his family’s admiration for John Brown.

After news of the Harper’s Ferry raid reached northwestern Pennsylvania, Lowry heard it rumored that the leader of the failed invasion was the same John Brown that was known to them twenty-five years before in Crawford County. Believing the man imprisoned in Virginia was “an old and respected friend,” Lowry decided he should go to Brown in Virginia with the “salutations of his old neighbors in North Western Pennsylvania.” He proceeded by applying for a letter from the adjutant general of Pennsylvania and other letters from associates in Philadelphia and Baltimore.15 When he reached Philadelphia, however, his friends warned him not to proceed into Virginia, fearing he would be harmed should it be learned he was a friend of John Brown. Proceeding cautiously on to Baltimore on Friday, November 18, he learned that “the excitement was at fever heat” in Virginia over the possibility of an invasion. Lowry spent the weekend in Baltimore, finally taking the train for Harper’s Ferry on Monday morning, the same day that Wise was making his public trip to Charlestown.

Armed with his letters, Lowry found no resistance at Harper’s Ferry and was even invited to ride into Charlestown on a train with troops from Richmond. He was at first suspected of being “a clergyman of the Beecher School” but finally passed muster with those whose role was to prevent the entrance of “Abolitionist spies.” Once in town, Lowry first sought out Governor Wise with the help of the outgoing Colonel Davis; failing to locate the governor, Davis then brought Lowry directly to the jail, where he entered Brown’s cell in the company of other men.

Lowry did not say so, but the relative ease with which he passed from Harper’s Ferry into the very presence of John Brown probably suggests his letters as well as his presentation in Charlestown were premised on something of a ruse. According to Wise, Lowry had claimed to be a political conservative, and further had said that his venture to Charlestown was only in keeping with a wager made among his countrymen about the real identity of the prisoner. More so than his letters of introduction, it was probably Lowry’s posturing as a sympathizer with slavery that seems to have brought him so easily into the Charlestown jail.16

Upon entering the Brown’s cell, Lowry was struck by the near reverence that the Virginians showed toward the old man, whereas in the presence of the other prisoners they “cracked their jokes freely and carelessly.” As Lowry put it, the Virginians stood before him “silent, as in the presence of some superior being.” Looking up from his reading, Brown greeted his guest “cordially and gratefully” and showed pleasant surprise on learning Lowry’s identity. The old man stated his surprise at seeing an old friend from Crawford County, expressing the tender feelings he held for his old Pennsylvania home, especially because it was the resting place of his first wife, Dianthe, and two young sons. “I cannot pretend to give his language,” Lowry wrote afterward, “[but] it was the natural expression of a deep and impassioned nature, and as eloquent as words could be uttered.”17

During their conversation, Wise was reviewing the troops, and the martial music was so loud that it became distracting. Lowry asked Brown if it he was bothered by the sound, and the old man replied that he found it rather inspiring. As the two friends spoke, the governor then gave a rousing speech before the townsmen, at one point declaring that if the Republican candidate, John C. Fremont, had been elected president in 1856, he and his Virginians would have marched into the capital and hanged the Black Republican, and took control of the federal government. When Lowry was told that his visit must end, Brown walked him to the doorway of the cell. Still enthused by their meeting, Lowry declared his intention of returning the next day if possible, although Brown seemed to know that he would not be permitted another visit. With the faintest of smiles, the old man responded, “Tell those without that I am cheerful.”18

With slight difficulty, Lowry found accommodations in the home of a hospitable citizen, whose wife first had to be persuaded that her guest was no abolitionist. Before bed, he was invited to the home of Wells Hawks, where Governor Wise was staying. Hawks was a Massachusetts carriage maker who had made his home in the South in the 1830s and would prove a devoted friend of slavery, afterward serving on the staff of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson during the Civil War. Although Lowry had already managed to meet Brown, he was probably invited to meet Wise because he had entered town with letters requesting permission of the governor. Their meeting was brief, and the governor assumed Lowry was a clergyman with Southern sympathies. In their conversation, Lowry claimed that he had only come to confirm the identity of the prisoner and settle a wager. When Wise offered permission for him to meet Brown, he was surprised to learn that Lowry had already obtained a meeting earlier that day. The governor then asked him if the old man had been considered insane when he resided in Pennsylvania. Lowry responded that Brown was thought to be both sane and honest by his neighbors in those days.

The following morning, the two met again on the train going down to Harper’s Ferry, but Lowry’s conversation now seemed different in tone. Asking Wise if he would consider commuting Brown’s sentence, the governor replied curtly that he would not do so, nor had Brown asked to be pardoned. The only condition on which he would surrender “General” Brown, Wise added sarcastically, was if “General Sympathy” was surrendered for execution in his stead. No doubt, Wise’s suspicion was aroused when Lowry continued to ply him with questions, especially when the Pennsylvanian began to express the belief that Brown had become a monomaniac and was “as crazy, on the subject of slavery as Gerrit Smith.” To this, the governor replied, “Men of that kind of insanity ought to be hung.”

Lowry’s report on the visit was published only days before Brown was hanged, but Wise responded fairly soon afterward, suggesting his irritation over the episode. To no surprise, Wise’s response was published in the Erie Observer, “the leading Democratic mouthpiece” in northwestern Pennsylvania. His evident intention was to contradict some of the details of the report, although the bigger discrepancy was in what Lowry did not admit, especially the manner in which he had pretended himself a conservative Democrat interested only in settling a bet. “To me, certainly,” Wise complained, Lowry “professed to be a conservative and anything else but a sympathizer with Brown and his associates. But what he really is, is now very apparent.” However, Wise was probably more irritated by Lowry’s conclusion that “the present panic among these Virginians demonstrated the correctness of Brown’s estimate of them when he thought that a small body of slaves with those unearthly weapons in their hands, could rush down from the mountains, victors over a panic-stricken Commonwealth.”19

On Tuesday evening, November 22, Jailer Avis allowed the correspondent of the Baltimore American to slip into the jail and interview the old man. Brown greeted him kindly, always prepared to extend the record of his remarks with the press. It seemed to the correspondent that Brown took “the greatest pleasure” in discussing slavery. He had no contempt for the people of Virginia, Brown declared, and believed they were “a generous people.” However, he abhorred the institution of slavery. Rehearsing his mistakes at Harper’s Ferry, Brown continued that his blunder was in retreating to the engine house, when he could have made a clean escape had he brought his hostages to the bridge. Had he further fortified each end of the bridge with even a small number of men, he would have given troops a good deal of trouble before they would have surrendered. “For this great blunder he says he ought to be hanged!” Indeed, he stated his perfect resignation to his fate, and certainly was not conscious of having committed a crime.”

Given Brown’s well-publicized belief in white–black equality, perhaps it was inevitable that he would be questioned on the subject of “amalgamation”—the nineteenth-century term for the sexual mixing of whites with people of color. When the Baltimore American correspondent raised the issue of “amalgamation,” Brown responded that he was opposed to it but that he would “much prefer a son or a daughter of his to marry an industrious and honest Negro than an indolent and dishonest white man.” For a contemporary reader, the old man’s remarks may seem contradictory, particularly coming from a man who, as David Reynolds has written, “stands out for his utter lack of prejudice.”

Certainly, in Brown’s era the widespread rape and sexual exploitation of the helpless slaves of the South was well known. However, the reporter’s query was really an anti-abolition question with no concern for the forced “mixing” that took place in the slave states. The real point of his question pertained to the extent to which Brown would be willing to go in keeping with racial equality in the absence of slavery. From the perspectives of both the traditional proslavery Southerner and the anti-abolitionist Northerner, “amalgamation” was the real problem, while “mixing” in the South was controlled under slavery, thus protecting the alleged superiority of the white race. As Edward Crowther has written, to proslavery people, “Abolitionism and its first cousin, Free Love, would lead to racial amalgamation and, ultimately, the deterioration of the races.”

Even granting that interracial marriage was permitted in a small number of free states in Brown’s era, such marriages would have been few and highly disfavored across the North. Under these circumstances, amalgamation would more typically involve fornication, a social circumstance that the old man considered both immoral and particularly denigrating to nonwhites. Indeed, his views might have been heavily formed by this impression because his home state of Ohio was a bastion of resistance toward interracial marriage and did not repeal its prohibition until well after Brown’s time.20

As W. E. B. Du Bois put it, John Brown related to blacks “on a plane of perfect equality,” and “neither descended upon them from above nor wallowed with their lowest”—which certainly entailed his rejecting any notion of sexual blending outside of what he believed was the divinely sanctioned institution of marriage. Furthermore, black people themselves were hardly as interested in interracial marriage as they were in attaining freedom and economic justice.21 Whereas whites were obsessed with amalgamation, the more relevant debate among blacks in the antebellum era pertained to the question of self-repatriation to Africa. Considering the influence that early black nationalists seem to have had on Brown, it also seems his response reflected a rare sensibility as far as the black perspective was concerned. He had once even paid for a printing of David Walker’s protonationalist classic Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1830) and would not easily have forgotten the author’s words: “Do they not institute laws to prohibit us from marrying among the whites? . . . I would not give a pinch of snuff to be married to any white person I ever saw in all the days of my life.” Like other nationalists, Walker believed that a black man who married a white woman would more likely become a “double slave to her” and would be appropriately treated by her as a “NIGER.” Thus, as both a Christian and as a radical reformer influenced by early black nationalism, it is not surprising that Brown would oppose amalgamation, because it more likely carried the association of interracial sexual promiscuity and racial degradation, not the healthful building of family and community.22

On the other hand, Brown’s further remarks set him apart quite vividly from the prevailing attitudes of a largely racist white society, which eschewed both the notion of black equality and the marital union of whites and blacks. That he could tell a Southern journalist that he would consent to his daughter marrying a “good and industrious” black man over against an undesirable white man was an extremely radical remark for any white man to make in 1859 and would have been so still in 1959.

Consider that just one year before, candidate Abraham Lincoln declared his belief that there was a hard-and-fast “physical difference” between the superior white race and blacks and that the two races would never live together “upon the footing of perfect equality.” In contrast, the same year, John Brown wrote his Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States, the rule of law for his intended community of liberated blacks, “proscribed peoples,” and their white allies. Article XL prohibits “unlawful intercourse of the sexes,” by which Brown meant fornication; otherwise, there is no mention of “amalgamation.”23 As one of Brown’s grandchildren concluded, he viewed racial amalgamation as it was regularly practiced, as “a monstrosity based on the coercion of slavery.”24 In a sense, too, his vision of history was bound up with the life and death of slavery itself. It seems he could no more contemplate the possibility of future interracial unions in a democratic context than he could envision the United States beyond the destruction of slavery itself.

It was at this time, during the last full week of November, that Brown wrote a number of family letters, sending information and words of encouragement to his wife, as well as to his children in New York and Ohio. Unaware that Mary had left her hosts at Perth Amboy and returned to Philadelphia, Brown wrote to her in care of Rebecca Spring on November 21. “This is ‘just as it should be,’ and let me still say, ‘Be of good cheer,’” he wrote, “for we shall soon ‘come out of all our great tribulations,’ and very soon (if we trust in him) ‘God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes.’” Toward the end of the letter, he updated her with the morbid details of the deaths of their sons and the Thompson boys, who had accompanied them from North Elba. “I have just learned that our poor Watson lingered with his wound until Wednesday about noon of the 19th Oct.,” he wrote flatly. “Oliver died near my side in a few moments after he was shot.”

To his family in North Elba, the old man wrote that the time and form of his death was a small concern to him. “I feel just as content to die for God’s eternal Truth, and for suffering humanity’s, on the scaffold as in any other way.” Nor was he simply being brave. “No; I would readily own my wrong, were I in the least convinced of it.” He had now been imprisoned for more than a month and had had sufficient time to thoroughly contemplate his actions and was “most grateful that I am counted (in the least possible degree) worthy to suffer for the truth. . . . I have enjoyed life much; why should I complain on leaving it?” To his son Jason, who had chosen to remain in Ohio rather than join his father and brothers in Virginia, Brown wrote that a “calm peace” now filled his mind both day and night. “Of this neither the powers of Earth, or hell can deprive me.” He closed by urging Jason and his family not to grieve for a single moment because of him, as he trusted that his life had “not been entirely thrown away” and that his death “shall not be in Vain.” Indeed, God could “make it to be of a thousand times more value to his own cause than all the miserable service (at best) that I have rendered it during my life.” Besides their “earnest sympathy,” he concluded, “they could now do nothing for him except to assure him that they were “all fully ‘persuaded to be Christians.’”25

During the same week, Ned House published one of his most disturbing pieces in the Tribune, which he wrote on November 22 and smuggled to New York in time for the Friday edition of November 25. Under the title “What Brown Has Accomplished,” House gave what may be the most important characterization of his reportage, particularly in observing the old man’s awareness of his impact upon Virginia and the South. Based on House’s own firsthand observation, the journalist described Brown as manifesting “composure and contentment,” along with “the calmness with which he views his certain fate,” so much so that even his visitors were filled with amazement. “Considered from his own point,” House wrote further, the old man was comforted by the realization that his invasion was no failure after all, “but a vast advantage gained.”

The Virginians, although the last thing they would wish to do would be to cheer old Brown’s spirits, have not had wit enough to keep from him the consequences of his movement. He knows, almost as well as any person in the country, the extent of the shock he has given. He has been told how Virginia quakes, and that almost the whole South trembles in sympathy. He has seen the frightened fury which has spread over the neighborhood of the scene of his exploit. . . . the entire State of Virginia blinded with madness, and thrilled through all its limits with a reckless terror; the people rising in arms against an invisible enemy . . . fleeing when no man pursueth; the neighboring States kindled with the same flame. . . . All this Brown knows, and is consoled by it. But he shows no exultation over it, simply speaking of it earnestly and tranquilly. . . .

House concluded by describing how visitors in town had told him “woeful stories of the cessation of business” and “the pervading apprehensions of danger” in Virginia and deeper in the South. It was clear that “great public insecurity” had overtaken the Old Dominion, to the point that some slaveholding families had spoken of migrating to “less troubled land.” One local slaveholder had even admitted that he would rather employ white labor on his farm were it feasible.

Clearly, the “paralysis of dread” had overtaken Virginia and the South, and it was so clear that even Brown’s imprisoned men were amused by it, although the old man himself never laughed. The Tribune elsewhere quoted from a letter sent from Petersburg, Virginia, that panic had seized “all classes of the people” and exaggerated reports had resulted in dispatching patrols to watch the city and scout along the Appomattox River. False arrests and “foolish fears” had gripped many, and some slaveholders were “desirous of selling their slaves” while others had begun to speak of leaving Virginia and settling elsewhere. Even the newly installed commander Taliaferro wrote to his wife that he found the people of Charlestown “very much alarmed.” Although he doubted that he and his troops would see a fight, even he seemed to believe that the “rumors and myths” were “very significant.” On Wednesday, November 23, Mayor Thomas Green of Charlestown issued a proclamation “in case of alarm,” warning citizens to remain indoors and keep a safe distance from the jailhouse. Charlestown’s main street would be kept clear during the day and night, and any citizen who violated his directives would be arrested and prosecuted.26

While Ned House had brought to light Brown’s inadvertent accomplishments in Virginia, his own unique role in exposing the fears, foibles, and vanity of the powerful and slaveholding class around Charlestown is undoubted. Throughout the later part of November, it was clear that his undercover reporting was getting on the nerves of local officials, which only gave the journalist more inspiration. On November 16, House wrote that the “principal topic” of disturbance among Charlestown leaders was his reporting in the Tribune. The local prosecuting attorney, Charles Harding, whom House had delightfully mocked during Brown’s trial, seems to have become obsessed with the Tribune and its mysterious correspondent. “Today,” House observed, Harding was walking around town with a copy of the newspaper in his hand, “uttering execrations . . . ejecting saliva aloft, and catching it on his chin, which he practices with great success.”

Meanwhile, the Virginians may have found passing solace in the erroneous news emanating from Boston that the undercover Tribune correspondent had returned to New York and his identity was known—until Greeley inserted a note on November 24 stating that “our correspondent will most probably remain at his post until after the execution of the condemned men.” Greeley and House were likely amused afterward, when a Baltimore American correspondent wrote that there was great anxiety in Charlestown to find out the identity of the despised journalist. “I was offered $20 yesterday for his name,” he reported, “but I was as ignorant of it as the man making the offer. If found out, he will fare badly.” Although it probably was getting dangerous for Ned House to remain in Charlestown, he was determined to keep at his post until December 2, when Brown went to the gallows.27

While Virginia fought its fevered nightmares, Brown continued to reign over the attention of the nation, seated comfortably on the unlikely wooden throne of his jail cell. Typically, Brown was so trusted by the jailer that he was not forced to wear manacles or leg irons, and the barred jail cell door was left open, allowing some occasions to stroll in the locked and guarded corridor just outside. By later November, his cell mate, Aaron Stevens, had significantly improved in health and was now moving about the room with greater ease. Under these conditions, an unpleasant visitor stood at the threshold of Brown’s cell and began to mock and deride the old man. Although he typically absorbed passing insults without incident, this time Stevens suddenly jumped up from his bed, visibly angered, and moved rapidly toward the door. Frightened, the sarcastic Virginian forgot himself, stepping back in sheer intimidation. Ned House witnessed the incident, writing in the Tribune that Stevens’s “impulse was uncontrollable, and the effect he produced was, I think, a splendid triumph in its way.”28

However, Brown continued to enjoy other guests, engaging the more enlightened of his visitors in a manner that one associate described as “most pleasant and instructive.” Although he continued to refuse the fellowship of proslavery clergyman, the old man seems to have welcomed the visit of the Reverend Alfred Griffith, their conversation lasting for nearly an hour. To a great extent, Griffith was the kind of minister that Brown happily greeted, given his proven legacy as an outspoken antislavery Methodist leader. Whether or not Brown knew of Griffith before their meeting, the two seem to have had an agreeable conversation, as the Baltimore American journalist put it, “principally on the subject of Slavery.” For decades, Griffith had consistently taken his controversial stance among the Methodists of Alexandria, Virginia, especially in his role as pastor of the Trinity Methodist Church. As a result of his firm opposition to slavery, Methodists in Alexandria ultimately split into two congregations—Griffith’s church being dubbed the “Northern church” and the proslavery congregation, the “Southern church.”29

However, the Baltimore American journalist also observed that toward the end of the visit, their conversation turned to disagreement, the two having “quite a clashing time” as they quoted Bible verses in debate. Clearly, the subject between Brown and Griffith had switched to another topic—undoubtedly the age-old Protestant debate over predestination and free will. As a Methodist, Griffith would naturally have taken John Wesley’s view, which claimed that God’s love in salvation could not be truly expressed without also giving mankind some ability to make a “free will” choice, to either accept or reject the salvation afforded in Jesus Christ.

In contrast, Brown would have held forth the classical Protestant view that his Puritan forebears took from John Calvin. From this standpoint, the human will was fallen and incapable of choosing salvation, and therefore, it was left to God to choose and save those whom He had elected. In classical terms, the Methodist or “Arminian” view would elevate divine love linked to human freedom; the Reformed or “Calvinistic” view would elevate divine sovereignty and elective love. Brown had long been an advocate of the English Reformation tradition and was schooled on classical Calvinist confessions from his youth. Throughout his life he had taken the field of theological opposition against free-will advocates. That he would challenge the venerable Methodist minister on this issue of theology is no surprise, just as it is no wonder that “neither was able to convince the other of the correctness of his peculiar doctrines.” An age-old disagreement, it could hardly find consensus in the Charlestown jail, let alone a theological enclave. Still, Griffith shared both the old man’s view of biblical inspiration and his antislavery convictions. Considering that advocates of spiritualism, deism, and other nontraditional religious opinions often had surrounded Brown, he probably enjoyed the friendly contest.30

One other letter from this period struck a notable chord in Brown’s response, when he heard from Thomas B. Musgrave, Jr., the son of one of his former business associates. In the 1840s, Brown had sold wool to the elder Musgrave’s Northampton Woolen Company, and at times their relationship was strained—Brown once more having taken up the cause of the underdog, this time being the woolgrowers in the tristate area of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Brown’s correspondence with Musgrave hints at the larger conflict that he had entered on in seeking to establish a wool commission operation on behalf of the growers. His objective was to empower these farmers and take control of pricing their wool back from the powerful manufacturers of New England. “From what I can gather,” Brown wrote to Musgrave in 1847, “we do not differ so widely as to our ideas of the value of wool but that we might get at the thing satisfactorily to both.” However, to make his objective clear, he closed with a jest: “I expect to blow all you poor famished Manufacturers Sky low. . . .”

Ultimately, Brown’s crusade on behalf of the woolgrowers was premature, and his wool commission business in Springfield, Massachusetts, closed in 1849 after three years in operation. The manufacturers were far more resourceful in resisting his efforts, and the farmers themselves lacked solidarity and patience. It would take another half-century before the woolgrowers of that region formed their own effective organization. Still, Brown’s years in Springfield proved beneficial, bringing him into contact with the black community in that city, as well as visiting abolitionist speakers and local businessmen with antislavery convictions.31

Musgrave was born in Leeds, England, and probably brought his antislavery sentiments with him to New England, where he made a name in manufacturing. After the manufacturers had fairly well crushed Brown’s efforts on behalf of the woolgrowers, Musgrave remembered him saying humbly that despite having lost so much, “he was thankful to God that he was yet alive.” Musgrave would later say of Brown that he was extremely honest, deep in his feelings, and upright in his dealings with people. “I do not believe that he would commit a wrong act, knowing it to be such,” he declared. “I have often seen him reprove his children for killing flies, when I have been at his home.”32

When news of Brown’s defeat at Harper’s Ferry reached Musgrave in Northampton, he asked his son, now employed by a firm in New York, to contact the old man in jail. Thomas Junior had also known Brown in younger days, and seems to have eagerly dashed off a spirited letter to him at Charlestown. “My dear Brown,” he wrote, “My father who has passed so many pleasant hours with you when from Northampton wishes me to write and offer you his heartfelt sympathy in your hour of great trial.” Inquiring if he wanted or needed anything, whether money or even a visit from his father, young Musgrave wrote, “Tell me . . . if we in any way gain your pardon.” In the letter, he also revealed that he was a business partner with Marcus Spring, who had hosted Brown’s wife in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. “I have talked much with him about you,” he wrote.

Before closing, he loosely quoted from “Warren’s Address,” a popular antebellum song that celebrated General Joseph Warren, a fallen hero of the Revolutionary War:

In the God of battles trust,

Die we may & die we must

But where can man’s times be shed so well

As on the martyr’s patriot bed.

And the rocks shall raise their heads

of his deeds to tell.33

Brown surely would have relished such a letter. However, it never reached him. Once more, Prosecutor Andrew Hunter had withheld it among other letters written to Brown by admirers and enemies. The prosecutor had done so often with good reason, because some were extremely offensive while others seemingly threatened the security of Virginia. However, it appears that Hunter had withheld Musgrave’s letter purely for political reasons. Not only had the young writer raised the analogy of the heroic Warren, but he also had added his own prediction that the time would come when “our country shall be free & no portion of it worked with Negro slavery from the thundering Niagara to the great placid Rio Grande.” And when that time came, Musgrave concluded, “the name of him who fell for many in love for that freedom will not be forgotten.”34

Although it was impossible for Brown’s captors to isolate him sufficiently from becoming an icon of freedom for the North, Hunter and others in Charlestown had made some effort to undercut his fame. For instance, they effectively denied history of a daguerreotype being made of Brown in his jail cell, just as they nearly prevented the sculptor Brackett from completing his work. Perhaps, too, they belatedly came to realize the impact that Brown’s correspondence was having on the North, and hoped to diminish the flow of salutary letters into the old man’s cell that might also show up afterward with Brown’s response in the Tribune or another antislavery newspaper.

When Musgrave did not hear from Brown, he wrote again the following week, and whether out of error or sympathy (or perhaps Musgrave included some money in the envelope), his second letter was permitted to reach the old man. Oddly enough, the second letter has not survived the generations, although it is reflected in Brown’s grateful response.

“My Dear Young Friend,” the old man wrote. “I have just received your most kind & welcome letter of the 15th but did not get any other from you.” Expressing his gratitude for Musgrave’s kindness, Brown added, “Tell your Father that I am quite cheerful, that I do not feel myself in the least degraded by my imprisonment, my chain or the near prospect of the Gallows. Men cannot imprison, or chain or hang the soul. I go joyfully in behalf of Millions that ‘have no rights’ that this ‘great, & glorious’ ‘this Christian Republic’ ‘is bound to respect.’” Perhaps Musgrave’s second letter included a similar reference to Warren and the Revolutionary War, for Brown made the observation that there had been a “[s]trange change in morals political as well as Christian since 1776,” no doubt referring to the manner in which chattel slavery had become so deeply rooted in the nation’s existence. Still, he concluded, he looked forward “to other changes” taking place in “‘God’s good time,’ fully believing that ‘the fashion of this world passeth away.’”35

In later years, Thomas Musgrave Junior recounted how his firm in New York had somehow been listed among companies that were boycotted by the South, perhaps in part because of his friendly correspondence with Brown.36 He also recalled another scene, the last time he saw Brown in person, perhaps in early June 1859, when the old man made his final visit to New York City. Musgrave remembered how Brown had shown up one day at his office, asking to see the firm’s senior officer, Marcus Spring, the very man whose wife would later visit him in the Charlestown jail.37

While waiting to see Spring, the old man’s eyes fell on a huge bale of sacks made from osnaburg, a coarse, inexpensive fabric notable for its rugged quality and used for everything from tent material to clothing for slaves. In his days as a businessman in Springfield, Brown had purchased osnaburg sacks from the elder Musgrave’s factory, but those likely were made from wool.

Brown sat down on the bale, feeling and rubbing the fabric of the osnaburg sacks with his fingers, and suddenly declared, “These are made of labor that ought to be free.” As an authority on fine wools, he had always prided himself in being able to discern the type and grade of a product just from the touch and feel of the fiber. But Brown’s fingers told him the sacks were not made from wool but, rather, from cotton, undoubtedly picked by the forced and stolen labor of enslaved people.38 Looking intently at Musgrave, he stood up, shaking his head, and soberly repeated the same phrase—“made of labor that ought to be free, made of labor that ought to be free.”39

CHAPTER 12

THE ASHES OF THE PAST

We feel assured that he who sees not as men see does not lay the guilt of innocent blood to our charge.

If the old man did not escape the occasional sniping and insults of mean-spirited visitors, he could at least suffer these indignities until their malice was satisfied and they left him alone again.1 However, one visitor’s malice was as personal as it was relentless, and his presence in Charlestown indicated more than inconvenience for John Brown. The visitor, Henry Clay Pate, was a former opponent in the Kansas wars of 1856, whose resentment had hardened into a determined effort to undermine any notion of Brown’s heroism and Christian martyrdom.

Pate, a native Virginian in his mid-twenties, was an aspiring writer until his zeal for the defense of the South drove him to the Kansas territory. At first he devoted his energies as a correspondent for the St. Louis Republican and to the publication of his own paper, sometimes known as The Border Star. As a Southern patriot and slaveholder, Pate defended chattel servitude and demonized northern capitalists as the true exploiters of humanity, meanwhile recruiting proslavery settlers for the territory. Following a number of dramatic incidents in the spring of 1856, he was deputized as a marshal by the proslavery territorial governor and set out to capture John Brown, who by now had become a controversial free-state champion. When they finally met on the battlefield in June 1856, Pate was captured by Brown—a defeat that left him resentful and bitter, as much for reasons of pride as for politics. The Virginian perhaps greeted news of Brown’s incarceration as an opportunity to gloat, although it seems he was more interested in exploiting the situation for some mean-spirited comeuppance that might also benefit his mediocre career.2

A few days after Brown’s defeat at Harper’s Ferry, Pate readily set his pen to paper, composing an attack on the old man, calling him a lifelong outlaw and a roaming religious hypocrite and horse thief, “as treacherous as an heir of hell and joint heir of the devil.” Quoting a diatribe that he had published in the St. Louis Republican in 1856, Pate declared the old man a restless, sleepless demon with the eye of a snake. He further alleged that Brown had even boasted that he “would take the life of a man as quick as he would that of a dog, if he thought it necessary.”

The Virginian’s letter brought a rebuke in the New York Herald from an anonymous Republican, who accused him of slandering Brown, taunting him as a “Border Ruffian” and President Buchanan’s “pet.” Pate denied these charges, responding that he was a proslavery Democrat and John Brown was indeed a “vile incendiary.” Unlike the old man, Pate boasted that he had not been in jail, killed a man, or “stole[n] a Negro.”3 He immediately set about writing a lengthier polemic titled John Brown, As Viewed by H. Clay Pate, which he completed and published at his own expense just before the old man was hanged.

Even as Pate was rearing his head with contempt, another enemy of John Brown was launching a campaign of invectives against him. In November, the resentful free-state editor George Washington (G. W.) Brown had begun to publish diatribes in his Kansas newspaper, The Herald of Freedom. This Brown, no relation to the abolitionist, was a native of New York who had practiced law in Ohio and published a newspaper in Pennsylvania prior to going to Kansas in 1854. Initially, he was an ardent free-state advocate, and his newspaper became the official publication of the New England Emigrant Aid Company. In 1856, he was even among a number of free-state men, including John Brown Junior, who were arrested and jailed by proslavery officials.4

Although some free-state people had suspected that G. W. Brown was an opportunist all along, it was not until his release from jail that he became a thorn in the side of antislavery men and finally a traitor in the eyes of many free-state people. After spending four months in jail, his case was dismissed without trial and he returned to the editor’s desk. Because proslavery thugs had destroyed his press, he borrowed money from the Emigrant Aid Society in order to reestablish his publication, although he never actually repaid the loan. Although his unpaid debt may suggest opportunism, it was Editor Brown’s political scheming and compromising that ultimately earned the contempt of free-state leaders. Fearful of further reprisals, he began to publish the Herald of Freedom in two versions—one local issue holding forth a moderate if not cooperative position toward the proslavery regime, and another version of the same issue with a patently free-state editorial, ensuring the continued financial support of his New England backers.5

The two Browns held each other in contempt. Rather than criticizing the obvious proslavery aggression in the territory, Brown the editor tended to blame the old man and his free-state associates for exacerbating tensions in Kansas.6 In turn, John Brown wrote that “all honest, sensible Free-State men” considered G. W. Brown’s Herald of Freedom “one of the most mischievous, traitorous publications in the whole country.”

Nor was this simply a personal spat between the two men. Richard Realf, one of John Brown’s Kansas associates, was even more hostile, declaring the editor “a willful liar, a malicious slanderer, and a most contemptible coward,” and invited the inquiries of anyone needing proof. (Evidently, no one in Kansas thought it necessary for Realf to defend his accusations.) Likewise, the antislavery journalist James Redpath wrote that it was a common saying in Kansas that G. W. Brown “would slander his wife, editorially, for ten cents a line, provided that you paid him in advance for a column’s worth.” Redpath further claimed that the editor Brown was not only a craven mercenary but that he also had gotten out of jail by promising to use his Herald of Freedom to encourage cooperation with proslavery leaders—a promise he kept somewhat disingenuously in one version of his Kansas paper. As far as Redpath was concerned, G. W. Brown had become “a mouthpiece and parasite” of proslavery territorial governors, and was little more than an imitator of the New York Herald’s James Gordon Bennett but “without Bennett’s brains.”7

With John Brown awaiting execution in Virginia, it probably was inevitable that the criticisms of men such as Henry Clay Pate and G. W. Brown would include the most vulnerable point of the old man’s Kansas adventure. By all accounts, Editor Brown was insincere if not treacherous. Similarly, Pate was not only “inordinately vain and pompous” but clearly inclined to skew the facts.8 Still, both men were aware of John Brown’s leading role in a particularly violent episode in May 1856, and both sought to reveal the details to the public with the intention of deflating the old man’s reputation as the putative antislavery martyr of the North. Yet they did so by framing the bloody incident in the most one-sided terms, well suited to the proslavery agenda.

The incident, often referred to as “The Pottawatomie Massacre,” never apparently troubled the old man as much as it has subsequently overshadowed his legacy. The gory episode, in which five proslavery men were hacked and stabbed to death, has given pause even to the warmest of Brown’s admirers over the years. The killings have been variously portrayed as sheer cold-blooded murder, as an act of bloody religious and political fanaticism, and in more recent years as the quintessential form of “terrorism.”

Popular portrayals of the killings often have mirrored the currents of the times rather than the facts of the case. Pottawatomie was recast in the later nineteenth century by writers whose contempt for John Brown agreed with the rise of segregation following the demise of Reconstruction. During the twentieth century, after “Lost Cause” revisionism had blamed Brown for starting the Civil War, psychohistorical speculation raised up his image as the “insane” killer of Pottawatomie. Even the current democratic secularist reaction against religious and political “extremism” and “radical fundamentalism” is rife with comparisons of Brown to jihadist fanatics and “American terrorists.” However, even from the first public revelations of the Pottawatomie killings in 1859, ideology trumped fact. The print war between Brown’s enemies and his allies, both of which sought to control the dominant narrative of the incident, actually muddled a realistic understanding of what happened at Pottawatomie.

G. W. Brown had said nothing about the killings for three years, but apparently felt safe to attack the abolitionist after he was sentenced to death. In his first incriminating piece, Editor Brown wrote that the old man “was with the party” that killed Allen Wilkinson, William Sherman, James Doyle, and his sons, William and Drury Doyle, during the night of May 24–25, 1856. “No man in Kansas has pretended to deny that old John Brown led that murderous fray, which massacred those men,” he wrote in the Herald of Freedom. Alleging that neither Brown nor his sons were ever injured by proslavery forces, he concluded that the abolitionist was a “monomaniac” from his arrival in the territory.

In fact, Brown never intended to settle in Kansas and had remained focused on his Virginia plan, even after several of his sons and their families determined to join the free-state movement in 1854.9 It was only when he received a letter from his family describing “lawless bands of miscreants” and proslavery violence that Brown made his way westward in the summer of 1855. To the contrary of G. W. Brown’s account, the old man’s initial correspondence suggests that his first months in Kansas were defined by domestic support and positive expectations concerning the future of the territory. Notwithstanding that a proslavery legislature had been forced on the settlers that summer, the optimistic John Brown still hoped that democracy would prevail according to the antislavery majority.

The opening of the Kansas and Nebraska Territories for settlement in 1854 was defined by the United States according to the doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” which entailed the settlers deciding by vote whether these territories would enter the Union as slave or free states. It was widely assumed that Nebraska would be a free state, whereas Kansas proved to be an imbroglio that surprised and horrified the nation. The presidential administrations of outgoing Franklin Pierce and incoming James Buchanan tended to wink at proslavery abuses in the territory, and it began to appear that guns, not votes, would decide the fate of Kansas.

In the fall of 1855, some free-state men were murdered, and the antislavery town of Lawrence was nearly assaulted by a large proslavery force without intervention from the federal or territorial governments. Although the cold prairie winter discouraged further aggression, Brown now anticipated more proslavery violence would take place in the coming spring. Meanwhile, he and his sons moved back and forth between Missouri and the territory, conducting business without aggression, contrary to G. W. Brown’s charge of monomania.10 Of course, the Browns were outspoken as to their belief in black equality and freedom; they further annoyed the proslavery element by assisting Indians in surveying their lands and ousting squatters, many of which were from the South. From the fall of 1855 until the crisis of proslavery invasion in the spring of 1856, the old man had spent his time caring for his family and securing the Brown settlements.11

To no one’s surprise, Bennett’s New York Herald promptly picked up Editor Brown’s articles, which in turn elicited a response from James Redpath in the New-York Daily Tribune. As Brown’s ally and first biographer, Redpath counterattacked, calling G. W. Brown a treacherous mercenary and coward. He “never dared to slander the old man free,” Redpath wrote, but now that John Brown was imprisoned and sentenced to death, he was doing so “with impunity.” As to the killings in Kansas, Redpath claimed that John Brown “was more than sixty miles distant when Doyle and his fellow-ruffians were JUSTLY killed.” To no surprise, G. W. Brown responded, defending his role as a political independent in the free-state movement, and declaring that he had written only what he “believed to be strictly true.” Although Editor Brown was neither honest nor fair in his portrayal of the old man, he was somewhat prophetic when he concluded that any attempt to defend John Brown would prove to be an “unpleasant task.”12

At the same time, G. W. Brown’s diatribes also seem to have sparked other screeds in the press, the most notable by former Virginia senator Isaac Pennybacker in the New York Herald. Pennybacker had served as the federal Survey Examiner in the Kansas Territory and claimed to have been present when John Brown captured Henry Clay Pate in 1856. The former senator railed against the abolitionist as a religious fanatic and a robber of slaveholders’ property and accused him of “inhumanly” murdering men “in their beds” without provocation or justification. G. W. Brown’s articles likewise were picked up in Democratic newspapers in the North, including the conservative Cleveland Plain Dealer, published in the abolitionist’s old tramping grounds. Outraged at these “slanders” against John Brown, his younger half-brother, Jeremiah Brown of Hudson, Ohio, issued a response. Like James Redpath, Jeremiah claimed that John Brown was miles away from Pottawatomie at the time of the killings, and that G. W. Brown’s accusations were “calculated to embitter the few remaining days my brother has to live.”13

Although Brown never communicated his disgust over G. W. Brown to his family by letter, the old man had clearly become embittered over the Herald of Freedom attacks. This became quite apparent when Morrow Lowry, his old Pennsylvania acquaintance, came to visit him earlier in the month. Lowry pointed out that his “Kansas exploits” were being portrayed differently in the Herald of Freedom compared to the accounts “which his friends gave” and then suggested to Brown “that his reputation demanded an explanation.” Brown replied that he understood his allusion, but would not admit that a refutation was necessary. “Time and the honest verdict of posterity will approve of every act of mine to prevent slavery from being established in Kansas,” the old man declared. “I never shed the blood of a fellow-man except in self-defense or in promotion of a righteous cause,” he concluded. As for G. W. Brown, he was “selfish, unjust, revengeful, mercenary, untruthful, and corrupt.” When Lowry objected to such harsh words about their mutual Pennsylvania acquaintance, Brown responded curtly: “Mr. Lowry, you are mistaken if you suppose that anything that George Washington Brown could say can tarnish the character of John Brown.”14

To no surprise, proslavery people were also embittered over reports of the Pottawatomie killings, especially after it became known that a widow of one of the alleged victims had written to John Brown from Tennessee, where she and her family had moved following the Pottawatomie incident. On November 20, Mahala Doyle wrote to Brown, charging him with entering her house at midnight, arresting, and then murdering her husband and two sons. “You can’t say you done it to free slaves,” the miserable woman wrote, “we had none and never expected to own one.” Although the sound of the “dying groans” of her loved ones remained with her, she offered Brown “consolation” from her “scrawl”—a peculiar statement, particularly coming from a woman whose husband and sons were supposedly murdered without cause. Doyle expressed “satisfaction” that Brown had lost two sons at Harper’s Ferry, because he had taken the lives of her two sons, although he had spared her teenage son John. Now, she wrote, John Doyle was “grown up” and “very desirous to be at Charlestown on the day of your execution.”15

Ned House reported to the Tribune that Doyle had also written to Sheriff Campbell, begging that John be permitted to come to Charlestown in time to act as Brown’s ceremonial executioner. If true, her letter to Campbell was not preserved; more likely the report was a distortion based on Doyle’s letter to Brown. It was also reported that John Doyle was granted permission to come to Charlestown but could not get to Virginia because of a hazardous landslide on the way.16 However, no such arrangement was made, and there is no reason to believe that Doyle even came close to putting a noose around the old man’s neck. Perhaps this rumor emanated from an eager correspondent of the Baltimore Sun, who also reported that some local men in Charlestown wanted to raise money for young Doyle’s travel expense. According to this report, the real hindrance was the lack of time before Brown’s execution on December 2. However, Governor Wise would not likely have permitted such a display of personal vendetta, not only in keeping with legal and ceremonial procedure but also out of respect for the prisoner. Even if Wise knew about the Pottawatomie killings, it is unlikely that he would have been willing to share Virginia’s solemn moment of vindication with the son of a Tennessee roughneck.

Mahala Doyle’s letter is now quite familiar to narrators of the Pottawatomie incident, although John Brown himself perhaps never saw it. The Baltimore Sun correspondent claimed that it was to be read to Brown in jail, but if this was accomplished, it was done spitefully in violation of Andrew Hunter’s authority and behind the back of Jailer Avis. In fact, the Doyle letter was withheld by the prosecutor and placed with other “intercepted letters” that afterward were delivered to Governor Wise in Richmond. Second, the letter itself bears no signature of his endorsement, and if the old man had received it, one wonders if it would ever have come to light in the handling of his family. Thus, if Brown heard about Mahala Doyle’s letter, he did so in a secondhand way.

Perhaps this was the reason that Sheriff Campbell seems to have asked the old man about G. W. Brown’s charges in the Herald of Freedom. According to the Baltimore American, Brown had freely acknowledged “his participation” in the killings to Campbell. Brown also told him his reasons for the killings, but these were not relayed in the American.17 A number of retrospective accounts of Brown’s explanation for the killings are available, but in one case there is a contemporary witness of the old man’s explanation, interestingly from the most unlikely source.18 In making light of the dangers that beset the Browns and other free-state people at the time of the killings, G. W. Brown inadvertently recalled that “Brown’s excuse at the time” was the need to meet “murder threats.”19

As far as the Doyle letter is concerned, the more interesting question is how the document came to public knowledge despite being screened and withheld by authorities.20 Most likely, it was “leaked” from a source in Charlestown, which would explain how it was published in the Baltimore Sun and other newspapers throughout the month of December. On the other hand, Mahala Doyle was semiliterate at best and may have been persuaded by proslavery people to compose the letter in the first place. Journalist Richard Hinton claimed that the widow’s affidavit about the Pottawatomie incident was both orchestrated and revised by proslavery politicians, so it is also possible that her letter to John Brown was something of a propaganda production.21 If so, it may be that a copy of the letter was circulated, along with the original that was sent to Charlestown.

Thomas Higginson, another of Brown’s “Secret Six,” read a copy of the letter on December 2 (he did not reveal the source), the same day that the old man was hanged. Higginson wrongly concluded that the letter was a forgery, being another of Brown’s associates who believed the old man was not at the scene of the Pottawatomie killings. Two weeks after Brown’s hanging, the Doyle letter was reprinted from the Baltimore Sun in William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator. However, Garrison affixed a letter immediately afterward from the Kansas correspondent, Richard Hinton, vindicating John Brown. In his letter, Hinton declared his intention of addressing “the ex parte statements now being raked out of the ashes of the past” by G. W. Brown. However, Hinton’s letter was not only unreliable as to a number of facts, but he also denied that Brown was “on the scene” of the killings and that he had it personally from the old man that he was not a “participator in the Potawatomie [sic] homicides.” Hinton finally declared that he would take John Brown’s word “against the oaths of a million of Doyles,” effectively blunting the impact of the widow’s letter.22

In 1883, Mahala Doyle told one of John Brown’s latest detractors that she had no idea what his “real reason” had been for killing her husband and sons. She likewise denied hearing any talk about the old man between her husband and sons and further claimed that there were no elections held nearby their home. These were not only lies after the fact, but afterward Doyle seems to have forgotten her self-portrayal as innocent and unknowing. She assured her correspondent that she could tell a great deal more about “Old Brown & his gang” if given the opportunity.

However, if Mahala Doyle’s later reminiscences were not trustworthy, neither were her published statements in 1856. Even apart from Hinton’s claim that the Pottawatomie affidavits were “concocted” and tampered with by proslavery leaders, the published version of Doyle’s affidavit only thinly covers what she knew at the time. Considering her claim that James Doyle and their sons were innocent bystanders, it is interesting that she seems to have made no protest at Brown’s demand of their “surrender,” because the term suggested some kind of active conflict.23

In fact, Salmon Brown, one of the Pottawatomie killers, recalled how Mahala Doyle berated her husband at the time of the attack. “When the Doyls were captured and taken out of the house,” he wrote, “Old Mrs Doyl” had followed her husband and sons out of the house, telling them “that she had warned them time and again that they would get their pay for their devilment.”24 Because Mahala Doyle actually knew of her husband and sons’ activities, she could not have been entirely unaware of the reason that the self-identified “Northern army” had shown up at her door and demanded the “surrender” of her husband and sons.25

Salmon also recalled that James Doyle and his sons were steeped in the local operations of the most militant proslavery faction, which was seeking to bulldoze the free-state majority by any means necessary. The elder Doyle was actually the “constable” of a proslavery court that had tried to issue warrants for the arrest of the Browns and others, and the two older Doyle sons had acted as his “deputies.” This is at least confirmed in the affidavit of John Doyle in 1856, which includes the admission that his father and brothers had belonged to the “law and order party”—a euphemistic term signifying the most militant racist element among proslavery settlers in the territory.26

Louisa Wilkinson, another Pottawatomie widow, likewise misrepresented her husband Allen Wilkinson as quiet and “not engaged in arresting or disturbing” free-state people. “He took no active part in the pro-slavery cause, so as to aggravate the abolitionists,” she avowed. In fact, Wilkinson was an aggressive proslavery politician and a district attorney for the “bogus” proslavery court that was being forced upon the territory under threat of violence. According to Orville C. Brown, a free-state founder of Osawatomie (and no relation of either John Brown or G. W. Brown), Wilkinson was an “active, violent partisan” and one of the five who actually threatened the Browns with death if they did not leave their settlements.27 Indeed, the five Pottawatomie “victims” were all specifically associated with the militant proslavery faction, and the common notion that they were killed merely for being proslavery men is a gross historical error.

Certainly there is no reason to doubt that the bloody attack along the Pottawatomie Creek had political implications relating to the ruthless “sack” of nearby Lawrence that took place on May 21. Indeed, the attack cannot be separated from the larger political concerns that Brown and his men shared with regard to the aggressive and violent movement of “ruffians” and their proslavery abettors in the territory. “In Kansas there was no democratic government,” observes Paul Finkelman.28 Not only was the democratic process defrauded and threatened with violence by proslavery thugs, but also a timid free-state majority was being bullied and abused by a proslavery minority with the cooperation of a proslavery federal government. Under political conditions in which proslavery officials and courts had robbed free-state people even of free speech, that the Browns came into conflict with local proslavery militants.

Furthermore, the condition of the Kansas territory in May 1856 was nothing short of undeclared civil war, and the most outspoken and resistant free-state people were in the crosshairs of the enemy. In contrast with many of the timorous and passive free-state people, Brown and his sons chose to engage the enemy in guerilla warfare. “Brown did not carefully plan the Pottawatomie raid the way Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh planned the Oklahoma City bombing,” writes Finkelman. “He reacted to specific threats and the sacking of Lawrence by a proslavery mob. This was not terrorism, but a fact of warfare in Bleeding Kansas.”29

Yet if the Pottawatomie attack was a political action taken against proslavery incursion, it was first and foremost a local and personal action in which a father took the initiative to save his family and neighbors in the absence of protection by police or military force, and in the face of perverted “law and order.” Robert McGlone is correct that the Pottawatomie killings expressed a blow “in behalf of the free-state cause” but that the killings were “also the climax of local quarrels” and “a preemptive strike in a clan vendetta.” Brown directed the attack, but the killers were equally “persuaded of the necessity of their task,” so that it is historically inaccurate to speak of the Pottawatomie killings as if it was singularly the work of John Brown. “The Browns thus returned to the Pottawatomie to ‘protect our people’ from the Doyles and their ilk,” McGlone concludes.30

Furthermore, considering the context and special interests underlying the 1856 affidavits, it is also clear that they must be treated as proslavery documents. As for Doyle, although she was no mob wife, she would likely have accepted the violent overthrow of the Browns had her husband, her sons, and the proslavery collaborators succeeded in their plan. Her letter to John Brown was naturally full of resentment toward the man who had saved the lives of his own family at the expense of killing her loved ones. But the letter conveys resentment more than outrage, and her sarcastic suggestion that Brown might take “consolation” from her words bespeak the sentiment of a defeated enemy, not a widowed victim of “terrorism.”31

Shortly before Brown’s hanging, the Baltimore American observed that since bad feelings had arisen locally against him because of the Doyle letter, the old man was busily writing some kind of explanation for his actions in Kansas.32 Like earlier Southern speculation about Brown’s jailhouse “repentance,” this report amounted to wishful thinking. The old man had no intention of defending actions taken under the duress of a proslavery invasion that had both threatened the security of his family and democracy in the territory. His writing prior to execution involved only personal letters to family and friends, and the hasty preparation of a last will.

Prior to the arrival of Henry Clay Pate on November 23, two officials from the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad visited on that Wednesday afternoon.33 The nature of their conversation is not known, although they may actually have expressed a measure of appreciation to the old man for securing the safety of their passengers during the raid. They may also have mentioned an unusual proposal that had been made to them by Josiah Perham, an eastern businessman known for promoting “money-making excursions.” If they did, John Brown would have been more than curious.

According to the New York Herald and the Baltimore American, Perham had approached the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad with the proposition of a “monster excursion from all parts of the country” to witness the execution of John Brown. Perham reportedly hoped for as many as two thousand tourists to buy tickets for this somber railroad tour.34 Of course, Governor Wise would never have permitted such a peculiar if not dubious spectacle, nor does it appear that the railroad officials had even entertained the sensational proposal. However, Perham’s ill-fated “excursion” raises interesting questions, especially because he knew John Brown and was both quixotic and adventurous enough to have dreamed up the scheme for other purposes than profit.

Perham was a native of Maine and may have known of Brown from the early 1840s, when the latter became renowned in the Northeast as a specialist in fine sheep and wool.35 After losing everything in timber speculation in 1837, he relocated to Massachusetts and eventually regained his fortune in the wool business. It was during this period, in the late 1840s, that he conducted regular business transactions with Brown, who then was operating a wool commission house in Springfield.36 By all accounts, Perham was a bold entrepreneur who tried in various ways to exploit connections between entertainment and travel, most notably his moving-image production, the “Seven Mile Mirror.” The show featured a panoramic illustration of the Great Lakes that mechanically “cranked forward” scenes so as to simulate movement along a virtual tour of the region. After making a small fortune on his production, Perham rented a Boston theater and began seeking deals with railroads to bundle their ticket sales with his show.37

To appreciate Perham’s proposed “excursion” to Charlestown, however, it should be noted that by 1860, he had emerged as an influential visionary of the North American railroad, his first notable venture being the People’s Pacific Railroad Company. The railroad’s charter mandated a “continuous railroad” to be constructed from the Missouri River to the Pacific Coast by 1876. Having gained influence and friends in government, Perham afterward transferred his efforts to establishing the Northern Pacific Railroad, gaining a federal charter in 1864.38

In 1862, Perham published his own “platform” as a Union general, calling for the utter defeat and suppression of the slaveholders’ rebellion.39 A strong advocate for the federal union and President Lincoln, Perham recounted his early suspicion of southern radicalism, the failure of the Buchanan administration to take stringent actions against treasonous leaders, and the “cloud” of “thick darkness” that he believed had initially befuddled Lincoln and his cabinet with regard to snuffing out the rebellion. In 1860, Perham not only urged his political associates (including Thaddeus Stevens) to “hang every traitor” but also reacted with urgency at the report that president-elect Lincoln was mortally endangered. Indeed, Perham wrote that in order to secure the inauguration of the threatened president, he had “commenced making timely arrangements with the railroads throughout the country,” in order to transport “one hundred thousand people, privately armed to Washington at excursion prices for tickets.” In doing so, Perham hoped that the presence of so many armed Republicans “might overawe the riotous and rebellious, and permit the inauguration of our chosen chief to take place.”40

Although Perham’s earlier proposal for an “excursion” to Charlestown was certainly consistent given his sensational, visionary style, it may be that he had actually intended something audacious on behalf of his old wool-trading associate. In retrospect it is clear that were Brown and his men to have been rescued even by a formidable group of mercenaries, the effort would have to have been made shortly after his defeat and transport to Charlestown, before any troop buildup. Any other military effort would have entailed an impossibly expansive invading force, far beyond the means of Brown’s allies. But what if hundreds, even thousands of “privately armed” tourists entered Jefferson County, suddenly streaming through the streets of Charlestown like a flash flood? In fact, such a plan seems ludicrous, not the least reason being that the sheriff would have executed Brown on the spot if any rescue attempt was made. However, the possibility that Perham had envisioned his “monster excursion” as a mere means of profit is untenable for someone who not only knew Brown but also held antislavery views. What Perham intended for his “monster excursion” will never be known, but at least he must have hoped that even a myriad of unarmed, sympathetic tourists might somehow overwhelm Charlestown and obstruct the scheduled execution.

John Brown would have been pleasantly surprised to see Josiah Perham but instead was forced to visit with his old Kansas enemy, Henry Clay Pate. Escorted into the cell by the jailer, Pate was also accompanied by a local resident and his son, the latter two apparently attending as witnesses. “Hello, Brown!” Pate called out, with a note of delight in his voice. “Hello, Pate,” the old man answered. Brown may have been suspicious of his almost friendly approach, but he reciprocated by welcoming the Virginian with a courteous handshake. Undoubtedly, Pate was only feigning his commiseration with the old man. Afterward, the New-York Daily Tribune astutely observed that the Virginian was hoping for Brown to acknowledge his bravery in the hearing of his witnesses. Furthermore, Pate was quietly gathering information for his book project, by which he hoped to revise his shameful defeat at Brown’s hands in 1856, as well as destroy the old man’s character once and for all.41

Little survives of their meeting except what Pate recorded in his anti-Brown screed, although it does appear they had a spirited conversation that ranged from Kansas to Virginia and to points of Brown’s life story as well. According to Pate, Brown said that he had traveled “all over the South” in former days, and even “had many warm friends there,” who apparently kept him “fully posted as to the condition and disposition of the people.” Brown also “recited his grievances,” which likely means the old man expressed regret over his tactical errors at Harper’s Ferry.

But Pate had grievances too. His defeat by Brown had been a nagging point of humiliation for three years. This perhaps was typified by the fact that the old man had seized his Bowie knife, a gift that Pate boasted was a kind of commission to put an end to Brown’s “career” in Kansas. Instead, the old man had taken him prisoner and carried home the knife as a trophy. As if to add insult to injury, Brown even used its impressive blade in the prototype for his famous pikes, which he had manufactured for the arming of liberated black men.42 The Virginian asked Brown what had become of the knife and expressed a desire to recover it even if he had to pay a ransom. However, the old man would only say that the knife had been taken from him at first, after which he tracked it down and eventually gave it to one of his wealthy New England supporters. Pate afterward believed that Brown had given it to Samuel Howe, although actually he had given it to Mary Stearns, the generous wife of another member of the “Secret Six.” When Brown gave it to Stearns, he told her how Pate had intended to kill him with it but happily concluded, “Well, it seems that the Almighty had other designs concerning it.”43

Pate’s knife seems to have represented both a prized possession to be recovered as well as an opportunity to steal victory back from John Brown. In 1856, the Virginian had embarked upon a vendetta mission on behalf of the proslavery faction, which used the Pottawatomie killings as an excuse to continue violent incursions on free-state people. In his writings, Pate presented Brown in the worst light, although he made no mention of his own deplorable acts, such as the unwarranted burning of the home of John Brown Junior, who had no involvement in the Pottawatomie incident. One witness recalled Pate’s vehement declaration that the proslavery faction would make Kansas a slave state “if they had to kill every Free-State man in it.” Another newspaper quoted him saying that he would take John Brown “or wade in blood to his waist.”

Pate’s loss to Brown was all the more bitter because he had had the advantage on the field with a greater number of men, as well as the backing of proslavery territorial authorities. Late at night before his defeat, he had led a surprise attack on the free-state town of Palmyra, leaving the residents terror-stricken. He later overlooked this ruthless assault on a sleeping town, but was critical of Brown for the counterattack on his camp early in the morning. At first, Pate’s men had prevailed, nearly driving Brown’s smaller group of fighters to retreat and leaving him fewer than ten men in the field. Crawling around on his hands and knees under fire, Brown then ordered his dwindling troops to shoot the enemy’s horses, a desperate attempt that proved successful. As the horses fell and buzzards began to swarm down on the carcasses, many of Pate’s men began to withdraw for fear they would also lose their horses and be stranded in hostile country.

In turn, Pate resorted to a ploy, sending out a flag of truce in order to stall for more time in the hope of getting reinforcements. However, Brown was suspicious when Pate stayed back and sent out a free-state prisoner bearing the flag. The old man promptly sent the prisoner back with the message that he would not parley with anyone except the commanding officer. With his bluff called, Pate hesitantly moved toward Brown while shielding himself with the body of his free-state prisoner. Knowing that he was also vulnerable, Brown sent some of his men around the mouth of a canyon to check any possible assault by Pate’s rifles.

When they met, it seems that Pate tried to egg the old man into an argument about territorial laws, but this only confirmed to Brown that the truce was a farce. He responded curtly: “If that is all you have to say, I want an unconditional surrender. I’ll have it.” Pate was caught in his own trap while his first officer angrily protested that it would be cowardly to surrender. Held in check by Brown’s sons, the officer could only curse as Pate yielded his sword to the old man.

Sympathetic proslavery opinion afterward might follow Pate in claiming that the old man had not engaged in “honorable warfare.” However, the Virginian had wilted in the field and then presumed he could fool the old man into an empty parley. In fact, the young commander had thought too highly of his own abilities while underestimating Brown’s discernment and cunning in the field. Even his “ruffians” were likewise taken by surprise. As Salmon Brown later put it, “they seemed to have no idea of our audacity.”44 After Pate challenged his integrity in the newspaper, Brown offered an honest account of the capture in a letter to the New-York Daily Tribune in July 1856. In his own defense, Brown pointed out that it was Pate who was dishonorable for using a flag of truce under false pretense and, therefore, that there was no actual violation of a truce. “Let others judge,” he concluded with a tone of triumphant disinterest.45

The defeat, followed by Brown’s widely published defense, not only galled the Virginian but also gave others an opportunity to taunt him to the point of fighting, sometimes to defend his honor.46 Pate clearly hoped that Brown’s incarceration might afford him a chance either to win his enemy’s salutation or to twist his words to his own advantage. Yet the visit with Brown provided little satisfaction, something all too apparent by the amount of libel and insult that filled his little book. Furthermore, history shows that Pate’s embarrassment in Kansas only foreshadowed the “sins of omission and commission” that led to his court-martial as a Confederate officer in the Civil War. Even after restoring him to service in 1864, the unsparing J. E. B. Stuart was probably thinking of the Kansas defeat when he said that Pate would not even “make a good corporal in a border ruffian outfit.”47

In seeking to exploit Brown’s final capture, Pate’s ploy failed once more, and the old man still held him prisoner to history at the end of their meeting. “Brown, you know I always fought you fair,” Pate appealed. “Yes,” John Brown responded, “fair and unfair too, when you had a chance. But that is all right.” Typically vindictive, Pate seems to have begun to rant, accusing the old man of all kinds of villainy, and intimating “that Brown would at any time appropriate another man’s property to his own use.” Afterward, Brown simply told the Baltimore American correspondent that he had met a great many men in his life with more courage than Pate. Even the Virginian’s relatives would conclude that his greatest claim was losing in battle to John Brown. Otherwise, he was a vindictive figure, “not a hero the family could be proud of.”48

Perhaps the most vivid demonstration of Henry Clay Pate’s malice was his effort to publish and distribute his anti-Brown book at the time of the old man’s hanging. Henry Olcott, who followed Ned House as the Tribune’s undercover correspondent in Charlestown, observed that a package of Pate’s “pamphlets” had reached town by express train on December 3. Evidently, the Virginian had rushed to get his little book printed and distributed even before the old man went to the gallows on December 2. Olcott thus dismissed the book for its “mean blackguardism and scurrilous language” and reported that even Southern men had expressed contempt for Pate’s book, which seemed as cowardly as kicking a dead lion.

As if it were not enough to attack Brown in print, Pate even tried to launch a speaking career based on his bitter contrivance, booking an engagement at New York’s Cooper Institute on December 7, the day before the old man’s burial. According to a correspondent of the Philadelphia Press, his angry “expatiation on ‘Old Brown’” had little impact, even in a city rife with conservative, proslavery, and racist interests. The Press correspondent described Pate’s presentation as yet another tirade, with the Virginian railing against Brown’s inclination to “rule,” his fault finding with slaveholders and his alleged membership in the “‘I am holier than thou’ church.” Perhaps the funniest of Pate’s perversions was the clever remark that Brown believed in “shooting the Gospel into every creature.” The correspondent concluded that Pate’s anti-Brown lecture had failed to draw a significant crowd, and that another such attempt “wouldn’t probably realize enough to pay the gas-bill.”49

Although Pate was neither an admirable nor a reliable witness to history, his account nevertheless draws the Pottawatomie killings into Brown’s last days along with the journalistic attack of G. W. Brown. According to Pate, the old man had sent for him on the morning after their visit. When he got to the jailhouse, he found Brown dining on a frugal breakfast of broth and bread. While he ate, the old man asked him to read an article from G. W. Brown’s Herald of Freedom. The piece, reprinted in the local Charlestown Independent Democrat, charged him with presiding over the massacre of innocent proslavery men. Initially, Brown asked his opinion of the Herald of Freedom but finally inquired if he believed the report of the Pottawatomie killings. The Virginian responded that he believed so because he had read the sworn statements of the widows of Doyle and Wilkinson. As Pate described it, Brown simply stopped speaking. Looking down, the old man murmured, evidently complaining that his alleged victims were being portrayed as “peaceable” citizens.50

In John Brown, As Viewed by H. Clay Pate, the resentful Virginian launched many of the slurs that were used subsequently by the old man’s detractors, such as the notion of his perverse bravery and moral hypocrisy. Pate even anticipated the popular twentieth-century fiction that Brown had only turned to abolitionism as a result of utter business failure. The old man had “made the nigger a hobby-horse on which to ride to fortune and favor with the great Moguls of Abolition,” he wrote in tones both bitter and racist.

As for the Pottawatomie killings, Pate did his part to skew the facts and incriminate John Brown. First, he incorrectly denied that the abolitionist’s family was in danger at the time of the attack on Lawrence in May 1856. He further distorted the record by asserting that the alleged victims of the Pottawatomie attack were only singled out because they were proslavery people. Denying the obvious facts, Pate claimed that the five slain men had been “quiet citizens”—most incredibly James Doyle and his sons, who supposedly “lived quietly on a claim” and took no part in the territorial struggle. As to Brown’s involvement in the killings, Pate wrote that the old man “did not pretend to deny” his role. Of course, not denying it was not quite the same thing as admitting to it. For this condemnation, Pate could only appeal to “overwhelming evidence,” including G. W. Brown’s one-sided journalism.51

On the other hand, the knee-jerk response of Brown’s allies did nothing to clarify the Pottawatomie episode. The varied responses from his defenders at the time can be confusing and, in some cases, absurd. For instance, one Republican newspaper in Pennsylvania not only reported that Brown was forty miles from Pottawatomie at the time of the incident but also that “the horrid deed” actually was perpetrated by proslavery “ruffians” who had mistaken their victims for free-state men.52

Although many reports reflected a lack of information, some writers refused to believe that Brown was involved in the killings at all. This was probably the case with James Redpath, who claimed that Brown had personally told him that he was not present at the scene of the killings. Redpath stubbornly clung to this belief for many years, and thus kept many of his admirers from knowing the real circumstances that Brown had faced in Kansas. Considering that his authorized biography of Brown was the standard source for a quarter of a century, “Mr. Redpath’s mistake”—somewhat disingenuously supported by John Brown Junior—provided a false counterargument that blunted the biased Pate–G. W. Brown version of Pottawatomie without telling the truth.53

As far as Brown’s family members were concerned, those directly involved in the killings, like Salmon Brown and son-in-law Henry Thompson, did not reveal the facts of Pottawatomie for many years. Less than one month after his father’s hanging, Salmon wrote to the Reverend Joshua Young, who had presided over Brown’s burial. The minister had heard of the killings and wanted to know in a straightforward manner if the sainted abolitionist had died with blood on his hands. Salmon responded: “I say positively that he was not a participator in the deed.” Of course, he was telling an anemic truth. His father had supervised the killings, although his men had done all the gruesome work. Likewise, Jason Brown had dissented from the attack at the time. Although he changed his mind in favor of the killings in later years, he also veiled what he knew until quite late in life.54

In 1859 at least one family member was given an edited version of the killings. Jeremiah Brown had welcomed his exhausted older brother and weary nephews back to Hudson, Ohio, where they spent the Christmas of 1856. As his published defense in early November 1859 suggests, John Brown had briefed his brother as to some of the facts of the case. Jeremiah thus wrote that the Browns had been personally threatened by “a Committee of five from the Border Ruffian camp” and were ordered to leave their settlement or be killed. Jeremiah was further told that other free-state people were well aware of “this threat to destroy them.” However, it seems the old man did not inform him about the outcome at Pottawatomie, except to say that he had made arrangements to be elsewhere at the time when the enemy was struck down.55

Brown’s admiring biographer, Franklin Sanborn, later wrote that the old man never denied his presence at the scene of the killings, although he consistently justified the act. This may be correct regarding his general remarks about the incident. However, both Jeremiah Brown and Judge Thomas Russell, the latter having visited him in jail in early November, made different claims. Jeremiah did not literally say that John Brown told him he was not present, but this is the only conclusion one can draw from his account. Jeremiah claimed that Brown and his sons personally told him about the Pottawatomie incident and that his famous brother “did not assent to the act, nor had any knowledge of it, and was eighteen miles distant at the time of the occurrence.” Likewise, Russell later wrote that Brown told him “that he was not there, and had nothing to do with the affair.” Brown did say that he fully approved of the killings, “but denied having any share in it.”56

Although unlikely, it is possible that these men unintentionally conflated memory with the prominent testimonies of James Redpath and Richard Hinton, both of which claimed insider information on the killings. However, neither journalist actually claimed that Brown had told them he was not present at the scene of the killings. Redpath and Hinton based that claim on an unreliable if not fictional source, an anonymous witness who allegedly had participated in the killings (Hinton’s alleged source was even supposed to have been dead by late 1859).57 It is also possible that Jeremiah and Judge Russell were themselves lying about what Brown had told them, but this is even less likely. The most reasonable conclusion is that the old man had deliberately misrepresented his involvement in the killings.

Brown’s unwillingness to acknowledge his presence and involvement in the Pottawatomie incident, along with the fact that he directed others to do the killing but did not literally take lives himself, are points of question.58 Certainly, he was not deluded into thinking that he was not morally complicit because he had not raised his hand against the enemy. Just before Brown’s hanging, one of the “jail officials” was asked by a reporter what the old man had said concerning the Pottawatomie incident. “He says he did not kill any of them, but that he approved of their being killed, and adds, moreover, that if this act was murder, he had his share of the responsibility.”59 This was not to say that Brown believed the killings murder, but only that he owned the responsibility as much as did the killers. However, the old man seems to have felt that his actions at Pottawatomie (like his later actions at Harper’s Ferry) fell along the lines of a military strike and certainly a preemptive maneuver in an undeclared but certain situation of combat. As such, Brown perceived his role as a commander.

The more pressing question is why did he hide his role behind the technically true admission that he was present and approved of the killings, and in a small number of cases, even deny his presence at Pottawatomie? Robert McGlone is near the truth when he says that the Brown “family’s long silence about the crime attested to a sense of complicity as well as a fear of public disapproval.” Brown camouflaged his admissions or misrepresented his involvement in the Pottawatomie killings probably because he wanted to shield his sons and associates from prosecution or acts of revenge; but he also wanted to spare them the certainty of public condemnation in the court of public opinion. Yet this is not to say that the killings were explicitly criminal, or that the Browns’ hesitancy to reveal the facts suggests they believed themselves guilty. The rush to pronounce the Pottawatomie killings as sheer homicide or terrorism is commonplace, although neither conclusion fits the fullest consideration of the evidence.

Furthermore, in 1859, most free-state supporters in the North could not have appreciated the realpolitik of the rising free-state guerilla movement, as represented by Brown and other free-state militants on the vanguard of struggle. At first, even the majority of free-state settlers in Kansas were conventional and passive in their outlook, and their timidity allowed them almost to be overtaken by proslavery invaders in the territory. As John Brown Junior’s wife recalled, the Brown men were not only unique in their outspoken opinions about slavery and black equality, but they had little hope for militant support from the majority of “decidedly timorous” free-state settlers. After five years and the loss of hundreds of lives in political and territorial conflicts, antislavery people came to the realization that the battle for Kansas was a real war that required drastic measures.60 Indeed, the old man did not live to see the worst incidents of proslavery violence that took place during the Civil War.61

Brown and his sons were among a small number of free-state people who understood the dangerous conditions that prevailed, but they were well aware that even sympathetic people might adjudge their actions as either inexcusable or unduly extreme. It is not hard to imagine why Brown portrayed the facts as he did, perhaps while being questioned by caring relatives and friends around the Christmas dinner table in Ohio. Nor would he have wanted to divulge the fact of his complicity to Judge Russell, whose young wife was present as they spoke in his Virginia jail cell. The old man was neither regretful nor doubtful of his actions at Pottawatomie, but his tailored admissions and frank denials only exemplified two standing tenets of his modus operandi: “tell no tales out of school” and “never tell on your friends.”

But what of his wife? Did he ever tell Mary Brown about his role in these killings? Initially at least, it seems that he signaled some curious admissions to his wife, who was safely ensconced in their Adirondack cabin back in New York. Obviously, Brown would not have immediately written home in detail about the killings, even if he were willing to tell Mary all of the facts. He not only would have wanted to shield her from the impact of the desperate scene, but he also could not risk implicating himself and his sons in writing.

In a curious letter scrawled in pencil, Brown wrote to his wife about one month after the Pottawatomie killings, while he was still a fugitive in the field. Although he avoided any explicit admission in the letter, he made two awkward references to the killings, as well as the curious statement “We feel assured that he who sees not as men see does not lay the guilt of innocent blood to our charge.” If he was trying to insinuate something to his wife, she seems not to have grasped the entire message. Mary later told biographer Sanborn that she had no knowledge of the Pottawatomie incident until many years after her husband’s death.62

Shortly after the publication of Pate’s work, Mary Brown was irritated enough to take up her pen in response, although it seems she was provoked as much by the rumors “afloat in the country” as much as by the “small book” which had spawned them. She was particularly grieved because the rumors not only portrayed her husband committing “several murders” but also as having killed two women and then burning their bodies to escape detection. Attributing these malicious tales to “Pro-Slavery men,” Mary ascribed these “false statements” to frenzy, extremism, and desperation. The widow concluded that the public could “rest assured that Mr. Brown never committed the murders and the burning of the bodies of murdered wives to ashes.” Appealing to the “spirit and tenor of his letters,” along with other published words John Brown’s conduct as a prisoner, the faithful wife concluded that these testified “conclusively and unmistakably to the character of the man.”63

Although Mary probably had required assistance in preparing her letter, she was at least telling the truth of the man she knew. If anyone wondered which profile of John Brown was most consistent with his life, conduct, and convictions, it certainly was not the man portrayed by Henry Clay Pate and G. W. Brown. As she saw it, the dignified prisoner who had spent the final weeks of his life in a Virginia jail cell—the husband she had known for decades—could not possibly have been the ruthless killer and moral hypocrite portrayed by his enemies.

What Mary Brown ultimately thought of her husband’s actions at Pottawatomie will never be known, although she probably trusted him enough to believe that the killings were necessary. In later years, she was known to say that he had told her that “time would justify” his actions in Kansas. While she did not live to see that prediction fulfilled, the widow of John Brown quietly guarded his legacy and his family for the rest of her days, even suffering the contempt of those who despised his name. When Franklin Sanborn was preparing his 1885 biography, the hero’s widow quietly directed him not to give a full account of the Pottawatomie killers as long as John Brown’s sons were alive.64

CHAPTER 13

THE CELEBRITY OF THE DAY

Have you read all of his letters published in the Tribune? Are they not sublime?

Early in November, an editor in Staunton, Virginia, made the interesting observation that it would be beneficial to prolong John Brown’s life as much as possible. Extending his days would not only make Virginia’s justice seem “cool and calm,” he wrote, but it would undercut the reactionary tendency to make him a martyr. Indeed, were the soldiers at Charlestown disbanded and the old man “kept caged for a few weeks by the jailor,” it would make it clear that Virginians were not “frightened out of their wits.”

Facetiously, the editor added that extending Brown’s time would also continue “the supply of paragraphs which he will afford daily as long as he is permitted to live.” After all, he was “emphatically the celebrity of the day” and would continue to be a popular subject of discussion “even after he drops from the gallows into the grave.” As long as Brown lived, he concluded, “every editor feels it to be a solemn duty to prick him with his pen and slice him with his scissors, for his own amusement and the gratification of the community.”

The editor’s remarks were not without value. In the first place, John Brown was not only the undoubted “celebrity of the day” but also the first to become the controversial center of attention for the telegraphic press in a way that anticipated modern media coverage. Of course, his social and political impact on society, and the prominence of his controversial and charismatic profile, was shortly and inevitably eclipsed by the Civil War and its dramatic personae. However, the Harper’s Ferry raid and its leader not only sparked the popular “fashion for interviewing,” but John Brown himself was arguably the first “modern” public figure who came to life in the press.

Even apart from his unusually progressive view of racial equality, John Brown was essentially a modern figure—a forward-looking man who took advantage of whatever new developments emerged in the antebellum era. Quite in contrast to the ludicrous notion of Brown’s “rage at the modern,” his biography is footnoted by a variety of episodes where the usefulness of new technology is applied to medicine, agriculture, and his antislavery activities. Indeed, if the advent of the railroad, as Peter Drucker has written, “was the truly revolutionary element of the Industrial Revolution” that brought about a new “mental geography,” then Brown was a willing beneficiary of that revolution, being one of the first transcontinental activists in the history of the United States.1

The editor also had a point regarding the “pricking” and “slicing” of John Brown by newspapermen, because he had certainly provided “abundant pabulum” for the “voracious gentlemen of the press.” Following the major New York papers, editors throughout the country had made coverage of John Brown a regular feature that sold papers and extended debates for weeks. Besides feeding the dailies and fueling the interest for a number of publications, he provided the main thrust for a new illustrated paper that immediately rivaled the popular Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. By largely exploiting the public’s interest in Brown and the outcome of the raid, J. Warner Campbell’s New York Illustrated News was launched in late 1859, proclaiming itself as a “great pictorial history.” The illustrated newspaper market was suddenly booming, largely as a result of Brown’s final days in jail. Indeed, something of a print feud broke out with Frank Leslie, whose preeminent weekly was already in competition with the notable Harper’s Weekly.

On December 3, the day following Brown’s hanging, Campbell published a “card” in the New-York Daily Tribune, protesting the erroneous report that only Leslie’s artists had been allowed at Charlestown for the execution. Campbell argued that this would do injury to his paper by creating the impression that his New York Illustrated News had only provided contrived, “fancy sketches” of the old man’s last hours. Campbell insisted that his artists had also “met with every favor at Charlestown” and had presented credentials befitting “the very peaceable purpose” of their work. In fact, the New York Illustrated News had notable artists on hand, including DeWitt Hitchcock and Thomas Nast, the rising star of newspaper illustration.

Of course, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper was equally authentic and had covered the story from the time of the raid, even outdoing Harper’s Weekly. It was Leslie’s artist, William S. Jewett, who had been inhospitably driven out in mid-November. Of course, Leslie protested and persevered, sending his special correspondent Augustus Rawlings to Charlestown—this time accompanied by the German-born artist Alfred Berghaus, “the arrogant but capable chief of the art staff.” The talented young Nast, working for the new competitor, had actually started his legendary career under Berghaus at Leslie’s, and went on to cover prominent figures like Garibaldi in Europe and President Lincoln (during the Civil War, Lincoln so appreciated Nast’s work that he called him “our best recruiting sergeant”).2

As business goes, Frank Leslie was antagonistic toward both of his competitors. Even before the New York Illustrated News arose, he had attacked the integrity of Harper’s Weekly. Accusing Harper’s of using “fancy sketches,” Leslie made the dubious charge that David Strother’s illustrations were sheer “fabrications.” Harper’s was the “Journal of Demoralization,” Leslie mocked, not the self-proclaimed “Journal of Civilization.” Indeed, the editor boasted, only Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper depicted the incidents “faithfully and promptly,” whereas “no reliance could be placed on any” of Harper’s illustrations.

Neither did Leslie respond well to the New York Illustrated News’s presence at Charlestown. He made similar charges in the New-York Daily Tribune following Brown’s hanging, denying that any other paper had authentic sketches of the old man’s execution and specifically targeted the New York Illustrated News’s illustrations as “bogus.” Well into December, charges and countercharges took place between editors Leslie and Campbell, once even in paid advertisements that were published in the same issue of the New York Herald.3 However, such skirmishes spilled ink, not blood, and probably improved sales for all the papers concerned.

Indeed, such business rivalry only colored the background of reportage, whereas the political drama over John Brown was quite evident in the editorials of Democratic conservatives, sympathetic Republicans, and a smaller number of outright advocates of the old man. It nearly goes without saying that proslavery editors in the South were of the same mind in regard to the growing expressions of admiration for Brown in many sections of the North. “With folly unparalleled,” declared the editor of the Richmond Whig, “the Northern papers and people are trying to make a hero of this wretched outlaw.” The editor of the Charleston, South Carolina, Mercury went further, declaring that although Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry had failed, “the developments are rapidly showing that a wide-spread scheme was maturing at the North for insurrections throughout the South.”4

Meanwhile in the North, Bennett’s Herald complained of Brown’s supporters, saying that Republicans should be called “red republicans,” because they were “red with the blood of their fellow citizens.” Any expression of support for Brown was seditious and treasonous, he declared. Any attempt to “honor and glorify Brown, and to popularize his treason” was an “insult to the majesty of the law and an endorsement of his crimes.” Bennett, a Scottish Roman Catholic, readily compared Brown to Oliver Cromwell, the Protestant militant of seventeenth-century England, under whose command so many Irish Roman Catholics were killed. Brown, too, represented such a terrible “religious, fanatical element,” as a kind of “modern Roundhead,” Bennett concluded, and now was driving many in the North “to desperate lengths.”

On November 26, Bennett showed further rage when it was discovered that a “compendium” of “Helper’s book” had been published with the signatures of many northern men, including Horace Greeley of the New-York Daily Tribune. The book in question was Hinton Rowan Helper’s The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (1857), written by a North Carolinian who objected to slavery purely on an economic basis. Helper’s controversial argument showed no interest in abolition or the humanity of the enslaved, but rather the economic disadvantage to whites resulting from slavery. From “a commercial, mechanical, manufactural [sic], financial, and literary point of view,” Helper wrote of the South, “we are as helpless as babes.” Compared with the North, he concluded, “our agricultural resources have been greatly exaggerated, misunderstood and mismanaged.”

By all accounts, Helper was a racist, but this was a point of disinterest to most Republicans. Rather, his economic opposition to slavery made him an ideal complement to the Republican agenda, which likewise had no regard for abolitionism and tended to approach slavery more as a problem to be delimited and gradually resolved at the discretion of white society. The compendium version of Helper’s book was edited in a manner befitting Republican usage and was not undertaken as a result of Brown’s action in Virginia. Nevertheless, the Herald editor not only took it as evidence that the Republicans had been “abolitionized” but also went so far as to question the author’s identity as a Southerner. Referring to the Helper compendium as the “unblushing language of revolution,” Bennett concluded that its advocates were now linked with “wild fanatics” and “raving abolitionists,” the first of which was undoubtedly John Brown.5

For their part, Republicans had been somewhat sympathetic toward Brown, but in a condescending manner, condemning his actions and often prone to question his sanity. Although there was no official lionization of Brown in the Republican Party, Greeley’s editorial in mid-November showed a growing partiality toward the old man, largely formed in response to accusations from conservatives like the Herald’s Bennett. Rather than blaming Republican leaders for “teaching” Brown to be radical, Horace Greeley argued, Bennett should first have looked to slaveholding Virginia. Even the motto of the Old Dominion, “Sic semper tyrannis” (Thus ever to tyrants), Greeley wrote, could justifiably be translated as “Hurrah for John Brown!” Indeed, Governor Wise, the “champion of the slaveholding class,” was about to “put to death the champion of the slave.” Greeley concluded that Virginia had “reached a crisis in her history. She should go where she belongs—among the oppressors of the human race—and have the honesty to admit her position.” As a rejoinder to Bennett’s editorials, Greeley charged further that it was wrong for even the most antislavery Republican leaders to be “ridiculously dragged into The Herald’s nonsense.” After all, Editor Bennett himself had traveled in the South prior to the Harper’s Ferry raid, Greeley quipped. Perhaps Governor Wise should investigate him too.6

If the Herald and Tribune represented the mainstream controversy over Brown in the North, there were others who increasingly elevated the old man as a heroic and godly figure. The most notable was the Independent, one of a number of “religious newspapers” that flourished during the nineteenth century as a means of providing “religious intelligence” as well as general editorials and reporting on the news of the day. The Independent was a Congregational publication, which no doubt colored its sympathy for the old man, who was himself a lifelong Congregationalist with roots in New England. Joseph P. Thompson, Leonard Bacon, and Richard Storrs, the founding editors of the Independent, were all Congregational clergyman trained in New England. In particular, the three clergy editors had founded their paper first as a publication to serve the interests of their denomination but, second, as a “free-soil” and antislavery paper. Bacon, the “senior editor,” was a native of Connecticut like Brown, but the entire antislavery triumvirate of the Independent undoubtedly supported Brown in increasing tones of admiration.

It probably was Bacon who penned the editorial of November 10, which declared that the “brave old man” waiting the day of his execution in Virginia was “teaching this nation lessons of heroism, of faith, and of duty, which will awaken its sluggish moral sense, and the almost forgotten memories of the heroes of the Revolution.” While “forlorn,” Brown was “calm, self-confident, courteous toward his accusers and his judge, benignant in feeling toward all men, mild and patient under personal injury, yet inflexibly and fearlessly committed to the cause of human freedom.” However “impracticable” his plan at Harper’s Ferry seemed to have been, the “rectitude of his motives” could not be impeached. “The day of John Brown’s execution will be a sorry day for Virginia,” he concluded.7

In the last weeks of November, Brown and Stephens were both improving in health, although the old man was still pained in his back, a long-term ailment that had become inflamed by one of the bayonet stabs inflicted on him at Harper’s Ferry. “I am getting much better of my wounds; but am yet rather lame,” he wrote to Thomas W. Higginson on November 22.8 He also answered a kind letter from an Ohio clergyman named James McFarland, with whom he was not acquainted. “I am not a stranger to the way of salvation by Christ,” Brown wrote, recounting that from youth he had “studied much on that subject, and at one time hoped to be a minister,” although “God had another work for me to do.” He now realized that it was not only given to him to believe in Christ, “but also to suffer for his sake.” Now that his time to die was approaching, he would have liked to have had someone “better qualified” to lead him in “prayer and meditation.” However, he found no clergymen in Virginia with whom he would pray because they were all proslavery men. Knowing that McFarland may have wondered about his actions in Virginia, Brown wrote, “I went against the laws of men, it is true; but “whether it be right to obey God or men, judge ye.” Christ told me to remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them, to do towards them as I would wish them to do towards me in similar circumstances. My conscience bade me do that. I tried to do it, but failed. Therefore I have no regret on that score.”9 Now, his only regret was leaving his family in need. “I have but a few more days,” Brown wrote, “and I feel anxious to be away, ‘where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.’” The clergyman likely knew the old man’s allusion to the sufferings of the biblical Job in these words, nor would he have mistaken Brown as claiming that Christ had spoken to him directly in some supernatural way. John Brown was no mystic like Joan of Arc or Nat Turner. He was merely expressing the Reformed doctrine of the “divine origin” of the Bible, by which assuredly it could be stated that Christ spoke to men.10

Brown’s letter to McFarland was not long held in private, although only a handful of his jailhouse letters were published immediately after his death.11 McFarland evidently submitted it for publication in the Wooster (OH) Republican about two weeks after the old man was hanged, the letter then being quickly republished in Cleveland and then picked up by the New-York Daily Tribune. Out of the approximately fifty surviving letters written by Brown from jail, perhaps about ten were published before his death, most of them being reprinted numerous times in newspapers across the North. These letters certainly fed the flames of enthusiasm for Brown in the North, although the spark of admiration for Brown undoubtedly had been his dramatic “speech” in court.

The number of Brown’s published jailhouse letters would more than double the following year, largely because of the publication of James Redpath’s biography and its sequel, a collection of letters and documents titled Echoes from Harper’s Ferry (1860). Even before Brown was hanged, Redpath had determined to publish as much of the old man’s correspondence as possible. In late November, he went so far as to post a request in the New York Tribune, soliciting copies of all “communications received from [Brown], as well as the letters to which they were an answer.”12

During his incarceration, the old man had no access to the favorable newspapers that published his correspondence, although he seems to have hoped that his family and associates would share his letters in widening circles. “Please let all my friends read my letters when you can,” he wrote to Mary in late November, hoping somehow that sharing his correspondence would compensate for all the letters he had not written.13 Although he apparently hoped that his letters might justify his antislavery role in historical terms, John Brown could not have foreseen to what extent his letters would find an interest among newspaper editors and writers in the later nineteenth century.

That year, November 24 marked Thanksgiving Day in twenty-seven states of the Union, including Brown’s birth state of Connecticut and his adopted home state of New York. Neither Ohio, the place of his formative years, nor Virginia, his captor, observed the holiday on this date, although apparently some towns like Fredericksburg and Norfolk chose to join in the observance. In New York, one or two sermons were preached with references to John Brown, including a somewhat sympathetic message by Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church, and a more enthusiastic defense of the old man by the zealous antislavery preacher, George B. Cheever, pastor of Manhattan’s Church of the Pilgrims on Union Square. The Herald regularly published sermons from the leading clergyman of the city, and Cheever was typically zealous in defending Brown. But the more interesting message was preached by Cheever’s Unitarian counterpart, Samuel Osgood, pastor of the Church of the Messiah on Broadway and Waverly Place. Osgood took the “moderate” position but sounded much like conservatives in the city, openly condemning John Brown for strengthening “the tyranny that [abolitionists] pretend to assail” and returning society to an earlier “period of lawless indiscrimination.” As to Brown’s effort at Harper’s Ferry, Osgood could not see it as anything except “lawless and murderous.” His views on Brown suggested his “moderate” racism as well. In the early years of the Civil War, Osgood would write that instead of slavery, black people were the “great stumbling block in the way of the nation.”14

Rabbi Arnold Fischel, speaking before Congregation Shearith Israel at 5 West Ninteenth Street, took a different tack. Saying nothing for or against John Brown, Fischel invoked the prophet Jeremiah by calling his congregation to “pray for the peace of the city in which you live.” Fischel probably sympathized with the slave and supported the Union effort during the Civil War, likewise spearheading the successful effort to include Jewish chaplains in the army. In his Thanksgiving message, Fischel contrasted Jewish experience under the Russian Empire, observing that “there were no obstacles” to his community’s advancement in the United States. Therefore, he concluded, their prayers for peace should be furthered by the practice of justice, mercy, and kindness to the poor. This might logically presume an antislavery stance, although the rabbi was reasonable to guard his remarks in a politically volatile city such as New York. Fischel promptly reminded his congregation how only a century before, Jews in New York City were nearly massacred over a political dispute. Although he did not believe such things would likely recur, “it was not impossible that they might.” It seems that the rabbi was referring to the panic of 1741 that resulted when rumor of a slave insurrection inflamed colonial New York. At that time, the city’s Jewish community was jeopardized because some of the slaves “implicated in the threatened riot and insurrection” belonged to Jewish families. Rabbi Fischel further counseled his congregation not to form distinct political organizations but, rather, to merge themselves into the party that they thought was most beneficial to the country in which they now lived.15

Back in Charlestown, the most eventful theme of Thanksgiving Day was the report that the “Telegram Office” had been reopened under the auspices of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, whose telegraph line ran concurrently with the railroad. According to the Herald, after Brown’s trial was completed, “there seemed to be no longer any necessity for the telegraph,” and the Charlestown operator had closed up the office and left town. Now, with the day of Brown’s execution approaching, the big metropolitan newspapers in the North would be eager for telegraphic reports once again.16

The old man’s correspondence bears no reference to Thanksgiving Day, but his letter to Rebecca Spring on November 24 was replete with expressions of gratitude. “I am always grateful for anything you either do or write,” he wrote to his kindly supporter. “I would most gladly express my gratitude to you & yours by something more than words. . . . You have laid me & my family under many and great obligations. I hope they may not soon be forgotten. The same is also true of a vast many others, that I shall never be able even to thank.” It had now been two weeks since Rebecca Spring’s visit, but the prosperous Quaker had remained a primary contact for the old man, especially because she had taken such a great interest in hosting Mary Brown during her stay in the Philadelphia area.

Brown went on to write that he had “very many interesting visits from proslavery persons almost dayly & I endeavour to improve them faithfully, plainly & kindly.” He was probably thinking of the recent visit of Henry Clay Pate, as well as other Virginians, some of which tested his patience. Yet if Brown used one term consistently to describe his feelings as a doomed prisoner, it was that he was joyful. “I do not think I ever enjoyed life better than since my confinement here. For this I am indebted to Infinite Grace, and the kind letters of friends from different quarters,” he wrote. To “E.B.” from Rhode Island, he had also written, “I, who, through Infinite Grace and the kindness of strangers, am ‘joyful in all my tribulations.’” Similarly, he wrote to his old friend, Herman Vaill: “You will not therefore feel surprised when I tell you that I am ‘joyful in all my tribulations’: that I do not feel condemned of Him whose judgment is just; nor of my own conscience.” Finally, to his son Jason in Ohio, he wrote, “I am even ‘joyful in all my tribulations,’ ever since my confinement; and I humbly trust that ‘I know in whom I have trusted.’”17

In expressing his joy to Rebecca Spring, perhaps the old man was mindful of Thanksgiving Day, and that he would have been in church with his family were he back in North Elba. After quoting an eighteenth-century hymn, he added, “My willing soul would stay/In such a frame as this.” Spring likely would have recognized the line immediately, and could just as easily have finished the rest of the stanza: “And sit and sing herself away / To everlasting bliss.” The hymn was called “The Lord’s Day” and was written by one of his favorite hymnists, Isaac Watts. “The Lord’s Day” celebrated the joyfulness of God’s children sitting in the presence of their heavenly king:

The king himself comes near,

And feasts his saints to-day;

Here we may sit, and see him here,

And love, and praise, and pray.18

That Brown seized on this hymn further suggests the extent to which his last weeks had become a period of deeply spiritual retreat and comfort. Contrary to any notion that he had merely “reinvented himself as a martyr,” the sum of his words, behavior, and the testimony of others all suggest that John Brown had sounded a profound and authentic chord of religious integrity that resonated powerfully in his generation. “Truly it is a long time since we have witnessed anything like the heroic exaltation of John Brown’s purpose,” wrote Philadelphian Susan Lesley in November 1859. “Have you read all of his letters published in the Tribune? Are they not sublime?”19 Looking back at this episode from our post-Protestant and increasingly secular culture, many contemporary readers find it hard to relate to the intertwined religious and political profundity of his impact on the nation.20

To be sure, in 1859, John Brown was quite aware that he had become perhaps as famous as he was doomed, and that the whole nation—North and South—could not pretend that his imminent death did not matter. But there was nothing pretentious or contrived in the role he played, and those who saw him closest in his last days either acknowledged it after the fact, or sought to suppress it with petty denials and insulting characterizations fit only for bigots.

Not even a week after his hanging, the editor of the Baltimore American launched a tirade against the obvious power of Brown’s published letters when he called the old man a mere religious enthusiast and self-interested fanatic. While admitting that Brown never made authoritative religious claims as had the fallen Mormon leader Joseph Smith, the old man had “always pretended to believe or really did believe that he was an instrument in the hands of Providence to extirpate slavery.” From reading his published letters, the editor concluded, Brown “constantly quoted Scripture and almost knew the Bible by heart.” Yet “he was by no means an orthodox Christian, was not a member of any church, took his own perverted reason as his guide,” and finally “adopted the wildest and most extravagant opinions and carried them into practice” in an obviously hopeless “scheme.” Even Brown’s bravery in the face of death was not to be admired, the editor wrote. “Pirates have died as resolutely as martyrs. . . . The way a man dies is no proof of the justice of his cause or the purity of his intentions.” Rather, his whole life had to be considered “in the light of reason, of law, of civil duty, of good citizenship.”21

Although the editor’s remarks were not without some value insofar as judging religious fanatics, his analysis was at its best in admitting what actually was true of John Brown. After all, the old man did believe that it was his vocation to fight slavery; likewise, he constantly quoted the Bible, which he had come to know by heart over a lifetime of study. Otherwise, the editor was quite incorrect. That Brown might be accused of anything less than orthodoxy in his religious views was ludicrous—except perhaps in the case of Southern “orthodoxy,” which nearly held chattel slavery as an essential tenet of the Christian faith.22 Likewise, Brown never resigned his membership in the Congregational church, although he did not balk at Sabbath fellowship with antislavery evangelicals when out of reach of his own denomination. As to his “wild” and “extravagant” views, the editor seems to have meant that enslaved blacks wanted their freedom, and that many of them would have taken the opportunity afforded by the old man’s effort. In retrospect, it seems that Brown’s religious integrity and martyrdom were assailed to the extent that his detractors either tolerated or embraced slavery, because they really had no basis to find him either heterodox or “wild,” except in his belligerence toward human bondage.

After the Civil War, a military journalist made an interesting comparison between Brown and a Confederate sympathizer named Mumford, who was hanged by order of General Butler when the Thirteenth Regiment occupied New Orleans. Mumford, an inveterate gambler, was found guilty of “endeavoring to excite insurrection” by tearing down the US flag from the top of the federal mint after the city had been surrendered to Union forces. Mumford was often visited by a chaplain during his incarceration but repeatedly refused any offer of “the consolation of religion.” Remaining unmoved, the gambler disclaimed any fear of death, purporting to have lived a blameless life. “Having never done anything wrong,” Mumford said, “I am prepared for a future world, if there is any future world. I only hate to leave my friends.”

As the journalist recognized, some comparison might be drawn between Mumford and Brown, because neither man was fazed by imminent death on the gallows, and the gambler had met death “as coolly as did old John Brown on the Virginia scaffold.” However, he added, the abolitionist “was a man of different mould; of austere morals, trained to piety, accustomed to spend much of his time in reading his bible or on his knees in prayer.” In contrast, the prideful Mumford pretended moral virtue but “was dissolute, intemperate, and a noted gambler—poor material to exalt into a martyr, even in the cause of slavery, for which he died.”23

John Brown differed from the gambler Mumford in one other notable way: even his captors came to admire him. That the chief jailer, John Avis, was deeply impressed with Brown and favored him with kindnesses is an obvious fact of the record. Although it may be argued that Avis was playing “good cop” in the hopes of gaining information from his prisoner regarding Brown’s escaped raiders, the jailer’s kindly conduct exceeds such motivation, especially considering he apparently let his own children frequently visit Brown and even play with him in his cell.

Although never openly stating his admiration for the old man, even later in life, Avis had treated his prisoner with kindness and consideration in a manner that may suggest his own inner tensions as a pro-slavery Virginian. In early November, Ned House noted in the Tribune that Avis felt “his heart warming to him everyday” and was “deeply impressed with Brown’s heroic fortitude in his captivity.” So great was his admiration for Brown that Avis was increasingly subject to criticism from those who resented his “honest partiality.” The following week, House wrote, “[Brown’s] jailer is a humane and just man. He does all for his prisoners that his duty allows him to. I think he has a sincere respect for Brown’s undaunted fortitude and fearlessness.”24

To be sure, if the jailer was exceptionally kind to the prisoner, he was still on the opposite side of the issue that had brought John Brown to Virginia in the first place. Although Avis was not a slaveholder and seems not to have been a petulant proslavery man, he was more than willing to feed his family from the wages of slavery’s operation.25 Only a few months prior to the Harper’s Ferry Raid, he had acted as an agent for a “gentleman” who wanted to purchase fifty blacks for his plantation. Part of his role as jailer and assistant sheriff was also to hold enslaved people in the jailhouse when they were in the process of being sold deeper into the South.26

Yet Avis’s role as an agent was something he continued to do, apparently to supplement his income, when he was no longer serving as the jailer. In the summer of 1860, the Spirit of Jefferson frequently ran two of Avis’s advertisements, one for his shoemaking business and the other for his role as an agent seeking to purchase “a large number of Negroes, men, women, boys, girls, and families.”27 Ironically, however, it appears that Avis lost his job, at least in part, because of his explicit kindness to Brown. Evidently, his publicized admiration for the old man left him increasingly vulnerable before those who resented his “honest partiality.”28

Nor was Avis alone among Brown’s admiring captors. Daniel Cockerell, a slaveholder who served as one of the jail guards, long remembered the old man being pleasant and giving no trouble. Cockerell recalled how he and Brown often would talk during his shift and that sometimes he would even return in the evening to continue the conversation. “His foremost regret was that he had failed to free the niggers,” the old slaveholder told a journalist in the 1880s. Yet even Cockerell concluded that John Brown had “told the truth, although we did not believe it then.” The same was true of William Fellows, a nephew of Sheriff Campbell, who also acted as one of the jail guards. Fellows recalled that initially he thought the old man was a “fiend,” but after getting to know him, he steadily formed an attachment to him.29

Similarly, Simpson Donavin, the reporter for the Baltimore Daily Exchange, later acknowledged being won over by Brown’s witness. His sympathy for the old man likewise had grown, based on a number of conversations and a careful observation of the prisoner. Years later, Donavin wrote that it was so evident that Brown’s “heart ran out” to the enslaved, “and so full and complete were his expressions of love and tenderness for the slaves that I was unable to fully appreciate them.” Even assuming some retrospective stylization in his narrative, Donavin’s encounter with John Brown seems to have been genuinely transformative in his life. His claim to have initially approached the old man with antipathy due to his affections for the people of Jefferson County likewise seems true enough. Donavin was co-owner and proprietor of Charlestown’s Spirit of Jefferson from the fall of 1854 through early 1856, which would have given him sufficient time to build friendships and bond with local people. Still, whatever bonds Donavin had developed in Jefferson County, his conversations with the peculiarly pleasant and pious prisoner deeply impressed him, so that he could later say that he had “never seen a man who so loved his fellow, as did John Brown.”30

In the long run, it appears that even Governor Henry Wise was deeply challenged by his encounter with Brown, beyond the shared impression with other officials that the old man was both sane and intelligent. According to Francis H. Pierpont, a postwar governor of Virginia, he met Wise in 1865 and found his opinion of the old man quite remarkable. Wise told Pierpont, “John Brown was a great man, sir; he was a great man.” With his hand upraised, as if making a vow, Wise concluded, “Yes, John Brown was a hero, sir!” Wise lived nearly twenty years after meeting Brown and had gone on to champion Southern secession and the Confederate cause. Yet, it seems the memory of the old man’s words had shortly begun to weigh on him. Wise told Pierpont that as early as the outbreak of the Civil War, he had prayerfully avowed to the Almighty that “he would spend the residue of his life, if necessary, in advocating the freedom of the slaves” if the Confederacy succeeded. Was he thinking of John Brown when, in the stillness of his own heart, he concluded never to consent “to hand down to his posterity an element of such national weakness as slavery”?31

If Brown sensed that his influence was awakening the North in opposition to proslavery belligerence and tyranny, he was also aware that he was sowing a new kind of seed among his enemies. It always was a tenet of the Brown family that slavery, not the people of the South, was the enemy. After the war, John Brown Junior would write to a South Carolinian, “My father, brothers, and comrades who fell at Harper’s Ferry did not hate the people of the South. ’Twas only toward her slavery that they cherished a sacred animosity.” Ruth Brown Thompson likewise remembered, from a young age, when her father scolded her for speaking harshly about the hard-heartedness and wickedness of slaveholders. “Hush!” Brown told her. “You would feel just as they do if you had been bred as they have. It is not their fault, but the fault of their training.”

Contrary to the John Brown that was widely portrayed in the South from the time of the raid and afterward, it was his single-minded and unprejudiced devotion to ending slavery that some proslavery men could hear in his earnest words. “I wish my friends could know but a little of the rare opportunities I now get for kind & faithful labor in God’s cause,” Brown wrote to his relatives. “I hope they have not been entirely lost.”32

Unfortunately, with the coming of the war, so replete with sectional hostility and vindictiveness on both sides, the memory of John Brown that solidified in the mind of the South was that of the slave masters’ killer and the chiding icon of invading Union troops. “We passed through Charlestown singing ‘John Brown’s body lies molding in the grave but his soul is marching on,’ wrote Sergeant George Sager of the 149th New York Volunteers, only three years after the old man was hanged. “They did not like it at all, as he was hung in that place,” the soldier wrote gleefully to his mother.

Perhaps Frederick Douglass said it best in 1886, when he told an audience in Brooklyn, New York, that it was now impossible under the “surrounding circumstances” to do justice to John Brown’s memory. “The smoke of fearful battles” still lingers and the “taint of a great moral wrong” still exists, the aging abolitionist declared. And if it was hard for an Englishman to do justice to an Irishman, “it was much harder for an American to do justice to a negro or a friend of the negro,” Douglass concluded. “It was impossible for Virginia to pardon John Brown, because he had struck a blow at her idol.”33

Even so, Brown saw the South through the lens of antislavery strategy, not sectional prejudice. “The North and the South will each have to share in this suffering and sacrifice,” he told Simpson Donavin. “Both are guilty. The North profited most in the inauguration of the infamy and has shared largely in the profits [that] have arisen from slave labor. Besides, by its unconcern and cowardice it has permitted the institution to grow and prosper until now it is arrogantly strong.” During his last time in Kansas in early 1859, he had made a similar prediction in speaking to the journalist William Phillips. The politicians of the South had become “slavery propagandists,” he declared, “and the politicians of the North trimmers.” Compromise had won over justice, and now the powers of slavery were determined to have their way. “If the Republican Party elects its president next year,” Brown prophesied, “there will be war. The moment they are unable to control they will go out, and as a rival nation along-side they will get the countenance and aid of the European nations, until American republicanism and freedom are overthrown.” With his own effort at armed destabilization having failed, the old man could no longer see anything but violence bringing an end to slavery. “It will go down in blood and carnage,” he told Donavin. “There will be wailing and lamentations in a million of homes, and grief and sorrow will sit with every family in the land.”34

The old man had two more visitors of note during the last full week of November, the first being Samuel C. Pomeroy, mayor of Atchison, Kansas. Pomeroy was a native of Massachusetts and an agent of the New England Emigrant Aid Company. He had known Brown from his first residence at Lawrence, Kansas, and supported the Pottawatomie killings. “[W]e all then endorsed them,” Pomeroy recalled, “and from that hour the invaders fled. That one act struck terror into the hearts of our enemies, and gave us the dawning of success.” Considering conditions in Kansas, Pomeroy believed the killings “saved a multitude of lives, and was the cheapest sacrifice that could be offered” in preserving the free-state cause. The two allies had last met in early 1859, when their paths crossed near Tabor, Iowa. At the time, Pomeroy was serving as mayor of Atchison, Kansas, and Brown was in the midst of escorting eleven enslaved people on a long trek to Canada after liberating them in Missouri.35

After the failure at Harper’s Ferry, Pomeroy was among a number of allies who wanted to consider a plot to liberate Brown and his men. Initially, he asked Congressman James M. Ashley of Ohio to visit the old man in jail, with the intention of getting a sense of Brown’s interest. According to Pomeroy, Ashley was able to visit Brown, but their brief meeting under the watchful eye of Jailer Avis prevented any discussion of a rescue plot. Although it was fairly useless to discuss a rescue by late November, Pomeroy wrote that it was yet his “great anxiety” to know from Brown whether he wanted his friends to attempt a rescue, and so he made his way to Virginia.36

On arriving in Charlestown, Pomeroy gained access to the jail, probably as a great favor of Avis, who did not want to disappoint the old man. The visitor recalled finding Brown looking weak and pale, but with a brightness in his eye that he long remembered. The prisoner immediately recognized his Kansas associate and extended his hand, saying, “In prison—ye came unto me,” quoting a parable of Christ. Although Jailer Avis had at first insisted on searching Pomeroy, he generously allowed the two old friends to speak in privacy. When Pomeroy raised the issue of a rescue attempt, the old man rejected it immediately. “No, no, by no means,” he said. “You will lose your lives and do me no good. I am worth now more to die than to live! Let me alone. The end cometh.” When nothing more could be said, Pomeroy stood up to leave, and took the old man’s hand in final greeting. Brown smiled but quickly turned his face away, unwilling to watch as his friend left the room. Turning back once more, Pomeroy told Brown, “Farewell for this life!” But the doomed man said nothing more.37

The other visitor was the less sympathetic Colonel Brown of Stafford, Virginia, who came to Charlestown as an aide to General Taliaferro. According to the New York Herald, the two Browns had an extended interview, the old man telling the colonel why “he deserved to be hanged for his bad generalship.” He told him further that he had expected to be joined by both enslaved people as well as white men from Virginia and the North—not “the roughs and rowdies” but the men of education and property. He further told his visitor that his associates doubtless would have rescued him from jail were he guarded under normal procedures. “As it was, he would,” the report continued, “if he had the power, make his friends abandon the idea of any such impossible exploit.” He then told Colonel Brown, “I know that I will have to hang next Friday . . . but I want you to know that there are others who will take up my work and prosecute it to a successful issue.”38

On November 26, Brown wrote to his wife, saying that the abolitionist James McKim had informed him that she was staying temporarily in the home of abolitionist Lucretia Mott, “the faithful old Lady.” He further reported some details of monetary gifts and offered some brief but practical advice for her trip home and the changes she faced ahead. “Life is made up of a series of changes, & let us try to meet them in the best manner possible,” he wrote as if he were going to be accompanying her beyond Virginia. “You will not wish to make yourself & children any more burdensome to friends than you are really compelled to do,” he concluded. “I would not.” As to his own fleeting time on earth, he wrote that the days were passing quite pleasantly, that he felt no particular dread at his coming execution, and that he only wished to be “properly assured of my fitness for the company of those who are ‘washed from all filthiness’ & for the presence of Him who is Infinitely pure.”

The next day, Sunday, November 27, was his last Sabbath alive. Brown wrote to his two younger half-sisters, Marian Brown Hand and Martha Brown Davis, the daughters of his stepmother, Sally Root Brown. Marian had written to him on November 24, expressing her love and support. “I rejoice that a brother of mine is counted worthy to suffer and die in His cause, and I feel myself impelled to cry out, ‘The Lord reigneth; let the earth rejoice.’” He should be encouraged to know, she added, that “thousands of Christians are offering prayer to God daily and hourly in your behalf, and that God will get honor and glory in the finale of the matter.”

Brown wrote back hastily, expressing his gratitude in learning “that you do not feel dreadfully mortified & even disgraced on account of your relation to one who is to die on the scaffold.” As for himself, he wrote that he felt “astonished” that he would be among those who “were permitted to pay the ‘debt of nature’ in defense of the right; & of God’s eternal & immutable truth.” He was reduced to tears, he wrote, “weeping for joy & gratitude” in a manner that words could not express. “Oh my dear friends can you believe it possible that the scaffold has no terrors for your own poor, old unworthy brother? I thank God through Jesus Christ my Lord: it is even so.”39

That same day, he wrote one more letter, this one to a young lady whom he had known perhaps since she was a teenager a decade before, when Brown was operating his wool commission house in New England. Twenty-eight-year-old Mary (Marie) Stearns lived with her widowed mother and two younger sisters in Springfield, Massachusetts. Evidently, her deceased father had been a friend and admirer of Brown, and now she felt constrained to write on his behalf. “I feel that I am expressing what would be the feelings of my dear father were he still with us; for you well know that you always had not only his respect and confidence, but his warm sympathy in your noble struggles for the rights of your fellow-men.” Assuring Brown that he was in their daily thoughts and prayers, she recalled his last visit to Springfield in 1857, when he had won “all our hearts.” She considered it a “cruel, bitter fate” that so many who loved him were unable to do anything for him in his imprisonment. Injustice seemed to have triumphed, she concluded. Now they could only sit “quietly and powerless” in their home, looking to God “who could make all things work together for good.” The young woman wanted to make sure that Brown received her letter, so she sent it enclosed within a letter to Governor Wise in Richmond, imploring him to see it forwarded to Charlestown. “May I ask of you, the favor, of sending to my friend John Brown the enclosed letter, which is merely one, expressive of my sympathy for him, in his present trying situation,” she wrote. Wise may have smiled at the writer’s credulous sincerity—“if you wish,” she concluded, “you can open & read it, but I earnestly beg you, to send the letter to him.”40

The old man greeted her letter as “kind & cheering” and sought to persuade her that he was “not at all low spirited nor cast down” in his circumstances. He was encouraged to know that his friends both sympathized with him and appreciated his “motives.” He acknowledged that he had been “whipped,” which put him to a disadvantage because the world generally considered success “the standard of all merit.” Still, he assured her, he had passed his time “quite cheerfully” and yet believed that his life and death would not “prove a total loss.” At least, Brown wrote, he had “tried to better the condition of those who are always on the under hill side,” and now he hoped that he could “meet the consequences without a murmur.” Nor was he finished working, except now he was “endeavoring to get ready for another field of action, where no defeat befalls the truly brave.” After all, he concluded, God reigns and wisely controlled all the events of history, including his disaster in Virginia. “I am one who [has] tried to believe that, & still keep trying. Those who die for the truth may prove to be conquerors at last, so I continue ‘hoping on’ till I shall find that the truth must finally fail.”41

According to Ned House, Charlestown was now bulging with the presence of one thousand armed troops, and authorities were pulling the belt of security in tightly. “Circumspection” was now closer than ever, House wrote, and the old man could no longer receive visitors without written orders from General Taliaferro. It was observed that Brown was busily writing at his desk but looking to his fate “with perfect composure.” The long leash that Jailer Avis had extended to him and the other prisoners was apparently pulled in, and the old man and the rest were now secured with leg chains. Meanwhile, Sheriff Campbell had received a parcel in the mail, the news of which was announced with glee throughout town. The rope that would be used to hang the old man had arrived, made from South Carolina cotton, undoubtedly picked and processed by slaves. One report described it as “sixteen feet of stout and substantial cotton rope, with a noose.” For those wishing to get a better look, the new rope was displayed in the sheriff’s office. House observed that the very sight of the rope evoked “horrible, bloodthirsty discourses” among the people. He was amazed to find that even several weeks after Brown was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, there seemed to be “no limit to the violence of expression” coming from the people. Indeed, if Brown was not protected, House concluded, he “might be seized by the infuriated people and torn to pieces.” In the meantime, the mob could at least exult over the fact that the rope was made of South Carolina cotton. “No Northern hemp,” declared Sheriff Campbell, “shall help to punish our felons.”42

The next day, up in New York City, another kind of display was reported quite incidentally in the pages of the Tribune. On Monday afternoon, November 28, an “old, ‘travel worn man’ appeared on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street dressed in a most “archaic outfit”—a dirty, stained blue coat and leather knee breeches “resembling coat-of-mail style” reminiscent of the knights of old. The old man, with his “snow white locks” and wrinkled face, made a peculiar display that quickly caught the attention of passersby, who then began to encircle him to get a better look. “Who is this old man?” some asked curiously, while others began to jeer and taunt him. Someone answered that he was Santa Claus but had arrived a month too soon. Another chimed in, exclaiming that he was Rip Van Winkle. But another claimed to know better, declaring the bewildered old-timer was none other than John Brown. At this remark, the onlookers broke into “jeering and jibing,” as the old man stood silent before them. With the continued chatter about John Brown, the Tribune reporter observed that the idea that this was the old man, freshly delivered from the Charlestown jail, “took amazingly” with the crowd. Some naïve onlookers had even walked away believing that “they had seen the brave old man” of Harper’s Ferry. Of course, the actual John Brown was still captive in Virginia, busy with his Bible and his letters and completely unaware that something like his doppelgänger was facing such an ordeal. As the journalist described him, the old man on Broadway “exhibited great heroism” before the “buffetings of the crowd,” although “his sorrows received no pity.”43 Surely things would be different for the old man down in Charlestown.

CHAPTER 14

NOW THE TINDER IS READY

He repeated that he was in every way reconciled to his destiny.

In the fourth week of November, Charlestown was still unnerved by the work of “incendiaries,” one of the latest victims being a local farmer named Willis. Throughout much of November, as David Strother recalled, “the nocturnal horizon was reddened with the glare of burning barns & stockyards,” a devastating and frightful situation especially for a “rural Community whose whole wealth consisted in grain & cattle.” After Willis’s barn was burned to the ground, the Baltimore American correspondent perhaps thought to lighten the episode by pointing out that the loss was covered by the Aetna Insurance Company—which incidentally insured human property too.1 The same reporter wrote that the town had become quiet by Friday, November 25, and that “the good people” of Charlestown had begun to disregard the local fires, seeing them “as of no importance.” However, Ned House was probably closer to the truth in reporting to the Tribune that there was “new evidence of anxiety” in Charlestown despite no actual threat.

Although some of the Richmond Grays playfully hijacked a farmer’s cart and mischievously rode it through the streets during the day, such carefree behavior belied the apprehensions of the town. The night guard was now increased to more than one hundred sentinels. Throughout the darkest hours, shots were fired at imagined invaders by nervous guards, and sleepless townspeople prayed the more heartily for reinforcements to arrive. One sentinel was so frightened that he reportedly paid someone to stand with him on duty for part of the night. Ned House probably chuckled at Charlestown’s empty fears, writing that there might be “a cow or so, and here and there a predatory pig, but I apprehend nothing beyond.”2

The growing number of soldiers in town obviously was creating stress in Charlestown, from the cancellation of evening church services to the disruption of business and the suspension of judicial county business. Churches, private homes, hotels, and the even the courthouse were made into barracks to house the growing force of Charlestown’s defenders. Even the women of the town were enlisted to sew bedding for the hundreds of beds ordered by the quartermaster.

Authorities perhaps worried that such disruptions and distractions in town might encourage vigilantes to seek an opportunity to invade the jail and assassinate Brown. The old man may have had his own concerns about security and likely was thinking of possible mob violence when he told one of his visitors that he was prepared for execution day, “if I do not die before.”3 Mayor Green peremptorily ordered citizens to stay away from the jailhouse, especially “in the case of public alarm,” when they were not to come any closer than one block “on any pretense.”

On November 25, House observed that people in town continued to “agitate themselves with vain alarms,” including great concern to prevent strangers from entering Charlestown. However, one prominent rumor was that the large number of armed men in town was not so much intended to prevent an invasion but, rather, to protect the jail from furious mobs in the event that Brown received a last-minute pardon or respite. Perhaps this was true, but David Strother also recalled that there was “another terror brooding over this unfortunate community” that was never acknowledged nor even whispered among friends despite holding “unconscious precedence” over all other fears. “This was the idea of a servile insurrection,” Strother wrote. Despite “the very confident and vaunting tone in which the Virginian assured you of the fidelity of his slaves,” the “ever-present dread” of an uprising was quite vivid at that time. Nor was the slaveholding community unaware of the obvious “discontent” among their enslaved people following Brown’s conviction. Although rarely acknowledged in public, their blacks “were more than suspected of complicity in the burnings.”

Overall, suspicion had become “the pervading feeling” in Charlestown. House proved quite correct in anticipating that members of the press would not be spared this overarching suspicion. According to one report, there was uproar when Rawlings and Berghaus of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News arrived on Saturday, November 26. Fortunately, their credentials were in order, and the disturbance was quelled when it became known that the two unwelcomed New Yorkers had passed muster with General Taliaferro.4

Meanwhile, more military support was arriving in town, including a howitzer company comprised of more than fifty men, ordered back from Richmond directly by Governor Wise. A Baltimore American correspondent observed that the Governor had ordered “quite a military encampment at Charlestown, in anticipation of an attempt to rescue Captain Brown and his fellow prisoners.” The reinforcements included eighty military cadets and volunteer militia from Richmond, Alexandria, Norfolk, and Portsmouth. On Saturday, November 26, the New York Times correspondent reported that Charlestown was now “under martial law” and that a “picket of soldiers extended from Harper’s Ferry to Charlestown” in an effort to allay the alarm that afflicted the small town. No rescue was feared by “sensible men,” the reporter added, although the masses were frightened, “even by a cow.”

The Times reporter managed to get a brief interview with the old man, finding him surprisingly “cheerful as possible” and happy to answer questions. Brown expressed his belief that his last conversation with Wise had been misrepresented in the papers, although the journalist did not provide any further detail of the old man’s gripe. “No one would suppose he was under sentence of death,” he observed. “Rest assured, he will die game.” In passing, the journalist also mentioned that P. T. Barnum had dispatched an agent to Charlestown, too. Apparently, the legendary museum proprietor wanted to buy Brown’s clothing and pike for one hundred dollars, along with the old man’s signed certificate of authenticity.5

“Our town now presents the appearance of a continuous military camp,” W. W. B. Gallaher reported in the Herald on the following day. Besides churches and public buildings, even local homes were made into barracks for newly arriving troops, which he estimated to have reached about four hundred. Less reliable than his relative, W. W. B. Gallaher was a member of a local volunteer company and seems to have begun using his military role to convey reports to the Associated Press. However, he had proved to be both imprecise and dishonest, and Ned House was probably referring to him when he suggested that the lack of regular reporters in Charlestown was hindering “telegraphic news.” House particularly complained that the volunteer correspondent had incorrectly reported that the governor of Pennsylvania had offered military assistance to Governor Wise.6 Evidently, Gallaher had misconstrued reports of assistance that actually came from Georgia and North Carolina.7

W. W. B. Gallaher may also have been the author of the false report that John Brown was “repentant.” To the contrary, Ned House wrote, the old man “manifests no regret” regarding “his recent invasion,” although he had appeared “more quiet and thoughtful” in recent days, no doubt in anticipation of his date with eternity. Having personally observed Brown, House described him as “centering his mind upon his rapidly approaching death,” being “perfectly composed, and wholly reconciled to his fate, as indeed he has been all along.” He wrote further that the old man was “very earnest on one point,” which was that his movement at Harper’s Ferry was never intended as a “revenge for the injuries he received in Kansas.” From appearances, Brown seemed unhindered despite the “light chains upon his ankles.” His hand were free and he had no other visible restraints, House observed, except that he had become weary of being subjected to “incessant visits,” probably because he was trying to write as many letters as possible in the remaining days of life.8

According to the Tribune correspondent in Petersburg, Virginia, excitement in that town was also growing daily in anticipation of Brown’s execution. “A deeply-settled feeling of rancor and bitter hate against the North had taken possession of the community,” he wrote, a sentiment that was only heightened by the ridicule observed in the “Northern press”—which was more or less an allusion to the Tribune’s reportage. This was especially related to the correspondence of Ned House, who continued his merciless exposé of Charlestown despite the risk of being discovered and thrown in jail right along with the old man.

In fact, House was amazingly determined to stay the course in Charlestown despite the interest to discover the identity of the troublesome Tribune correspondent. On November 25, he reported that a reward was offered, “to expose The Tribune correspondent,” along with a local volunteer soldier having been promised $20 to “detect the culprit.” True to form, House mocked the whole effort. “I am mortified to find myself rated at so contemptible a figure,” he jeered. “I do not esteem $20 the fair thing.”

Even the Herald would have happily exposed House if possible, because the editor Bennett considered the undercover correspondent as much a spy for the abolitionists as a mocker of Virginia. But Bennett may have frustrated matters even more by suggesting that the Tribune actually had two or three undercover correspondents in Charlestown. There was some truth to this claim, although House probably was the only Tribune correspondent situated in Charlestown. However, he evidently relied on associates stationed in nearby towns, who were themselves submitting local reports while assisting him in conveying his correspondence to New York. House acknowledged as much in his final report, writing that despite many difficulties, his mission at Charlestown was carried through successfully “with the aid of two other writers.” One of those writers was Henry S. Olcott, a Tribune agricultural editor who accepted the undercover assignment, remaining in Petersburg until he replaced House in Charlestown on the day of Brown’s hanging.9

By Monday, November 28, it was reported that there were about 1,500 soldiers under arms in Charlestown, which may have inadvertently provoked citizens into thinking that an attack was imminent. It was also reported that arrangements were being made for Brown’s execution, including the construction of the gallows. Judge Parker had already determined that Brown would not be hanged in the enclosed jail yard, which was the “ordinary station of the gallows,” but, rather, in a place “as widely impressive as it could be made.”

House reported that the specific site of execution had not yet been selected, but probably it was going to take place in an open field about a half-mile from the rear of the jail. The selection, he wrote, was premised on the idea that the meadow in that direction descended to a central point, surrounded by hills, which would allow for observation. However, the gallows itself would be enclosed by lines of troop so as to “prevent the approach of any whose ears might otherwise be contaminated” by Brown’s dying speech. In fact, House added, the old man had no intention of making an address from the scaffold. Brown told the correspondent that as far as he was concerned, he would already “have taken leave of the world before emerging from his cell.”

House could confidently write these words because he had obtained a permit from General Taliaferro, along with some others, to interview Brown and Stevens on Sunday evening, November 27. House wrote that they were received “with cordiality” by the old man, who set aside his letter writing and turned around his chair to face his guests but excused himself from rising because he was experiencing back pain. The guests noticed that his feet were secured, although Avis had placed light chains that did not make it difficult for him to move around. The old man twice told his visitors that he had no confession to make, but spoke with the “utmost gentleness and tranquility,” although House suggested that some of the visitors were less than gracious in response. When they afterward departed, “hands were shaken all around,” and he observed that as far as Brown was concerned, “it was an honest expression of good will. With most of the rest it was like a salutation of Judas.”10

House thought this a most significant visit because he believed it would be his last opportunity to see John Brown before he was hanged. The young journalist quietly studied the old man, observing his demeanor and preserving the characterization for history. House described Brown thus as exhibiting a kind of “quiet courtesy” as he “cheerfully” spoke to his guests about his own imminent execution. “He repeated that he was in every way reconciled to his destiny,” and the only thing that seemed to have bothered him now was being asked for his autograph. Interestingly, Brown seemed to have “a great repugnance to parting with any of his handwriting,” House observed. This became evident when one of the visiting newspaper correspondents, likely Augustus Rawlings from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, tried to override the old man’s determination not to provide autographs. Appealing to Brown, the correspondent pointed out that his publisher had already paid Mary Brown fifty dollars “for her photograph,” which seems to have meant that she was paid to permit an artist to make a sketch of her. In fact, the “photograph” of Mary Brown would not be done until she reached Harper’s Ferry on December 1, when the artist Alfred Berghaus made a sketch for the cover of Leslie’s.

Brown expressed gratitude for the payment to his deserving wife, although he persisted in refusing to provide an autograph. He explained that so many personal and written appeals had been made to him for an autograph and that trying to satisfy each request “would deprive him of all the time that remained to him on earth.” True to his sense of fairness, the old man concluded that if “he could not gratify all, he would refuse all, without exception.” House was quietly pleased to see the correspondent disappointed, because he believed Leslie’s would only use the autograph “as a new means of casting ridicule upon the man who is so soon to die.” However, the Leslie’s correspondent ultimately succeeded in getting the old man’s autograph—reproducing it from the check that was cunningly written out to him for Mary’s sketch. A facsimile of his autograph, along with Mary’s image, thus appeared on the cover of Leslie’s the week following Brown’s execution.11

The Herald reported that General Taliaferro was taking every precaution “against a surprise or disturbance of any kind” and that stringent regulations would be upheld in restricting civilians from being close to the scene of execution. The expressed intention was to prevent anyone from hearing Brown speak. However, Governor Wise wanted to keep civilians away from the gallows in the event there was a last-minute rescue attempt, in which case Brown would be immediately fired on and those closest to him would “inevitably share his fate.”12

To House’s delight, he was somehow able to obtain another meeting with Brown and the raiders on Monday morning, November 28. The journalist expressed surprise at this opportunity, because Governor Wise had now issued a prohibition of all visitations with the exception of the military. However, there was little opportunity to converse with the old man apart from a “simple salutation,” House finding him poring over “a religious work”—perhaps Richard Baxter’s Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1650), a lifelong favorite of John Brown. Baxter was a prominent English theologian and pastor, and his Saints’ Everlasting Rest was popular among the descendants of the Puritans. By all accounts, Brown loved it throughout his life, but the book may have taken on special meaning in his last days, because Baxter had written it when he was far from home “and in such an ill state of health as to be in continual expectation of death for many months.” A Protestant classic, Saints’ Everlasting Rest addressed what Baxter called “the most happy state of a Christian” by which one looked forward to an “endless enjoyment of God” first at death and then “most fully, after the resurrection and final judgment.” However, the author’s point was to prepare the believer for the life to come by discovering the joy of the divine presence prior to death. Now John Brown was reading it as Baxter had written it, “languishing in the suspense of life and death.”13

According to House, on his last Sunday alive, the old man seems to have given a final attempt to obtain the spiritual support of an antislavery clergyman, when he sent for the Reverend Jacob Hoffman Waugh, a minister in the local Methodist Episcopal Church. Perhaps Brown had belatedly learned that Waugh was the nephew of the late Bishop Beverly Waugh, a prominent Methodist leader with known antislavery convictions. According to House, the old man and Waugh spoke at length, the journalist concluding that “their speech could have but one subject.”14

However, the meeting did not end well. The correspondents of both the Baltimore American and the New York Illustrated News reported that the old man ultimately rejected Waugh, undoubtedly after he learned that the clergyman did not share the antislavery convictions of his famous uncle. In fact, the Reverend Waugh was a slaveholder who owned at least two females, a teenager and an elderly woman. As described in the New York Illustrated News, Brown “heartily” welcomed Waugh and “listened attentively to his reverend visitor.” But when he realized that Waugh was a proslavery man, “he refused to accept of his services, and kindly, yet firmly and emphatically, refused to prolong the interview.” When Waugh returned among other clergymen the following day to visit the prisoners, the old man refused to receive him. DeWitt Hitchcock of the New York Illustrated News captured the scene quite aptly, with the old man facing Waugh, standing determinedly with his hand uplifted, and pointing to the door of the cell.15

Brown may have been blunt in rejecting Waugh, but the minister was a devoted friend of the status quo, as another incident revealed following the old man’s death. On Friday evening, December 2, the Baltimore American reported that a “suspicious character” from Yonkers, New York, named Otis had arrived in Charlestown and had sought out the Reverend Waugh with a letter of introduction from his own minister back home. Hoping to find camaraderie with another Methodist believer, instead Otis was turned over to authorities by Waugh. In defending himself, Otis claimed to have been in Washington City on business but had had made a rushed journey by rail and buggy over to Charlestown in order to witness Brown’s execution.

Otis was not only too late to see Brown, who was executed earlier in the day, but was also held under arrest in his room at the Carter House. He protested that he had only been curious about the execution, and that he had no intention of discussing slavery while in town. Indignant at this treatment, Otis concluded sarcastically that he thought he was “still in the United States” until he reached Charlestown.

The Baltimore American correspondent described Otis as “very gentlemanly,” concluding that he bore up “under his confinement with patience.” However, according to one of the guards at the Carter House, when Otis was discussing Brown’s hanging, suddenly he had “burst into a flood of tears.” When his apparent grief aroused suspicion, Otis explained that his own father’s death was still recent. In fact, not only was Otis a sincere Methodist but a devout admirer of John Brown as well, and it seems he really had made a last-minute effort to see the old man before he ascended the gallows.

Baltimore American readers would never have any idea of Otis’s identity beyond these details, and history seems to have overlooked the episode as well. But the “suspicious” guest was undoubtedly Elisha Graves Otis, the inventor of the safety device that allowed the perfection of the working elevator and the progenitor of the famous Otis Elevator Company. An active and outspoken opponent of slavery too, he had predicted that same year that slavery would cease to exist in the United States within a decade, although he died four years prior to abolition. In a sense, this long-forgotten episode provides a resonant footnote to the story, because the abolitionist John Brown had plunged to his death through a gallows trapdoor—something quite the antithesis of the most famous invention of abolitionist Elisha Otis.16

If Otis’s visit was disturbing, then coming to Charlestown was both disappointing and frightening for Sidney Edgerton, an Ohio congressman. Edgerton had received a petition from Jason Brown, one of the old man’s sons who had not gone to Harper’s Ferry, requesting the body of his father. Edgerton came from Washington city through Baltimore, arriving by railroad at Harper’s Ferry on Wednesday, November 30. Edgerton was in the company of some Republican colleagues, who were advised to remain at Harper’s Ferry by Virginia congressman Boteler, who had interviewed Brown following his defeat. Boteler then escorted Edgerton to Charlestown, where he met with General Taliaferro and presented the petition. In turn, Taliaferro consulted Prosecutor Andrew Hunter, who returned word that “no decision would be given as to the disposition of the body.” Evidently, the authorities in Charlestown were awaiting the direction of Governor Wise, who was scheduled to arrive the same day.

With the petition rejected, Edgerton evidently requested to see Brown and his men but was refused access to the jail. Understandably, the Ohio Republican spent no further time in Charlestown, and there is no reason to think that he was made to feel welcome. Southern sources reported that the antislavery congressman was then given an open wagon with a driver and safely escorted back to Harper’s Ferry by four of the famed Black Horse Rangers. However, when he returned to Washington, Edgerton claimed that his life was endangered and that the carriage driver had fled from the wagon as a result of hearing threats made against the congressman by some horsemen. Edgerton always believed that his life was threatened and that he would have been assassinated had he left the wagon with the driver.

There is no reason to doubt that Edgerton was telling the truth about threats and the flight of his carriage driver, and the most reasonable conclusion is that the alleged threatening horsemen were the Black Horse Rangers. Certainly, it was dangerous for an antislavery congressman to have gone to Charlestown at this point, and the attitude of malice, violence, and revenge that prevailed among many Virginians was almost palpable.

Considering that Edgerton was a congressman, it is doubtful that the Black Horse Rangers would have assassinated him, no matter how much they personally despised him. However, if his authorized escort had been acting in a manner of respect in following their orders, the incident likely would not have taken place. It seems, then, that the Rangers were engaging in some bitter fun at the congressman’s expense, making threats and abusive remarks that were intended to offend and intimidate him. Certainly, had they wished to assassinate him, Edgerton would not have made it back to Washington. Nevertheless, as far as Edgerton was concerned, he thereafter believed that he had narrowly eluded death at the hands of proslavery enemies, and the incident further fueled his animosity toward the South.17

Of course, many accounts of Southern abuse likewise riddled the news here and there, such as the case of an “abolitionist” named T. A. Salvo, who was tarred and ridden out of town on a rail at Bamburg, South Carolina, on November 10. Salvo’s only crime was being “too free in the expression of his opinion, for which he was also rewarded with a half-shaved head. In Norfolk, Virginia, a shoe-store proprietor named Danenburg was likewise abused for “seditious language calculated to incite insurrection”—meaning that he had dared to express sympathy for Brown. In order to escape abuse, indictment, and incarceration, Danenburg fled the city, probably losing all of his personal possessions and property. In another case, a marshal from Connecticut happened to be traveling through Virginia by railroad and was accosted by a group of “vigilants” who wanted to drag him off the train and put him in jail in the town of Culpepper. Fortunately, he was armed and threatened to kill the first man who put a hand on him, which immediately put an end to the matter.18

Besides Virginia’s hasty and ruthless treatment of Brown and his men, these reports of mean-spirited prejudice, unbridled abuse, and the violation of civil rights did not go unnoticed in the North. The publicized experiences of people like Rebecca Spring, the lawyers Hoyt and Sennott, the artist Jewett, Congressman Edgerton and less notable individuals throughout this episode surely added to Northern resentment, particularly as they appeared amid reports of developments in Charlestown and the approaching executions.

On Thursday, December 1, the day before the hanging, the Tribune published a letter from a Virginian who identified himself only as a “prominent citizen of Charlestown.” The anonymous writer warned that despite the generosity of the people of the South, no Northerner who set foot on Virginia soil at the time of Brown’s execution would be tolerated. Such a visitor would be seen as an enemy bent on waging war “upon our institutions,” inciting insurrection and murder, and igniting “the torch of civil war.”

The writer also declared that recent events had alienated the South from the North more than the latter realized and that Southerners did not care if war came, “if it needs must come.” Indeed, the North would find such a war an “abstraction,” he continued, whereas with the South it would be a war “for our homes, our rights, our institutions, our all,” and this would be a point of advantage. The South had already begun “to look upon your section as our rightful enemy.” Now, “the tinder is ready, let the spark but be struck,” he wrote, concluding that perhaps it would not be long “before the people of the North and those of the South may owe allegiance to separate and distinct sovereignties.” Similarly, the tirade of a lawyer in Petersburg was published in the New-York Daily Tribune: “Sir, I would be glad to see the whole North sunk to the deepest depths of the bottomless pit! Damn her, we don’t want a union with her, when we can get a foreign market for all our products. . . . The South has borne with her insolence too long, and it is time, and now is the opportunity for a great United Southern Confederation to show the world the true meaning of the word Republic!”19

However, to the moderate antislavery majority of the North, so indifferent toward black freedom in any sense, it was the South that seemed overbearingly insolent. Even the conservative reporter for the Herald thus expressed his hope that once Brown and his men were executed, Southern wrath would dissipate and “all disunion sentiments will pass away with it.” By his own admission, the reporter was dismayed that “[n]o amount of persuasion could induce the people of Virginia to believe that there exists any conservatism or sympathy with the Southern cause at the North. There seems to be a fixed opinion to the contrary among the great mass of the people.”20

If the reactionary defensiveness and prejudice of the South worried the allies of slavery in the North, it simply galled Republicans like Horace Greeley. In an editorial from this time, Greeley complained that “[o]ur Southern neighbors are a very hard people to get on with.” As a case in point, Greeley observed how the proslavery element had tried to subvert democracy in Kansas after having promoted popular sovereignty and the demise of the old Missouri Compromise. It was the slave states that had “provoked the struggle now going on [in Kansas],” he wrote, “and now that the contest seems going against them they fly into a preposterous rage,” refusing to acknowledge defeat. “They make no bones of declaring, that sooner than meeting the approaching defeat they will break up the Government.”

Greeley further pointed out that despite their leading role in promoting the political developments leading up to the present crisis, the South was acting “arrogant” and showing “a very childish temper.” Because popular sovereignty had backfired on the South, Greeley explained, the Republican Party was only trying to get the federal government “back to the position” it held prior to popular sovereignty. As far as Virginia’s famous prisoner was concerned, Greely wrote, if proslavery “excitements and outrages” had “created” the militant abolitionist and raised the hopes of blacks for freedom, this was also the fault of the South. The “only great hero of the war” in Kansas was “furnished by the North” under circumstances created by the South,” the editor declared. It would therefore do well for Southerners to “learn to restrain their ardor and to take their defeats with equanimity, both now and hereafter.”21 Of course, the old man sitting in Charlestown jail would not have been flattered by this homage to his heroism; he disdained the Republicans for trying to return the nation to the status quo of compromise, when his own intention was to destabilize and destroy chattel slavery once and for all.

As the week progressed, Charlestown continued to bloat with soldiers and guns, House observing that by Tuesday, November 29, there would be 1,800 men under arms, and as many as 2,500 by Friday morning, the day of execution. “The military movement are incessant,” he wrote, and the courthouse square, close to the jailhouse, echoed “with the sound of arms from morning till night, and again till morning.” It seemed that preparations never paused. The town had become “densely crowded,” and this was even creating difficulty in finding food. Communication with the North had become impossible because the authorities were controlling the telegraph, reporters from outside were banned, and Governor Wise had now given notice that no strangers would be permitted in the entire county without being able to “give a satisfactory account of themselves.”22 The Herald reported that a number of correspondents thus were turned away the next day, being forced to return to Baltimore as a result of the ban.

Wise also took control of the Winchester and Potomac Railroad, placing it strictly at the disposal of the military. Orders were even issued to prevent women and children in town from approaching the jail, and the people of Jefferson County were also warned to stay home “and protect their property,” which probably meant they would do well to keep an eye on their slaves in case of an uprising. Wise threatened that if it were deemed necessary, martial law would be “proclaimed and enforced.” For all intents and purposes, however, martial law was already the reality at Charlestown.23

On Tuesday, November 29, the Herald correspondent observed that the weather was “delightfully bright and warm” and that Charlestown looked “as if the times were revolutionary. War, not peace, appears to be the order of the day,” he concluded. The streets resounded with the beating of drums and martial music as troops went through military maneuvers in the street, flags waved in the breeze, sentinels paced back and forth, and military aides busily moved about town on orders. Quiet little Charlestown suddenly had acquired the “air of a camp,” with General Taliaferro overseeing all affairs from his headquarters at the Carter House. The friendly “army of occupation,” the correspondent wrote, featured many different uniforms—“dark coats and pants and slouched hats, light blue, or even antique outfits with ‘high, awkward hats’ like the British in older days,” along with irregular cavalry strutting about with sabers by their sides, horse pistols stuck in their belts, and spurs clanking at their heels. Those not on duty strolled the streets, smoking pipes and cigars while sauntering from corner to corner, many of which were now armed with howitzer cannons.

“This evening the town is doubly guarded,” wrote Ned House. Whatever is supposed to add to the military precautions is done,” including guards posted at the entry and exit of every train, and a strict curfew for citizens. As far as communication was concerned, all private use of the telegraph had ceased, and newspaper reportage had come to a complete halt. Apparently, an exception was made for the out-of-town Herald reporter, who received a special dispensation from Prosecutor Hunter. Otherwise, as House observed, none of the dispatches in the Northern newspapers had actually emanated from Charlestown except for his clandestine correspondence. Of course, throughout his time in Charlestown, Ned House had used different means to get his correspondence to New York, perhaps including private wire dispatches. However, it seems that most of his correspondence had been smuggled in the mails by other means or occasionally conveyed by a messenger. Now, in the final days of his mission in Charlestown, House openly wrote that he had to send his reports “to another place thence to be forwarded” by an associate.24

In the final few days, it was repeatedly observed that the old man was busily engaged in his own correspondence, much of it letters for family and friends. Interestingly, House made several references in his correspondence during Brown’s last week to the effect that the old man was particularly intent on writing some sort of “explanatory letter” that he wanted to have published after his death. From what House seems to have gathered, Brown was writing this “long letter to one of his friends,” with the intention that it would answer some of the errors published in the Herald and other proslavery papers.25 Brown had some concerns about how his last interview with Governor Wise had been portrayed by reporters, and likewise objected to W. W. B. Gallaher’s interpolations in his remarks about Beecher’s sermon. Knowing that he would not be permitted any public last words, he may also have wished to have his voice go out to the world by some final written statement entrusted to a friend or colleague.26 But if this is the case, then Brown’s final word of “explanation” may have been confiscated and destroyed, because no single letter from his incarceration has survived that fully answers House’s description.

On the other hand, the journalist may simply have misconstrued Brown’s busy writing activities, because the old man wrote at least twenty letters of varying lengths between November 27 and December 2, the day of his death, along with two last wills. At one point, House referred to Brown as writing “explanatory letters.” Yet it is clear that both proper and improper criteria were used to screen Brown’s correspondence and that in the case of Mahala Doyle’s letter, not everything withheld remained confidential. The idea that political and personal resentment might also thwart Brown’s final written “explanation” is certainly not out of the question. Ultimately, even if the old man wrote such a letter and it is lost to history, much of what he would have written is probably reflected in the larger body of his final correspondence.

On November 28, the old man wrote to his brother Jeremiah Brown in Hudson, Ohio, mainly concerning the final disposition of some of his possessions as well as the monies due him from his father’s estate. He wanted to be sure that his son Jason received his pocket watch and that his field glasses would go to Jason’s “next younger brother,” meaning his son Owen, who had escaped from Maryland and eluded capture despite Governor Wise’s effort to track him down with the other surviving raiders. “I intend making some special provision for the last named; to be paid him in money from the proceeds of my father’s estate; in consideration of his dreadful sufferings (as well as losses) in Kansas; & his cripled [sic] condition from childhood,” the caring father wrote.27

Owen was Brown’s third son from his first marriage and had suffered debilitating damage to his arm in a childhood accident. His lame arm pained him a great deal throughout life, and his caring father sought medical assistance, including electrical treatment with a galvanic battery. Unfortunately, the treatment failed to “impart new life to the whole arm,” as his brother John Junior had hoped.28 Owen is typically described as an odd but altruistic fellow and, despite his disability, he actually proved to be one of his father’s most fierce and faithful soldiers, from Kansas to Harper’s Ferry. Like his father, Owen was galled by slavery, and his sentiments echoed those of the old man. “Shall we live for ourselves,” he wrote to his family, “or shall we live to assist the millions of our poor fellow men who are robbed of every natural right under Heaven—robbed of their friends and their all?” When it was apparent that things had gone wrong at Harper’s Ferry, Owen fled northward, taking refuge among friends and family in Pennsylvania and Ohio. The old man naturally was careful not to provide anything that Virginia authorities might use to track down Owen, although the son had no intention of being captured. As he told one associate, “They can’t take me back to Virginia. I’d rather be shot than die in bed, anyway.”29

Brown also wrote to the wife of his generous supporter, George Luther Stearns of Medford, Massachusetts, one of his “Secret Six” supporters.30 Stearns, a successful industrialist and fervent antislavery activist, had provided considerably to Brown’s political and personal concerns, and shared admiration for the old man with the rest of his family.31 Brown had visited the Stearnses, presented Henry Clay Pate’s knife as a trophy, and had even written an autobiographical sketch for their admiring son, Henry, more as a kindness than as a benefit to himself.32

However, Mary Stearns not only affirmed her husband’s support of Brown but also held the abolitionist in the highest esteem, as seen in her letter of November 8. “Your sublime allegiance to truth is our comfort and cheer in this sharp trial,” she wrote. “Dear, brave old friend, you can never die! The gallows seems no longer a degradation, since your example has so hallowed and glorified it! For the Truth’s sake I can let you die; but for our affection’s sake we would put our arms around you and hold you here forever.” Beyond these expressions of personal affection, Stearns blessed him “for your faithfulness to a great principle,” and promised that she would “try to be a braver and truer woman and mother (albeit a sadder) for the lesson you have taught.”33 Before ending the letter, she quoted a portion of Charles Mackay’s poem, “Eternal Justice”:

Pace through thy cell, old Socrates,

Cheerily to and fro;

Trust to the impulse of thy soul

And let the poison flow.

They may shatter to earth the lamp of clay,

That holds a light divine,

But they cannot quench the fire of thought

By any such deadly wine:

They cannot blot thy spoken words

From the memory of man,

By all the poison ever was brewed

Since time its course began.

To-day abhorred, To-morrow adored,

So round and round we run,

And ever the truth comes uppermost,

And ever is justice done.34

“My little son Henry sends you his love, and says he will never forget you,” she added before signing, “Your friend with enduring love and reverence.”

One can imagine the old man’s tearful expression as he penned his response on November 29, addressing her as “My Dear Friend.” He had not received more satisfaction or comfort from any other letter that he had received since his “imprisonment” than hers, Brown wrote, assuring her that he was “quite cheerful & was never more happy.” However, he was pressed for time and now could only send “a word.”

That Brown had little time to write is evident enough, being only two days from facing the gallows and feeling pressed to write yet a good many letters to family and associates. However, Stearns had written on November 8, which means under normal circumstances the letter should have reached him before the end of the third week. That he was answering it so late suggests either that he had put off writing back to her because of other obligations or, more likely, that the letter had been delayed. Brown said nothing either way, but it does seem as if he had just received her letter and was responding while it was still newly arrived. If so, then it may be that Andrew Hunter had withheld it and possibly considered not giving it to Brown at all because of its expressed sentiments but then reconsidered at the last minute.

This may explain why, after writing the letter, Brown seems to have kept it, uncertain that it would reach Stearns if it fell under the scrutiny of Andrew Hunter. In fact, he held on to his letter until he passed it into the hands of his wife, along with other correspondence, on December 1. On the verso side, he had scrawled, “Please Mail this to her,” a request that Mary Brown dutifully obeyed, afterward sending it to Stearns within the pages of a Bible.35

Whatever the case, Brown completed this short but memorable letter, the last part subsequently becoming one of the most prominent and frequently quoted statements from of all his jailhouse correspondence:

I have asked to be spared from having any mock or hypocritical prayers made over me, when I am publicly murdered: & that my only religious attendants be poor little, dirty, ragged, bare headed & barefooted, Slave Boys & Girls; led by some old grey headed, Slave Mother.

Farewell. Farewell.

Your Friend

John Brown^36

In fact, Brown was making no stylized claim here but rather was reiterating what he actually had requested of his captors. According to Charles Fulton of the Baltimore American, Jailer Avis told him after the hanging that the old man indeed had expressed a desire to be escorted to the gallows by “a poor weeping slave mother with her children.”37

In writing “mock or hypocritical prayers,” Brown clearly meant that he did not want any proslavery clergyman to accompany him in his final moments on the gallows, something that his captors at least granted. It is purely speculative, but perhaps in the last days of his captivity, the old man was aware that Avis had brought some poor slave family into the jail, confining them until their sale was complete and they could be shipped farther into the South.38 Whether or not this happened, in John Brown’s last hour he most certainly would have preferred the humble prayers of a few enslaved children to all the high-minded supplications that could be rendered by the whole host of Charlestown’s proslavery clergymen.

By Wednesday, November 30, the “instrument of death” was completely constructed, but was first erected and tried within an enclosure of the new Baptist church. Ned House described the gallows as “made according to the ordinary pattern, with uprights, a cross-beam and trap.” However, a constant flow of people wanted to see the gallows, and many people busily sought souvenir chips and splinters from the work area, others even using knives to cut little fragments from the gallows. On Friday morning, December 2, the gallows would be reconstructed on the execution site, which had now been finalized—a spot some four or five hundred yards to the rear of the jail. The open field would allow for many spectators, although none but select individuals from the military would be allowed to approach the gallows close enough to hear anything that might be spoken by the prisoner. Reportedly, the soldiers were to form three sides of a hollow square in the field, with the fourth side occupied by gallows, where the old man would make his final stand.39

In anticipation of the day of execution, Brown’s admiring allies from the Independent published another editorial, declaring that they could no longer “resist the conviction that God has in view the overthrow of Slavery, in all the steps of this sad but most impressive event.” No insurrection reaching from the Potomac to the Gulf of Mexico “could have awakened such a sensation throughout the country, as did the raid of John Brown into Virginia.” Thus, it would be slavery, not the old man, which would be “gibbeted, when he hangs upon the gallows,” the editor wrote. The hanging would prove that John Brown had done his work “even more effectually,” and the cost in money and fear to Virginia would be “greater than she can bear.” The old man, “swinging upon the gallows, will toll the death-knell of slavery,” he concluded. For all of his mistakes, John Brown had proved to be a “hero who braved death for the weak and the wronged.”40

CHAPTER 15

TEN THOUSAND PHOTOGRAPHS

The shorter the life is, the longer eternity is.

Ironically, the most complete collection of letters written to Brown are those withheld by his Virginia captors, although it is impossible to determine how many letters actually reached him in Charlestown. First, he did not respond to the many strangers who wrote for the sake of obtaining an autograph, and evidently these requests ended up in the fire.1 Still, it appears that Brown carefully saved a significant portion of his correspondence, typically endorsing each one he read in the nineteenth-century fashion of writing the name of the correspondent on the letter.

For instance, he probably did not respond to Anna Dickenson, a Philadelphia Quaker who wrote in late November. Whether or not her melodramatic epistle put him off, the old man seems to have had no time to write a response.2 Still, he faithfully inscribed “Anna E. Dickensons Letter” on the last page, filing it away with the rest of his correspondence. There were other letters that Brown seems to have saved for history, although likely without responding. For instance, Charles Partridge, the editor of New York’s Spiritual Telegraph, wrote a kindly letter to the old man, requesting that Brown contact him through a medium after he had entered the “Spirit Realm.” Partridge promised to publish the old man’s words from beyond either in the Telegraph or the Tribune.3 Regardless, Brown bundled these letters, placing them alongside a small trunk that his wife had first sent to him filled with clothing, writing materials, books, and dried fruits.4 The letters, which he carefully labeled for posterity, were returned to his wife along with the “little trunk,” the only remnants of his final days in Charlestown.5

As Brown’s authorized biographer, James Redpath was not only given great liberty with his papers and correspondence but also acted as the de facto archivist in collecting and publishing many of the letters written to Brown in jail. Unfortunately, the journalist did not think beyond his own publishing interests and seems to have returned them to Brown’s family, who allowed them to be scattered or lost. Yet without Redpath’s Echoes of Harper’s Ferry, perhaps the greater number of the letters that John Brown preserved in jail would be completely unknown to history.

In his last days, Brown wrote a warm response to Thaddeus Hyatt, an inventor and industrialist whom he knew as a zealous supporter of the free-state cause in Kansas and the chairman of the National Kansas Committee. Hyatt was equally supportive of the old man and proved to be his most desirable ally, particularly because he had thrown his considerable resources and influence behind raising money for the Brown family.

In mid-November, Hyatt’s appeals for funds on behalf of the wife and children of John Brown began to appear in the New-York Daily Tribune. Writing to the “Friends of Freedom,” Hyatt challenged, “Our duties now are with and for the living. God and history will have a care for the dead. Friends at the North what will you do for John Brown’s family?” A clever businessman, Hyatt added a novel incentive, promising that each donor of one dollar would receive a reproduction of an “admirable likeness” of the old man that Brown had personally given to him.6

Through the newest technology of photography, each subscriber would receive an actual copy instead of the common engraved image, Hyatt declared. Another innovation was the inclusion within the image of a clipped greeting in Brown’s own handwriting “taken at the same time with the likeness.” Indeed, this use of photography to combine Brown’s image and signature would be in such demand, he added, that its distribution would favor those making the earliest donations. “The pictures will be delivered on the principle of ‘first come first served,’” Hyatt promised in a follow-up advertisement in the Tribune.7

The image being distributing was based on a daguerreotype made in May 1858, the only one of twelve definitive images of Brown in which the abolitionist wears a beard.8 Whether or not Hyatt’s published picture of the old man was a predecessor to the modern political poster, certainly its widespread distribution accounts for the popularity of the bearded Brown image as a cultural icon. Hyatt himself was quite confident in his project, predicting that there would be “no difficulty in disposing of 10,000 copies of the old man’s photographs the moment the news spreads through the country.” Furthermore, ten thousand such images sold would yield eight thousand dollars for Brown’s afflicted family. “TEN THOUSAND PHOTOGRAPHS of John Brown will not satisfy the demand!” Hyatt proclaimed in another Tribune advertisement on November 21.9

Nor was the old man unaware of Hyatt’s endeavor. The latter had written to him in mid-November, including a clipping of his advertisement in the Tribune. “You will see that I need your autograph,” Hyatt wrote. “Please address me immediately.” Brown quickly complied, sending back a note with the neatly inscribed words, “Farewell, God Bless You,” which Hyatt promptly had superimposed in facsimile on Brown’s picture. “You little knew, my friend,” he wrote to Brown, “when you gave me your likeness, to what good account it would be turned.” Brown evidently had given him a copy of this bearded image in 1858, but according to Hyatt the old man had done so, urging him to use caution in “exposing the photograph to be seen.”10

John Brown did not have the daguerreotype made “to be seen” in the common sense. Rather, the real purpose of the 1858 image was probably contrived for political purposes. The self-presentation of the image—the old man dressed in the familiarly humble apparel of a “gentleman farmer,” standing confidently with his pocketed hands pushing back coattails, was every bit an authentic portrayal of Brown as he was known. Yet the image was deliberate, something of a statesman’s portrait that he probably intended “to be seen” after he had successfully carried his movement into the mountains and slavery began to crumble. “It was important to project the image of John Brown as a vigorous leader for slave liberation,” notes Jean Libby. Indeed, this was to be the image of the “Commander-in-Chief” of the “Provisional Army”—the face that he intended to represent his South-wide liberation movement. Instead, Brown now sat in a Virginia jail cell waiting for the day of execution, and it was his Kansas friend who reimagined the use of the image for a different purpose. “[H]ow little could I then dream of your impending fate,” wrote Hyatt.11

On November 19, Hyatt wrote to Tribune readers, reminding them that they had seen “the bravest man of the century stricken cowardly and murderous blows” on the floor of the armory engine house and then “brought faint and wounded” on a pallet into court, ferociously hurried through “the mockery of a trial,” and now “condemned to death with such summary vengeance as no criminal at the North, however vile, has ever experienced.” However, the proof that Northern sympathy for Brown was “substantial,” Hyatt continued, was being displayed at the rate of “two dollars per hour for the first hundred hours” of his photographic fund-raising project. The popular response to Brown’s image was thus “the first practical method to give expression” to the “insulted manhood” of the North. Although ten thousand photographs of the old man would not “satisfy the demand” he predicted, at least it was “one way in which the North affixes its seal of reprobation upon the brutal and cowardly manner in which a brave man is being hurried to death!”

Hyatt also included a variety of testimonial letters for subscriptions to the John Brown image, including that of Lydia Maria Child, along with anonymous remarks and those from a man claiming to have known the old man for over a decade (“He is the soul of bravery and honesty. I must have his photograph, and I wish to contribute to aid his family”). Hyatt continued briefing readers of the Tribune as to the progress of sales, with four hundred reportedly having been sold by November 25, one week before Brown’s hanging. “In view of these substantial evidences of a wide-spread sympathy through the Northern States for John Brown,” Hyatt proclaimed, “I respectfully submit to Governor Wise that he is about to execute a very popular man!”12

Hyatt’s service to the Brown family did not go unnoticed by proslavery conservatives in the North, and James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald labeled him as a “peddler of photographs.” To Bennett, Hyatt was equally as guilty of encouraging insurrection as Gerrit Smith and the Tribune’s Horace Greeley. When it was announced after Brown’s hanging that Virginia senator James Mason was going to convene a senatorial committee to investigate the Harper’s Ferry raid, Bennett opined that Hyatt should be called to give account of himself before the committee along with the rest of the “Kansas agitators . . . and subjected to the most stringent cross-examination.”13

Mason ultimately agreed with Bennett’s advice, and Hyatt was among several of Brown’s associates to be summoned to stand before the committee in early 1860. His response was to feign cooperation but stall, and then challenge the constitutionality of being forced to testify until he was finally thrown in a Washington jail cell, where he remained from March until June 1860. However, as a man of means, Hyatt played the clever prisoner, converting his cell into a comfortable dwelling, with furnishings and a screened-off “bed chamber,” and sending for all the comforts and edibles he desired. His strategy frustrated Democrats and thumbed its nose at the proslavery side, causing Bennett’s Herald to declare sarcastically that Hyatt was in “mortal peril,” not being allowed “more than one bottle of champagne per diem.” Even a moderate ally like Horace Greeley thought his strategy “rose-water martyrdom.”

Still, Hyatt would make the best of it, even entertaining guests, whose signatures filled a visitor’s book that he kept in his apartment jail cell. Hyatt even ordered bank checks that showed his address as “Washington Jail.” However, he never testified, refusing to divulge even the slightest detail of his knowledge of John Brown’s activities until the authorities were frustrated enough to release him. Regardless of what some Republicans thought of his velvet subversion in Washington, Hyatt had remained true to the old man, and told no tales “out of school.”14

Of course, all of this was yet in the unseen future when Hyatt penned his letter to John Brown on November 14. “God be with you, my brave heart!” he wrote. “God and his eternal heavens are above us! Eternity is ours! So that, in his sight who shall judge us at the last we stand approved. Life matters not, and death matters not; and whether the hours of this day, or the morrow, be shortened, is of little account; for the shorter life is, the longer eternity is; and which is best for us depends wholly upon God.” Admonishing Brown that he had challenged the admiration of men and angels by his faith and courage, Hyatt concluded: “Be steadfast to the end! Be patient! Farewell! I am yours in Christ, ‘for the life that now is, and for that which is to come!’ Farewell.”15

John Brown’s response to these words was not preserved, nor was the last letter from Hyatt written to the old man on November 24. However, in his letter on November 28 to Hyatt, Brown expressed his final gratitude to his friend. “I am certainly most obliged to you for it, & for all your efforts in behalf of my family & of myself,” he wrote. His effort had alleviated “the greatest burden I have felt since my imprisonment,” by providing for his “shattered & brokenhearted wife & children.” Apparently others had objected to Hyatt’s method and proposed other fund-raising schemes, but the old man now “had no advice in regard to it.” Rather, he was very grateful to know, while yet alive, “of almost any active measure being taken.” Beyond this, he concluded, he had nothing else to comment, since he had now begun to “familiarize” his mind “with new, & very different scenes.”16

Ultimately, “ten thousand photographs” was more an ideal than a reality. Hyatt’s fund-raiser sold no more than a few thousand in the United States, and perhaps some abroad, including Haiti, where the old man was greatly admired as a hero and martyr of black freedom. Certainly, the sale of several thousand pictures was no defeat. Considering the value of a dollar in 1859, perhaps many more sympathetic laboring people would have bought it had the picture been less expensive. Still, in view of the bloody apocalypse that would shortly be revealed to the nation, perhaps the sale of three thousand photographs was something of a down payment on the reverent memory that John Brown would attain amid the throes of Northern agony and the birth pangs of black emancipation.

The month following the old man’s hanging, Mary Brown wrote to Hyatt, thanking him in advance for his “great kindness and disinterested benevolence.” His support had been a “source of great relief and consolation” to her husband in his last days, and now she had found many generous friends “in almost every city of the free north and Canada, east and west, and across the great Atlantic and England and Scotland.” In July 1860, she received the sum of $2,600 from the picture fund—no small amount for the time, the funds then being distributed among Brown family members. According to Hyatt, the distribution was determined according to the condition of each recipient. However, the widow only received $200 from the pictures, quite in contrast to her stepson, John Brown Junior, who received $900. Other family members, including the young widows, likewise received proportionately smaller amounts compared to what was given to the old man’s namesake.

Evidently, a similar distribution took place with other funds raised for the Browns, John Junior once more taking the largest chunk of all Brown’s adult children, including those who had fought and suffered with him in Kansas and Virginia. It was a peculiar form of primogeniture displayed, especially because John Junior seems to have contributed less to his father’s efforts overall in comparison to his younger brethren and their widows, not to mention the other raiders. Unlike Robert Lincoln, whose wealth and position was secured virtually from the moment of his father’s assassination, neither John Junior nor his siblings ever became rich as a result of their father’s sacrifice.17 However, throughout his adult life, the old man’s namesake seems to have taken the lion’s share of whatever reputation and benefit availed, beginning with the charitable funds collected by John Brown’s friends and associates after his death.

In July 1860, Mary Brown would send words of gratitude to Hyatt on behalf of the entire family, likewise being published in the New-York Daily Tribune. “Be assured that we will ever hold in grateful remembrance your affectionate regards for us,” she wrote. “May your life long be spared to gladden, by your active sympathy other hearts as you have ours.” Hyatt glowingly responded: “Friends, I am fully recompensed for my labors in this matter. It is something to have ‘looked into the eyes of John Brown!’ It is something to have ‘looked into the eyes’ of his noble family—illustrious survivors of an illustrious sire!18

Three days before his execution, Tuesday, November 29, John Brown shuffled through the pile of correspondence before him, perusing a letter from a Pennsylvania clergyman that caught his attention. Perhaps given his recent disappointment with the Reverend Waugh and his final refusal of a clergy visit from Charlestown’s proslavery ministers, the old man could not help but search out the words of the clergyman. The letter, written on November 23, came from the Reverend Alexander M. Milligan, a Presbyterian clergyman in New Alexandria, Pennsylvania. Milligan was in the Covenanter church, a branch of Presbyterianism with roots in seventeenth-century Scotland. Originally, the main thrust of the Scots Covenanters pertained to the defiant commitment to the independence of the church from the Crown. Their descendants first came to North America in the colonial period and enthusiastically supported the independence movement. However, as a small body of Presbyterians in the United States, the Covenanters continued to challenge the status quo, mainly in their demand that the government recognize the crown rights of Christ over the nation.

If the Covenanters had another distinction, it was in their passionate hatred of slavery and their refusal of church membership to any slaveholder. The definitive Covenanter document was written by the New York clergyman, Alexander McLeod, whose fiery antislavery pamphlet Negro Slavery Unjustifiable (1803) was the perfect rejoinder to the often self-righteous proslavery Presbyterians of the South. The Covenanters believed that chattel slavery was unacceptable and sinful because it was premised on “man stealing,” as well as enforcing racial lines without biblical warrant, and likewise because it contradicted the very essence of Christian baptism. As William Edgar observes, Covenanters were “extremely active in antislavery activities,” including the Underground Railroad, right up to the Civil War.19

Milligan himself was born in Scotland in 1822, but had done his theological training in western Pennsylvania before entering the pastorate. Known as an eloquent preacher and antislavery lecturer, Milligan would later receive a special pass from Secretary of War Edwin Stanton that permitted him to move freely among the Union troops at his discretion. After the Civil War, he labored in spiritual and educational work among the freedmen and remained a tireless advocate for the amendment of the Constitution of the United States in acknowledgment of the kingship of Christ.20

Milligan’s letter starts with his explanation of the dissenting position of the “Scotch Covenanters” toward the government. The Covenanters refused to hold offices or vote in elections, he explained, because the nation “neither acknowledges the authority of God, nor protects the persons of its subjects,” apparently meaning enslaved blacks. Milligan then saluted Brown’s bravery, pointing out that “some earnest Christians” regarded him “a martyr to human liberty” and were praying “for a large outpouring of the martyr spirit” as he prepared to die. The minister further encouraged Brown to examine his motives, as to whether he had “taken up the cross for Christ’s sake, as well as for the sake of His oppressed people.” If indeed Brown had done so, he promised, his character would be “a hundred fold more than redeemed,” and his legacy magnified for his family. The minister also expressed hope that Brown would agree with the Covenanters in proclaiming “God’s controversy with this nation for dishonor done to His Majesty,” because the nation’s founders had fashioned a constitution that made not even a mention of the deity or “submission to the King of kings.” Having unburdened himself of his grievances toward the nation, Milligan counseled, “Noble man! you are highly honored of God! You are raised up to a high, commanding eminence, where every word you utter reaches the furthest corner of this great country; yes, of the civilized world. . . . O, feel that you are a great actor on a world-wide stage; that you have a most important part to play, and that while you are suffering for Christ, he will take care of you. . . . Fear not to die; look on the scaffold not as a curse but an honor, since it has been sanctified by Christ.” Milligan concluded that he still entertained “the lingering hope” that the nation would not add to its “already full cup of crime” with “the blood of your judicial murder.” Asking for a letter from Brown, he concluded in benediction, signing his name under the closing greeting, “Yours, for God and the slave.”21

For all intents and purposes, Milligan’s letter was probably the closest thing to final pastoral counsel that John Brown could anticipate before ascending the gallows on December 2 and seemed to be the very words he needed to make the rest of the journey. Greeting Milligan as “My Dear Covenanter,” the old man explained that he was now getting more than three times the number of kindly letters per day than he could answer. Yet he could not deny himself “the satisfaction of saying a few words to a stranger whose feelings & whose judgment so nearly coincide with my own.” He considered the minister’s words “heart warming” and excellent in counsel, and Milligan’s letter “really seemed to impart new strength” to his soul, notwithstanding he “was very cheerful before.”

The old man continued, expressing his confidence that God would not forsake him until, taking his place on the gallows, he had “showed his power to this generation; & his strength to every one that is to come.” This biblical allusion to Psalm 71:18 was an interesting one, and Milligan probably recognized it immediately as a Hebrew song attributed to an anonymous old man of biblical antiquity. (The text of Brown’s King James Bible read “Now also when I am old and grayheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come.”) Perhaps Brown had identified with this anonymous ancient writer, whose words reminded him of his own experience—the old writer saying he was a “wonder unto many,” opposed by enemies who had organized, plotted against him, and held him captive in the hand of the wicked. “Thou shalt increase my greatness,” he declared, “and comfort me on every side.” Other than this meaningful exchange, Brown’s response to Milligan was brief. His time was quickly approaching, he wrote, and he would “most gladly commune further in the sojourn of life if it were possible. “I am so near the close of mine that I must break off however reluctant,” the old man wrote before ending in Christian greeting.22

Throughout this time, Mary Brown remained in Philadelphia, waiting the dreaded day among newfound antislavery friends. Although a Congregationalist and Trinitarian, Mary attended the First Unitarian Church on Locust Street on Thanksgiving Day but was not immediately recognized by the congregation or the pastor, William Henry Furness. Susan Lesley remembered her as “an immensely large, strong-looking woman . . . with a good face and expression, but the saddest you ever saw.”

When the service was over, Mary lingered in the church, apparently waiting until most of the congregation had departed, so she could leave unnoticed. When Lesley and her little daughter approached her, Mary told her that the sermon had been consoling to her. Taking up the child in her arms, she endeavored a pleasant moment, only to burst into tears. Writing to her family in North Elba a few days later, Mary described Furness’s sermon as “one of the best antislavery sermons I ever heard.” She was probably thinking of the harsh criticism of her husband made by conservatives, adding that there were “some folks in this world who don’t think it a sin to preach speak & pray for the greatest sin that ever rested on our nation.” As for their father, Mary assured them that he was “tranquil” and “joyous” and continued to write “very comforting letters.” Sympathy abounded for their father, she wrote, and “the poor slave” would benefit from his difficult circumstances. Indeed, there was ample financial assistance too, so much so that if money alone could free their father from his Charlestown jail cell, “he would not stay there long.”23

While remaining with abolitionist James Miller McKim, Mary asked her host to write to Brown, mainly to contradict the rumor that she was unwilling to remain in Philadelphia according to his wishes. As McKim reported both to John Brown and the readers of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, she had eagerly followed news of her husband in all the newspapers, reading “with avidity everything” she could find in print about him.24

While her constant listening and reading was largely a sorrowful task, McKim noted that at least one article brought some light to Mary’s face. When her husband’s remarks about Beecher’s sermon were published in the Herald, “she laughed and cried over them alternately,” McKim recalled. Even though Brown’s remarks actually were blended with false interpolations, there was a familiar tone to some of the comments that the wife found “so characteristic” that she could not help but smile through her tears. However, when one of Brown’s published letters was read aloud, the old man’s words about having lost his “two noble boys” nearly caused her to collapse in grief. According to McKim, she “dropped her head suddenly, as if pierced by an arrow, and for a while was overcome with emotion.” He also shared the painful episode with the old man, describing to Brown how the reference to their two fallen sons “quite broke her down.”

Brown responded promptly to McKim’s letter, although he made no tender remarks regarding his wife’s grief. He was “greatly obliged,” he wrote, to learn that Mary was his guest, and hoped she could remain nearby in Philadelphia until after he was “disposed of,” or at least until he could contact her. In a postscript, Brown hinted that he had no idea of his letters being published in sympathetic newspapers. “Can get no New York papers here unless it might be the Herald: or the New York Observer,” he concluded.25

Interestingly, the only newspaper that Mary Brown openly deplored was the New York Observer, which one reporter for the American Anti-Slavery Society later referred to as the organ of “Pro-Slavery piety.” That John Brown’s mild-mannered wife would express such contempt was first due to the fact that the Observer was a religious newspaper, similar to the Independent, except that its Presbyterian editors were decidedly sympathetic to the slaveholder. According to Richard Davis Webb, an Irish abolitionist, the editors of the Observer were “bitterly opposed to all interference with American slavery, to abolitionism of whatever shade, and to all attempts to limit or restrain the power of the slaveholders.” The editors at the Observer never missed “an opportunity to vilify or misrepresent the abolitionists.”

Even more, the Observer was particularly galling to Mary Brown at this point because its ultraconservative Christian owners, Sidney and Richard Morse (the younger brothers of telegraph inventor Samuel F. B. Morse), assumed a decidedly orthodox air in calling for her husband’s death. As Brown’s defender in the Independent stated, one of the Observer’s editors, perhaps the Reverend Samuel Irenaeus Prime, had made himself odious among all the newspaper editors of the North by “clamoring” for Brown’s execution “with the conscience of an inquisitor.”26 Indeed, the harsh resolve of the Observer’s editor outdid even the vitriol of James Gordon Bennett, who happily republished one of Prime’s “Old School Presbyterian” screeds in the Herald.

Reacting to the notion of pardoning the Harper’s Ferry raiders, Prime had thus declared that punishment, being the “fruit of love,” required that “one who has made war upon society shall die.” Brown and his raiders had “embarked in this war upon” Virginia, by preparing pikes “for the blacks to be used in barbarous slaughter” and by the killing of Heyward Shepherd, the “honest colored man who made no resistance.” Worse, Brown and his men had “refused to lay down their arms after being over-powered, and continued their murderous work,” thus losing any “claim to compassion.” The editor, undoubtedly expressing the sentiments of the Morse brothers and other right-wing Protestants, concluded that even if “others can find any cause for pardoning such crime, we cannot.” To such sentiments, Mary Brown declared that she could read all that the Southern editors would write, and anything that even came from Bennett’s poisonous pen. As for the Presbyterian Observer, however, the wife concluded, “That paper, I cannot abide.”27

The only other complaint that Mary Brown made concerning newspaper coverage pertained to some overzealous journalist in New England, who falsely reported her as saying that although she had lost her sons at Harper’s Ferry, she would be willing “that all the rest of her family should be made a sacrifice, if necessary to the cause of freedom.” She told the journalist Theodore Tilton that while she “would not shrink from any necessary trial or struggle when the hour came for it,” she would not “look forward with composure to any further lessening of her family, already too sadly broken.” Mary concluded that she found it most regretful that anyone would put such “unmotherly” words in her mouth.28

Writing to her husband a little more than one week before his execution, Mary confirmed that she had received word from him through McKim, although she was displeased with the message. It seems that the old man had once again changed his mind and wished her to remain in Philadelphia until after he was “disposed of.” Brown was probably concerned about the intense circumstances in Charlestown, and the possibility that Mary might be exposed to danger if she ventured down to Virginia. Still, she wrote, she “could not go any further away until that sad event.” She was now staying in the home of the venerable abolitionist Lucretia Mott and had found “warm friends” wherever she went in Philadelphia. Mott had recently preached and her message was filled with allusions to him, Mary wrote further, adding that she might soon also hear the great Wendell Phillips speak some evening. The thought that her husband would soon die, and that they would be parted without saying farewell, was a “great Sacrifice” that she hoped God would enable her to bear. Asking him to write as much as possible, Mary added, “Everyone thinks that God is with you. I hope he will be with you unto the end. . . . Farewell, my dear, beloved husband, whom I am never to see in this world again, but hope to meet in the next.”29

During her extended stay in the Philadelphia area, Mary had also granted two interviews that were widely publicized. Her interview by the Brooklyn writer, Theodore Tilton, appeared in the Independent in mid-November, and a second interview by her host, Miller McKim, appeared the day following Brown’s death in the National Anti-Slavery Standard. In these seminal interviews from the abolitionist’s closest companion, the North was further infused with a conception of John Brown that contravened any portrayal in the conservative and proslavery press. Tilton’s interview revealed Brown as a lifelong Christian with an exhaustive knowledge of the Bible, a strong ethic of self-denial and concern for the poor and oppressed, and a man both “generous by nature” and kindhearted. “He has always aimed to impress his family with a spirit of benevolence,” Mary told Tilton. “He has always taught his children to be unselfish; to act always for others before acting for themselves.” If Brown had a fault, she concluded, “it was only that his “sympathies for the poor and the oppressed have always been too easily excited.”

McKim’s interview with Mary Brown yielded a similar profile of the old man, portraying him as the cherished paterfamilias, “born to command and bound to be obeyed.” As a father, he was often the family’s nurse in times of sickness, she recalled, “a tender husband and a kind and gentle father” who was known to stay up during long, cold nights in order to keep the fire going. “Many and many a time he has bid me good-bye,” Mary stated, “hardly able to speak for his tears, saying that he might never see me again.”

As to religion, her husband’s was practical, not formal or sentimental. “‘First pure, then peaceable,’ was his idea of Christianity. Love for God was to be shown by good will to men.’” Finally, in both interviews, Mary challenged any notion of insanity. “He has always been, and now is, entirely in his right mind,” she told Tilton. Typically, Brown was “cool, deliberate, and never over-hasty,” with clear reason. “No, he is not insane,” she concluded. To McKim, she said, “I couldn’t say, if I were called upon, that my husband was insane, even to save his life, because he wasn’t.”30

If McKim was helpful in promoting a more personal and generous view of John Brown, he probably also assisted Mary Brown in her letter to Governor Wise, written from Philadelphia on November 21. “I am made bold to address you by my trust in your feelings as a man,” she wrote, “& by reports that have come to me of the respectful words in which you have spoken of my husband now under sentence of death in your State.” Asking on behalf of her children and herself, Mary continued by requesting, “when all shall be over, the mortal remains of my husband and his sons be delivered to me for decent & tender interment among their kindred.”

I do not ask you for his life, dear as it is to us, and right worthy and honorable as I know him to be. I am perfectly aware that, if public consideration cannot avert his doom[,] private feelings however agonized will not be allowed the slightest weight.

In the letters which I have received from him, there is not a word expressing a desire that I should petition for his life. But he tells me that But he tells me that if, after he shall be no more, I think fit to come to Virginia “to gather up the bones of our beloved sons and of” my “husband,” it will be well. I ask, Sir, for the exertion of your authority & personal influence in furthering this my desire.31

Wise responded five days later, addressing his letter to “Mrs. Mary A. Brown now in Philadelphia.” Stating that he had received her letter that same morning, Wise wrote that he “sadly” thanked her for her trust in “my feelings as a man.” He continued, writing, “Your situation touches those feelings deeply”—but ultimately cut the rest of the line from his draft, which continued, “and they yearn toward you with the tenderness that should softly approach a wife, a mother, a woman afflicted.” Instead, Wise wrote, “Sympathizing as I do with your affliction . . . you shall have the ‘exertion of my authority and personal influence’ to assist you.” Furthermore, Wise wrote that he was pleased that she had “the wisdom and virtue to appreciate my position of duty.” The Almighty knew, Wise continued, that he did not take “the slightest pleasure in the execution of any whom the laws condemn.”

In his draft, Wise also wrote, “If duty and law permitted, you should have the lives of your husband and sons instead of their mortal remains. But, madam, God, the Giver of life, is between us and with us and we all have God”—but this line too was dropped in the final version. To demonstrate his promise, Wise enclosed a copy of his orders to General Taliaferro, ordering that “the mortal remains of your husband ‘when all shall be over’; to be delivered to your agent at Harper’s Ferry.”32

From appearances, Wise’s response seemed gracious. However, in his initial draft, he had written that the bodies of her “husband and sons” would be returned. In the final draft, “sons” was omitted, suggesting that the governor had reconsidered the extent of kindness shown to Brown’s widow and family. The editorial changes in Wise’s draft suggest that the governor had to pull back from his first tendency, which was more generous in comparison to the sentiments of the people of Virginia. Yet the withdrawal of kind words was far less significant than his ultimate refusal to return the bodies of Watson and Oliver Brown to their mother. Although the governor probably knew that the bodies had been disposed of after the raid, there is no reason that he could not have made some effort to recover them under his executive capacity. It is more likely that he had second thoughts about appearing too generous toward the wife of John Brown, and so without either explanation or apology, he wrote only that she could have the body of her husband.

According to McKim, Wise’s response was sent to Mary in care of Mayor Alexander Henry of Philadelphia, including the governor’s orders to Taliaferro for the release of John Brown’s body. Wise’s letter “seemed really sympathetic,” McKim wrote, in offering her permission and protection for her woeful task. However, the letter unleashed “surges” of grief from the wife, who seemed without comfort for quite a while. McKim afterward suggested that it was only then that the reality of her husband’s death had finally struck home, because Mary had “tenaciously” grasped at the “shadow” of hope for so long. While this was true enough, it is not clear that either Mary or her sympathetic host immediately recognized that Wise had politely refused the return of her dead sons. However, it may be that the governor’s wordless refusal was precisely the reason for the outpouring of her grief. If so, then perhaps she was only shielding her family back home, when she wrote to them that very day: “Just received a letter from governer wise [sic] saying that I could have the bodys of our friends when they are disposed of.” Regardless, the governor thus left Oliver Brown’s body to rot in a crude and nearly forgotten common grave, along with the remains of Brown’s other fallen men. Likewise, by his refusal, Wise had tacitly permitted Watson Brown’s body—stolen as it was by spiteful medical students—to remain a laboratory display in the Winchester Medical School. It would take decades before their remains, along with those of the other raiders, would finally be given an honorable resting place alongside their leader in North Elba.33

On Wednesday, November 30, the old man put aside reading letters to compose his own final letter, which he intended for the entire family, including his adult children in Ohio. “My Dearly beloved Wife, Sons & Daughters, every one,” he wrote. “As I now begin what is probably the last letter I shall ever write to any of you; I conclude to write you all at the same time.” He explained that on the day before, he had gotten a letter from Mary, “by which it would seem that she has about given up the idea of seeing me again.” But the old man had changed his mind again, and had “written her to come on; if she felt equal to the undertaking.” Now he was not sure that she would get his letter on time. “It was on her own account chiefly that I asked her to stay back at first,” he added. I had a most strong desire to see her again,” but “there appeared to be very serious objections.” He hoped she would come after all, but was prepared to die without seeing her again. “[S]hould we never meet in this life; I trust she will in the end be satisfied it was for the best at least; if not most for her comfort.”

After a few details about monetary gifts he had received from friends, Brown assured his family that he was “waiting the hour of my public murder with great composure of mind & cheerfulness: feeling the strongest assurance that in no other possible way could I be used to so much advance the cause of God & of humanity: & that nothing that either I or all my family have sacrificed or suffered will be lost.” The family could assuredly set their feet upon the rock of divine sovereignty, he added, for God was not only “wise and merciful,” but “just & holy,” and ruled “not only the affairs of this world but of all worlds.” He now was confident that “our seeming disaster” would ultimately result “in the most glorious success. . . . So my dear shattered & broken family; be of good cheer; & believe & trust in God “with all your heart & with all your soul; for he doeth all things well.”

He continued by admonishing them not to “feel ashamed” on his account, or for even one moment to “despair of the cause[,] or grow weary of well doing.” As for himself, he “never felt stronger confidence in the certain & near of a bright morning; & a glorious day: than I have felt & do now feel since my confinement here.” He was conscious that he had always sinned, but likewise was confident that the Heavenly Father would “kindly & forgivingly” meet him on the road like the compassionate father who received back the prodigal son in Christ’s parable.

Given his strident evangelical faith, perhaps it is no surprise that Brown’s final “family letter” would not only contain a frank confession of sin but also an evangelistic appeal as well as an extended defense of the divine inspiration and authority of the Bible. With the exception of his daughter Ruth and her husband, Henry Thompson, his adult children did not share his evangelical faith, and some had flagrantly questioned the veracity of the biblical text. It was not only his desire that Mary and his believing children would continue in faith but that none would “’fail of the grace of God, through Jesus Christ’: that no one of you may be blind to the truth: & glorious ‘light of his word’; in which Life & Immortality; are brought to light.” Certainly these were words for John Junior and his wife, along with Jason, and Owen, all of which seem to have been more inclined to the popular Spiritualism of the day.

Even Brown’s beloved teenage daughter Annie had abandoned the good ship of faith. Apparently, the old man was so concerned as to have written to her from jail, asking her to become a “Christian.” Brown must have been greatly disappointed when she wrote back, saying that she had different ideas of what being a “Christian” meant. Rather than following the biblical religion of her father and grandfather, Annie had concluded that she had sufficient reasons to reject the evangelical faith for a more private and universalist understanding. “I believe that all will finally be forgiven and saved,” she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson on November 29. “The notion of eternal damnation is contrary to all my ideas of justice, mercy, or benevolence.” Nor would she “accept pardon on the terms offered,” meaning she rejected any notion of the saving death of Christ, a core doctrine of Christian orthodoxy. I choose to suffer individually for all the evil deeds done in the world by me.”34

Annie’s theological rebellion perhaps astounded the old man, who had always argued that it was presumptuous for anyone to judge God’s ways, because no one was sovereign and divine. In another time and setting, Brown might have admonished her firmly with Saint Paul’s words concerning the foolishness of the vessel in challenging the potter. But this was no longer a time for argument and debate. He could only make his last testimony in the most reasoned and kindly tone, urging them to often study the Bible with “a childlike, honest, candid, teachable spirit” out of respect to him, even as he had prayed that “the God of my Fathers” would “open all your eyes to a discovery of the truth.” They would well need the “consolations of the Christian religion” in the future, and having been defeated, sentenced, and jailed, he had become convinced “beyond all doubt of a great need of something more to rest our hopes on; than merely our own vague theories framed up.” He was not asking them to “throw away your reason,” he wrote, only to consider the guidance of sacred scripture rather than find themselves cast about on a wild “Ocean” without a “Helm or Compass.”

Beyond the concerns of their souls, Brown’s thoughts turned to the family and their future. Over the previous five years, the Browns had known loss, beginning with the death of Grandfather Owen, always the beacon of Christian faith and antislavery zeal for the family; then Brown’s son Frederick was murdered in Kansas in 1856 by a malicious proslavery preacher. With the failure of the raid, it seemed the family was ruined—Oliver and Watson were dead, leaving their young widows to grieve, and poor, “crippled” Owen was a fugitive, while scandal and arrest threatened to overshadow the rest of the family. “And let me entreat you all to love the whole remnant of our once great family,” Brown wrote, “‘with a pure heart fervently.’ Try to build again your broken walls: & to make the utmost of every stone that is left.” Nor should they forget the Brown family mandate: devotion to “the great family of man,” for in “the exercise of habitual love to man; it cannot be very hard to learn to love his maker.”

In closing, Brown invoked the old Puritan martyr, John Rogers, an English Protestant theologian who was burned at the stake in 1555, one of the victims of “Bloody Mary,” the Roman Catholic Queen Mary I. “John Rogers wrote to his children, ‘Abhor that arrant whore of Rome.’ John Brown writes to his children to abhor with undying hatred, also that ‘sum of all villainies’ Slavery.” Alluding to the words of Daniel the exiled Hebrew prophet, Brown finally urged them to remember that “they that be wise shall shine: and they that turn many to righteousness: as the stars forever & ever.”35 Bidding his “dearly beloved” family farewell, the old man closed his epistle with the benediction, “To God & the word of his grace I commend you all, Your Affectionate Husband & Father, John Brown”36 (see figure 15.1).

FIGURE 15.1 DeWitt Hitchcock’s sketch of Brown and Stevens in their jail cell in the final days of the old man’s incarceration. Note the desk with pen, ink, and a pile of correspondence. New York Illustrated News, December 10, 1859.

On the same day he wrote his last family letter, Brown received a visit from Alban Payne, a medical doctor from Warrenton, Virginia. Payne was something of a journalist, but had come to Charlestown as a colonel in the 1185th Regiment Militia. After investigating the burning of barns in the vicinity, he and his men were barracked at a farm just outside Charlestown. Given his military status, Payne took it on himself to venture into town and interview Brown, undoubtedly with the intention of submitting his correspondence to the Warrenton Whig, which published his reports under the name “Nicholas Spicer.”

From his writing, it is clear that Payne was decidedly hateful of Brown, politely sitting with the old man while reading every word and gesture in the most resentful and mean-spirited manner. Claiming to have more than one “protracted conversations with Capt. Brown and his followers” beginning on November 30, Payne wrote that from his first glance, he had concluded the old man was conceited and egotistical. An advocate of phrenology, Payne described Brown’s head as not “properly balanced,” which further attested to his foregone conclusion that John Brown was “the ‘best bundle’ of egotism, hypocrisy, and deception, my eyes ever rested upon.” In writing this after the fact, Payne was making a facetious play on Governor Wise’s well-publicized speech of October 21, when he referred to Brown as “a bundle of the best nerves I ever saw cut and thrust and bleeding and in bonds.”37

Feigning concern as a doctor, Payne asked Brown of his health, to which the old man responded, “I am, thank God, as well today as I ever felt in my life, save a slight pain over the region of my left kidney, from which I have suffered more or less at times since my childhood.” According to Payne, the two had “a long and familiar conversation,” although he provided little detail of their discussion, except when he could draw some negative judgment on the old man and his conduct. Brown spoke kindly of Governor Wise and some of the military staff and local citizens, especially Jailer Avis, adding, “I should like all you Virginians were it not for one thing. You are a kind, polite, and brave people.”

Given his tendency toward optimism, there is no reason to doubt Payne’s reporting of Brown’s words, although his interpretation of the old man says much more about the interviewer. John Brown was “one of those men who impress you with confidence,” Payne recalled, “and you feel entirely at your ease.” But as they spoke, the old man seemed cautious, occasionally peering quickly over his shoulders “as if looking for some one to advance from behind.” Payne’s description suggested this was some mark of hypocrisy or deceit in the old man, although it is more likely that Brown was concerned about being assassinated. By his own description, Payne had come into the cell in advance of some others, and because Brown apparently did not know any of them, he may have felt insecure to have his back exposed.

Brown was rather a “garrulous old man rather than one possessed of remarkable powers of intellect,” Payne adjudged. He was more given to “possessing a dogmatical turn of thought more than any intrinsic capacity for inductive reasoning”—quite a conclusion to draw from a short conversation under such circumstances. Indeed, Payne concluded that Brown was “somewhat specious,” like an actor who found it “difficult to perform” his role due to “certain defects arising from natural deficiencies.”

If Payne’s attempt at analyzing Brown was skewed by prejudice and the vacuous presumptions of phrenology, the Virginia doctor was somewhat better at providing a physical description of the old man. Payne assumed that Brown was taller than he was in real life, which may indirectly suggest that he was far more impressed with the old man than even he realized. However, he seemed more correct in observing that Brown seemed healthy and “wiry,” with no fat on his body “but an abundance of bone and muscle.” Standing, the old man cut a fine figure, Payne describing his form as tapering “gradually from his hips down, until, you reach his chest, which is broad and deep, plainly indicating that no fatigue would be too great for him to undergo.” The old man’s hair was “coarse, thin, and grey” and was “combed back with care over a large ‘bump’ of self-esteem”—Payne’s phrenology once more imposing itself on the description. Brown’s face was “long and narrow, printing a sharpened appearance,” with eyes “dark blue or black,” the color seeming to change at times. In summary of the man’s appearance, Payne wrote that the old man “might with great propriety be called the Rule-or-Ruin John Brown.”

Writing only weeks after Brown’s execution, Payne revealed little of the old man’s conversation, although he claimed to have let Brown do all the talking. Initially, he had asked him various questions, but found his answers elusive. Had he traveled through Fauquier County? “In my life I have travelled much!” How many men did he have at Harper’s Ferry? “Capt. Brown ordered breakfast for forty-five!” Believing he could get no more information from him, Payne wrote that he yielded the conversation to the old man, and in a short time Brown was “giving me a graphic description of his journey through Virginia and other Southern states.”38 Unfortunately, Payne gave no more details, because he wished only to portray himself as having outwitted the old man into talking. However, Brown had only told Payne what he had wanted to reveal. He had been in the South. He had been all over the South.

Payne prepared his report of Brown’s last days in a series that first appeared in the Warrenton Whig but was later picked up for publication in New York City by William Porter’s “sportsman’s paper,” The Spirit of the Times. Payne’s cynical portrayal of the old man and the black people he sought to liberate (he wrote that blacks were an “inferior race,” closely related to the “mammalia”) was well suited to the reading appetites of many New Yorkers.39 After the old man was hanged and buried, the city’s proslavery interests would be laid bare as white men thronged the streets in outrage against abolitionism and its greatest fiend, John Brown.

SECTION IV

DECEMBER’S MARTYR

Two observations sum up a main truth about prophets: not only do they profoundly connect to their time and place, they operate in profound tension with them. This explains both their spectacular success and their ultimate failure.

—DONALD WEINSTEIN[1]

1. ”Eminent Biography: Donald Weinstein on Savonarola,” Yale Press Log, 23 Feb. 2012, http://goo.gl/tEfyvZ.

CHAPTER 16

TIME SEEMS A LAGGARD

I am very cheerful, in hopes of entering on a better state of existence in a few hours.

With the day of Brown’s execution approaching, some efforts were made by citizens in the North to appeal for the old man’s life. Of course, Governor Wise disregarded any form of intercession, whether from notable antislavery magnates in the North such as Lewis Tappan and Amos Lawrence or from crackpots threatening a rescue attempt. However, some notable efforts were made to gather signatures on behalf of Brown and his men, and these likewise were brought to the governor’s attention to no avail.

In late November, the Philadelphia Press reported one petition made by Pennsylvanians who acknowledged “the right of each State to sovereignty within its own bounds, subject only to constitutional restraints.” The petitioners presented a number of reasons in asking clemency for Brown, claiming that that he was a “monomaniac” regarding black emancipation and was both “brave” and “sincere” in his delusion. Were Brown’s life spared, they wrote, the honor of Virginia would best be promoted by her “generosity,” and many more “fellow-citizens” throughout the nation would be gratified. Of course, the petition concludes, Virginia would thus show that it could “confine” her enemies, even those deemed “crazy,” and keep them from “doing harm.”1

A similar effort was earlier made by citizens in Brooklyn, New York, asking for moderation in Brown’s case. These petitioners appealed further that “neither haste nor severity should prevail” and that the old man’s death sentence “be remitted, along with the other prisoners.” Among the signers of the Brooklyn petition was the abolitionist minister and publisher Joshua Leavitt, one of Brown’s admirers at the New York Independent. Another associate of the Independent, Theodore Tilton, also signed the petition. Tilton was another editor for the antislavery paper and was the journalist who had interviewed Mary Brown and Rebecca Spring in November. Tilton had also hosted Mary in his Brooklyn home when she first journeyed south to see her husband.2

However, among the signers, perhaps the most interesting was Willis Hodges, an acquaintance of John Brown dating back to the 1840s, when they were associated with a black colony experiment in New York’s Adirondack region. Hodges may have first gotten Brown’s attention in late 1847, with an article advocating black participation in a program in which freemen were given grants for settlement on the Adirondack lands of the wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith. As a leading spirit among African Americans in New York State, Hodges was a strong advocate of black economic advancement through the development of farms, factories, and mills planted in the rural areas away from the ruinous influence of the city.

Hodges was also the cofounder of the weekly newspaper The Ram’s Horn, which advanced a strong doctrine of black manhood and independence, no doubt quite appealing to Brown. When he learned of the black venture on Smith’s lands, Brown threw himself headfirst into the effort, desiring to strengthen recruitment and personally lend his support. His correspondence with Hodges in 1848–1849 reflects his intense interest in assisting the settlers, most of which were urban dwellers with little experience in farming or rural settlement, especially in the cold climate of the Adirondacks.3

After Hodges founded a black settlement in Franklin County, Brown followed in the spring of 1849, settling in nearby Essex County with his family, in the hopes of aiding the associated “Timbucto” settlement near present-day Lake Placid. “Say to my colored friends with you,” Brown wrote to Hodges in early 1849, “that they will be no losers by keeping their patience a little about building lots.” Unfortunately, the black experiment on the Smith lands did not go well. From the onset, black land grantees faced unscrupulous opportunists and racial prejudice, and not a few were deceived into selling their land rights, or discouraged by the harsh mountain climate and the intimidating demands of their wilderness lots. Ultimately, most of the grantees returned to the more familiar urban lifestyle and climate downstate. In contrast, John Brown chose to remain in Essex County, probably as much for his own preference as to support the few remaining black grantees.4

Although pursuits in Kansas and Virginia largely kept him away from his beloved mountain home after 1855, Brown’s heart remained in the Adirondacks, to the extent that he almost commanded his wife to remain there after his death.5 (Mary disliked the cold, reclusive setting but dutifully remained there until 1864, when she sold her property and moved to California.) His friend Hodges had returned to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, around 1853, after which he was married and entered the ministry. It is not clear if Brown saw Hodges five years later, when he stopped in Brooklyn to solicit support and enlistment from the black community. Hodges had earlier expressed agreeable convictions about the necessity of using force to end slavery, so it seems he would have been a ready ally for Brown in Virginia. However, when Brown and Hodges were finally reunited in the early summer of 1859, the old man was surprised to find him in a different frame of mind.

According to his biographer, when Hodges learned of Brown’s Virginia plan, he opposed it. Instead, he argued that a war between the North and the South was imminent, which would provide the ideal time “for the slaves and their friends to take up arms.” Brown was certainly disappointed with what he perceived as backpedaling, but attributed it to the fact that Hodges was now married. It is possible if not likely, however, that Frederick Douglass had quietly run interference on Brown too, being dead set against the old man’s revised Virginia plan.

Contrary to his later claims, Douglass had learned of Brown’s intention to attack Harper’s Ferry much earlier in 1859, and was pulling away from Brown throughout much of the year, apparently also talking against it to other black leaders. Indeed, Hodges’s demurral may reflect the fallout from Douglass’s interactions in Philadelphia. “[S]ix months before the old hero and his brave band struck their blow at the Ferry,” James Boyd recalled, “the plans were submitted to William Still by Frederick Douglass, who seemed to be fully up in all the secrets of the campaign.” For years Brown had anticipated Douglass’s leadership in the effort, but with his refusal to fully support the old man, Still and other black leaders in the region also pulled back. The extent to which Douglass’s dissent actually hurt Brown’s enlistment of free blacks may never be known, but it was probably far more influential than historians subsequently acknowledged. As W. E. B. Du Bois frankly concluded in 1909, “Douglass’s decision undoubtedly kept many Negroes from joining Brown.”6

It is unclear to what extent Brown attempted to persuade Hodges to change his mind in the months prior to the Harper’s Ferry raid. However, when news broke of the defeat in Virginia, Sarah Hodges cautiously burned a good portion of Brown’s letters to her husband—undoubtedly the more recent correspondence containing the old man’s appeals.7 Interestingly, too, there is no evidence that Hodges ever wrote to Brown during his incarceration. Indeed, none of the black leaders of the North seem to have done so, perhaps in large part because they shared a sense of awkwardness after following Douglass’s influential counsel. However, with the old man nearing the end, Hodges signed the hopeless Brooklyn petition, perhaps wishing that although he did not support Brown, he might at least help to save his old friend’s life.

Thursday, December 1, brought exceptionally mild weather to Jefferson County, reminding many of spring instead of imminent winter. According to Alban Payne, “it was a real gala day” for soldiers encamped outside Charlestown, since they were permitted to enter town in squads of ten under the supervision of their captains. Meanwhile, the military circumstances in town had become overwhelming, with more militia, armed guards, and artillery. The New York Illustrated News thus reported that the “intense energy” manifested in Charlestown was devoted to destroying any chance that Brown might be rescued.

Henry S. Olcott of the Tribune later made a similar observation, pointing out the extreme measures to which the authorities went, even to the last moment, to ensure the old man’s death. Olcott thought their worries something of a joke, especially since no one seemed to show similar apprehensions concerning Brown’s doomed raiders, several of them having been scheduled to hang on December 16. “Brown is the head devil,” he wrote glibly, “and almost the only incubus on their breasts.” The journalist was close enough in his estimation. Robert E. Lee, stationed at Harper’s Ferry for the time being, wrote to his wife on December 1, “To-morrow will probably see the last of Captain Brown (Old John Brown). There will be less interest for the others, but still I think the troops will not be withdrawn till they are similarly disposed of.”8

Yet if Southern desperation to kill John Brown was almost palpable, so was the frustration of the civilians in Charlestown, who had grown weary of having sacrificed their personal freedom in the name of security. Now armed men were everywhere, on “every street and every highroad,” even as patrols scoured the country to arrest strangers. Trains were methodically searched for armed invaders, and innocent visitors were greeted with hostile interrogation, many even being driven out of the county.

It probably was Charles Fulton of the Baltimore American who wrote on December 1, describing the troubling conditions that he found on returning to Charlestown after an absence of five weeks. “I cannot see what additional rigors could be enforced on this most unfortunate people. The experience of the past month will be ever memorable for the trials and tribulations that have been inflicted upon them. Even the citizens of the town cannot pass through the suburbs without being arrested and carried to head-quarters.”

Furthermore, the nagging presence of the anonymous Tribune correspondent continued to exacerbate the great prejudice against Northern newspapermen, all of which were looked on as highly suspicious characters. The journalist for the New York Illustrated News reported that he and the artist DeWitt Hitchcock would have felt the bite of this hostility were they not vouched for by a friend in Baltimore, probably Fulton of the Baltimore American. Of course, Ned House, still determined to remain in town until the last minute, continued to document the drama in Charlestown for the Tribune. Noting the “jealous caution” that Virginia authorities showed by denying Brown any “last words” and excluding the public from the execution, he struck home at the Old Dominion. “Can it be that it is feared this old man’s sturdy truths and simple eloquence will stir a fever in the blood of all who listen, that shall break down the barriers of prejudice, and shatter their feeble principles like glass?”

As far as Charlestown was concerned, House continued, “I believe all the zeal here is excessive,” adding that there were increasing incidents that even the citizens thought were excessive. According to House, at the last visit of Governor Wise, even he was “kept standing in the rain long enough to catch a severe cold, because he could not give the sentry the countersign.” Likewise, the aged Edmund Ruffin, president of the State Agricultural Society “and one of the most ultra Pro-Slavery men in the country,” was arrested on returning from a walk out of town. Ruffin despised Brown and publicly volunteered to perform his hanging. But his zeal for slavery did not spare the white-haired fanatic from being marched to the guardhouse before being released. Even Prosecutor Andrew Hunter was “subjected to the same species of military discipline,” reported the Baltimore American.

If Wise had to return to Richmond suffering from a bad cold, he also was beginning to feel the bitterness of Charlestown’s citizens, who were increasingly disgusted by the abuses of the friendly occupation. Although the fever of their resentment would not break until Brown was dead, it did so almost immediately after his body was cut down from the scaffold. Olcott reported in the Tribune how Charlestown had the bewildered look of a “besieged town” and that security had become so restrictive that even the leading citizens could not move about to their businesses without being interrogated at the point of a bayonet. This certainly would weigh heavily against any future political support for Wise in Charlestown, Olcott concluded.

Ned House visited the Wheeling battalion, quartered at the Episcopal church, observing the men asleep on cushions made for the pews. Likewise, the town graveyard had become animated with the sights and smells of soldiers washing clothes, cooking their meals, and even napping or playing cards atop the graves. Despite orders that had curtailed the “revelries” of the soldiers, the citizens of Charlestown were now thoroughly exasperated to find that their town had become a military camp, if not a barracks. “The residents of the town could not be more secure than if they were prisoners of war,” wrote the Herald correspondent. Even the somewhat contemptible District Attorney Charles Harding was sober enough to complain about how “the military had extinguished civil power.”

Based on his own military experience, Olcott of the Tribune afterward opined that the density of the military presence in Charlestown—now well over two thousand troops—was so great that any attempt to defend the town in the event of a real attack might have ended up a fiasco. With so many different companies and no actual plan for defense, he wrote, there would have been a “great slaughter of the soldiers by their own friends” in the event of a sudden invasion. Of course, any rescue of Brown by a small number of antislavery allies was now impossible, Olcott wrote. Had the old man’s comrades acted immediately, he concluded, they could have easily carried him off in a strategically devised rescue.9

Now the only allies of John Brown to approach Virginia were a small party whose ultimate mission was to rescue his body after the hanging—a task of no normal consideration, particularly given that there were a good many who would not be satisfied by the old man’s execution. Lewis Sayre, an orthopedic specialist in New City, Virginia, had already written to Governor Wise, protesting the return of Brown’s body to his family. Sayre wanted the remains to be consigned to medical dissection for punitive purposes, which he thought to be even more degrading in the eyes of common people. He further argued that this would prohibit any sort of triumphal procession of his body “through the Eastern states.” Other Virginians entertained similar sentiments, some calling for a clinical beheading after the execution in order to thwart any ceremonial display of the body in the North.

Nor were these merely the sentiments of the fanatic fringe. The remains of Watson Brown, one of the old man’s sons killed at Harper’s Ferry, were maliciously stolen away by students of the Winchester Medical College. None protested how the body had been skinned, its various systems dried and varnished, and “the whole hung up as a nice anatomical illustration.” Unsatisfied by even this vindictive act, some students spoke of rendering Watson’s skin into stuffed sporting pouches.10

The small party coming from the North was composed of Mary Brown and her Philadelphia hosts, Miller McKim, his wife Sarah Speakman McKim, and Hector Tyndale. McKim was a Presbyterian clergyman and antislavery editor, and both husband and wife were antislavery and Underground Railroad activists. Tyndale, whose mother was a Quaker, was a businessman with a background in military life. He was initially approached by abolitionists to escort Mary Brown when she first came to Philadelphia, and agreed to accompany her when finally she was permitted to go to Charlestown. Unlike Miller McKim, who considered Brown a martyr for freedom, Tyndale was not at first approving of the old man’s actions in Virginia.11

On the train going into Harper’s Ferry, Mary Brown met Patrick T. Moore, captain of the Montgomery Guard, who would act as her guide to and from Charlestown. The next morning, Moore seems to have introduced her to Lieutenant Robert E. Lee, who had led the conquering marines against her husband only weeks before. Lee had been ordered back to Harper’s Ferry with four companies of men from Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, in order to fortify the armory in the event of another assault. The lieutenant afterward wrote to his wife about the meeting, saying that he was pleased to refer Brown’s wife to General Taliaferro in Charlestown since he was perfectly indifferent to the entire matter.

James Ashley, a first-term Republican congressman from Ohio, was also at Harper’s Ferry when Mary Brown arrived, subsequently writing a report for the Toledo Blade that was quickly picked up by other papers. According to Ashley, when Taliaferro was wired about the arrival of Mary Brown, he replied that she was to be detained at Harper’s Ferry, along with her companions, and watched closely. Looking about the town, Ashley was further amazed to note that hundreds of soldiers were guarding the armory, while “almost every citizen in the town” seemed to be armed as well.12

Another careful observer at Harper’s Ferry was the Tribune’s arriving undercover correspondent, Henry Steele Olcott. The twenty-seven-year-old journalist was one of the agricultural correspondents for the New-York Daily Tribune, an accomplished authority on agricultural research and methods, and the author of Sorgho and Imphee, the Chinese and African Sugar Canes (1858). Like Ned House, who was a music and theater critic, Olcott seemed an unlikely type to take on a risky political assignment like entering Virginia incognito, especially when things were so “decidedly lively at Charlestown.” Unlike House, however, he was a moderate Whig with no strong interest in the politics of the day, being “content to let others fight their full of the slavery question.”

The turnaround for Olcott came when he learned of editor Horace Greeley’s “perplexity” over losing his source of correspondence in Charlestown, because House had “at last found things so hot” that he dared not stay one day beyond Brown’s execution. Yet Olcott was not just motivated out of personal sympathy for Greeley’s predicament as a publisher. He had also heard about the unpleasant experiences of other journalists, and was disgusted by the way “mob rule” had so stifled reportage of Brown’s last days. “Then the liberty of the press was for the first time practically destroyed in this country,” Olcott recalled.

Desirous of volunteering his services, Olcott’s only condition was that he would be allowed “to do it in my own way.” The young journalist then set out for Virginia, making his first base of reportage in Petersburg. As the day of execution approached, he successfully convinced a virulent proslavery associate that he was eager to help with Brown’s hanging and so gained a place among the Petersburg Grays. He further won favor with a fellow member of the Masonic Lodge, who was able to get him assigned to the staff of General Taliaferro’s chief surgeon. To the good fortune of history, Olcott’s assignment not only provided him a thorough disguise but also would allow him a close and unobstructed view of Brown’s execution.

When Olcott arrived at Harper’s Ferry, he was surprised to find that Mary Brown was also staying at the Wager House Hotel, along with her traveling companions. Observing the blended curiosity and malice of the people, he noted that “speculations were rife as to the identity of her escort,” Miller McKim, who was variously mistaken as either Henry Ward Beecher, William H. Seward, or Horace Greeley^13 (see figure 16.1).

FIGURE 16.1 DeWitt Hitchcock’s sketch of Mary Brown, when she arrived at Harper’s Ferry. New York Illustrated News, December 17, 1859.

On Thursday morning, December 1, Mary and her companions expected to travel together to the Charlestown jail, but were now informed that General Taliaferro had ordered the McKims and Tyndale to remain in Harper’s Ferry. It seemed a cruel order, and even the officers at Harper’s Ferry were displeased with it according to Olcott. However, the source of the disappointing restriction was not Taliaferro but, rather, Governor Wise, who was supervising the process from Richmond. As Olcott learned afterward, “a triangular correspondence by telegraph was going on between Charlestown, Richmond, and Harper’s Ferry.” Indeed, in the early hours of Thursday morning, Taliaferro had wired the Governor, reporting that the wife of John Brown was at Harper’s Ferry “with another woman and two men” and desired to go to Charlestown. Taliaferro inquired if he should permit them to visit, who should be permitted, how long the visit should be, and what should be done with the party “if they remain here.” When he did not receive a response right away, the general wired the governor once more, reporting that everything was quiet and that there was no chance of an invading force. “Every precaution had been taken to resist any attack,” Taliaferro wrote, adding that he was still waiting for orders “concerning Mrs. Brown.”

This time, Wise responded, directing that “Mrs. B.” would travel alone to Charlestown “guarded,” should be submitted to the “usual conditions of search,” and likewise overseen by the jailer. “This permit to extend to this day only,” Wise added, concluding that the entire visit would be regulated by Taliaferro, who was “to see that she returns safely to Harper’s Ferry this evening.” Congressman Ashley observed that Mary did not immediately acquiesce to the order, arguing that at least Sarah McKim might accompany her to Charlestown. However, her “earnest entreaties” were consistently refused, Ashley wrote, and the faithful wife was “absolutely compelled” to acquiesce “or else she would not be permitted to go to Charlestown.”

The whole matter, politically devised and coolly expedited, was performed with a mask of Southern civility and gallantry that gave Virginians an opportunity both to delight in the process and to pretend sympathy for Brown’s family. In this way, Captain Moore “offered” his services as her escort, although his role was not only predetermined but also orchestrated to satisfy obligation in minimal terms.

While pretending sympathy, Wise and Taliaferro thus rationed each moment of her progress toward the goal, the whole while keeping Mary and her fellow travelers under strict surveillance. In fact, Mary Brown was repeatedly delayed in the most painful sojourn of her life, and the trip over to Charlestown that was to have begun on Thursday morning did not even commence until about three o’clock in the afternoon. Congressman Ashley was nearer the truth of the episode in mocking Virginia’s “chivalry” than was the undercover Olcott, who was distracted by some sympathetic expressions of approval over Mary’s attempt to make the sojourn in the company of another female. However, no companion was permitted, and the wife of John Brown was almost literally stripped of all consideration before embracing her husband for the last time.14

Leaving the McKims and Tyndale in Harper’s Ferry, Mary departed with Captain Moore, their carriage being escorted by eight mounted riflemen and a corporal from the Montgomery Guard. W. W. B. Gallaher, perhaps endeavoring to feed reports to the Herald, was the only journalist who ventured some information about the conversation between Moore and Brown en route to Charlestown, although his account is not entirely trustworthy. For instance, Gallaher reported that Mary was angry because Moore had ordered the McKims and Tyndale to take “the next train going east,” which was not true. In fact, her three companions remained in Harper’s Ferry, awaiting her return, although probably she was visibly annoyed at having to depart for Charlestown without them.

According to the Herald, Moore attempted some conversation with his solemn guest, first by expressing cordial sympathy for her circumstances. However, she remained stoic, although courteous, in return. “She exhibited no sorrow or regret, so far as he could observe,” the report continued, “nor did she manifest any particular anxiety.” With the conversation remaining largely one-sided, Moore tried again to get Mary to speak, more pointedly stating that it was unfortunate that her husband had involved himself “with his present difficulties.” To this remark, she simply replied that she would bear the affliction as well as she could. She had not seen her husband for six months, and “they had been separated with the exception of a few days for nearly two years.” However, Mary added coolly, she and her husband had corresponded regularly, and she “had always felt a deep interest in the cause in which he was engaged.” Moore was put off by this Spartan response, afterward complaining that Mary had shown far less feeling than he would have, even if the least wrong were inflicted on one of his children. But the captain was particularly galled by the fact that she had “repelled all attempts on his part to express sympathy,” while amply expressing resentment toward her husband’s death sentence, which she declared cruel and unjust. Furthermore, Mary declared, she was proud to be the wife of John Brown. “The gallows, she said, had no terrors for her or for him.”

As they rode farther, Moore gratuitously pointed out a number of black children along the road, remarking that they were “well fed, well clothed and kindly treated in every respect—as much so, in fact, as the white children.” Then he added a little instruction about the self-interested inclination of slaveholders throughout the South to treat their slaves similarly well. Mary reportedly replied that she “never before dreamed” that the condition of the slaves was so good “or that they felt so happy as they appeared to her from her present opportunity of observing them.”

Of course, Gallaher either erred or lied outright in his reportage, so the reliability of this scene may be questioned.15 However, even if Mary did say that that she had “never before dreamed” that the slaves were treated so well, she probably was emulating her husband’s notable ability to blend cordiality with sarcasm. The wife of John Brown was a devoted antislavery woman in her own right and would not have been impressed by the hogwash of Virginia slaveholders. She knew that even these “well fed and well clothed” black children were the property of some white man and that the fruit of their labor, like their bodies, would never be their own as long as slavery reigned in the South.

In one of his last reports for the Tribune, Ned House scoffed that it had been determined by authorities that Mary Brown’s “progress and arrival should be made the occasion of the most imposing warlike display that could be made.” Congressman Ashley likewise wrote that her entry into Charlestown “beggars all description.” Three brass cannons were thus added to the two already planted in front of the jailhouse, with the better part of one thousand men standing at attention, with pistols and swords displayed and their bayonets glittering in the afternoon sun.

When entering town, Mary’s carriage first stopped in front of General Taliaferro’s headquarters at the Reaman & Gibson House, once more delaying her trip to satisfy the whims of the authorities in favor of “pomp and circumstance.” As the carriage again began to move through town toward the jail, hundreds of “eager gazers” began pressing in to get a glimpse of the old man’s wife. Mary seems not to have been fazed by the curiosity of the crowd, and when Moore closed the curtain inside for the sake of privacy, she merely assumed he had done so to block the sunlight. When they finally approached the jailhouse, there were soldiers standing on all sides, from four to six men deep, forming “a hollow square through which the carriage passed with Mrs. Brown.” The Tribune’s Olcott had also reached Charlestown, positioning himself in time to observe the arrival of the “formidable cavalcade,” along with the extensive maneuvers and movements of the troops surrounding the jail.16

Stepping out of the carriage, Mary passed through a file of bayonets and mounted the steps of the jailhouse, no doubt expecting to enter and immediately see her husband. Instead, she was held up for another fifteen minutes, listening to “stiff platitudes” and enduring the “the dreary dignities of formal reception” by General Taliaferro and Andrew Hunter. “With singularly bad taste,” wrote Ned House, Taliaferro “assured her that if she should ever be disposed to visit Virginia again, he could cordially invite her to Charlestown, where she would receive true Southern hospitality.”

Delayed further, Mary was now diverted into the private quarters of Jailer Avis and informed that she was to be strip-searched. She was now handed over to Mary Avis, the pleasant young wife of the jailer, who directed her to remove her clothes and then subjected her “to a rigid scrutiny.” The procedure was likewise ordered by General Taliaferro, reflecting the “morbid suspicion” of Virginia authorities that she might have a concealed weapon or some form of poison to aid her husband in committing suicide. As Ashley wrote, it was “preposterous” to think that the Browns would collaborate in such desperate measures, especially suicide. “John Brown’s whole life and every act from the day of his arrest until that hour, was a guaranty against his committing self-murder,” he wrote. “The whole conduct exhibited more fear on the part of those in charge of this manacled, unarmed old man, than ever the despots of Europe exhibited when Napoleon terrified the whole world with his feats of heroism and daring.” According to the Herald, even Captain Moore thought the search unnecessary. “She believes him to be a martyr, and she would offer no obstacle to the consummation of what she believes to be his great destiny.”

Perhaps it was at this time that John Brown’s cynical Virginia interviewer, Alban Payne, had found occasion to observe the wife of the prisoner. Describing Mary Brown as “rather good looking,” he added that she was “somewhat masculine in appearance,” meaning that she was no small-framed woman. “In a word,” Payne concluded facetiously, “she was fat, fair, and forty.” Simpson Donavin, the young journalist from the Baltimore Daily Exchange, also returned to Charlestown after a brief absence. Quite in contrast to Payne, Donavin had begun to draw very different conclusions about Brown from their conversations throughout the previous month, and his sympathy had quietly grown warm for the old man.

Donavin would be one of a notable list of journalists who gained access to Brown’s hanging despite the denials and limitations imposed on the press by the authorities. Although he was not able to visit Brown prior to the execution, he had enjoyed one last conversation with the old man in late November. Donavin would later recall entering his cell, trying to sound pleasant. “How rapidly the time flies, I scarcely realize that a night has passed since I saw you.” The old man smiled, replying, “Do you think the time goes rapidly? I do not. It seems a laggard. Were it not for a face I long to see, and some correspondence I wish to finish, I could wish the last hour were here.” Now, he only desired to see the face of his beloved wife once more and to answer a handful more letters to old friends and family members. “My work is all done except the final and most important act,” Brown told Donavin. “I must die and while I do not go to the scaffold of my own accord, yet willingly do I do so, as I believe that my death is necessary to complete my work, and I am anxious to finish it.”17

Meanwhile, Captain Moore had joined General Taliaferro, Andrew Hunter, and Sheriff Campbell in Brown’s cell on the other side of the corridor. Moore informed the old man that his wife had arrived, having escorted her from Harper’s Ferry, and that likewise he would escort her back there that evening. Moore likewise expressed his willingness to provide any other possible assistance, for which Brown expressed his thanks. Moore then presented a check for fifty dollars, made out to him by a representative of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, which the old man willingly endorsed for his wife.

Brown’s attitude visibly changed from gratitude to disgust when Taliaferro informed him that although his wife was about to join him, a “long interview” would not be permitted. When Brown countered by requesting that he and Mary would have two or three hours, Taliaferro informed him that would be too long. Holding back his anger, Brown responded, “Well, sir, I want nothing from the State of Virginia, and I beg nothing, sir; you enforce your orders.” Taliaferro left the cell, seemingly determined to enforce his stricture, although the visit was extended to several hours without explanation.

Mary had already been informed that she would have no private moment with her husband, because their reunion was to be entirely overseen by the jailer. This probably came as an annoyance to the old man, too, because Stevens had been removed from the cell, and Brown probably thought they would spend the last hours together in private. As Congressman Ashley put it afterward, the sorrowful couple “could not be permitted a moment alone, although the jail was guarded by at least a thousand soldiers and five brass cannon.”

To make matters worse, throughout the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening, the Richmond Armory Band “performed pieces of music in front of the General’s quarters, and in other parts of the town. When Mary first arrived, there was a “grand full dress military parade” going on in the streets of Charlestown, with as many as five hundred soldiers marching, and the sidewalks and balconies were crowded with spectators, while flyers were distributed in the street announcing that Mayor Green had declared a six o’clock curfew that evening. In fact, the whole time of Mary’s visit, “martial music resounded,” while sentinels with fixed bayonets guarded both sides of the streets, preventing people from passing the jail. Even the well-greeted Herald journalist, freshly arrived from New York, was put off by this crass display of military pageantry. “It did not seem to occur to any of the commanding officers,” he wrote, “that this serenading was, all things considered, of somewhat questionable taste.”18

Initially, Mary entered the jail area, meeting her husband in his cell. According to the Herald, the two came together in almost a “stage kiss and embrace,” because neither husband nor wife seemed visibly shaken. Ned House portrayed the reunion differently, based on his conversation with Jailer Avis afterward. The Tribune thus reported that the silence between them was “more eloquent than any utterance could have been.” As Avis looked on, Mary stood quietly in her husband’s embrace, resting her head on his chest and clasping his neck with her arms. Then,

“Wife, I am glad to see you.”

“My dear husband, it is a hard fate.”

“Well, well; cheer up. We must all bear it in the best manner we can. I believe it is all for the best.”

“Our poor children; God help them.”

“Those that are dead to this world are angels in another. How are all those still living? Tell them their father died without a single regret for the course he has pursued—that he is satisfied that he is right in the eyes of God and of all just men.”

Avis told House that as their conversation turned to the sorrows of his family, the old man nearly broke down but shortly regained his composure. Ever inclined to supplement sorrow with practicality, Brown then suggested to Mary that she should try to get the decaying remains of their fallen sons for cremation prior to reinterment in the Adirondacks. “I really cannot consent to do this,” Mary protested. “I hope you will change your mind on this subject. I do not think permission would be granted to do any such thing. For my sake, think no more of such an idea.” Apparently, Sheriff Campbell was present at that moment, chiming in that the cremations would not be permitted in the state. “Well, well, do not worry or fret about it,” Brown concluded, “I thought the plan would save considerable expense and was the best.”19

At some point, the couple was escorted out of the cell, passing from the jail area and crossing the main corridor into the jailer’s residence. Here they found that Mary Avis had banished the children from the parlor and set before them a tasty supper, although no utensils were permitted at the table (see figure 16.2). As they sat, however, neither husband nor wife seem to have eaten very much, absorbed as they were in their final moments together.20 Had he heard of poor Gerrit Smith’s illness and confinement in the asylum up in Utica? Yes, the husband responded, he had been informed about it. Smith was “a good friend,” the old man said, and he was very sorry to hear of his “misfortune.” Was Smith better? Yes, Mary replied. She had heard “direct” from him only a few days before and believed he was improving. “Brown said he was glad to hear it, but nothing else was said about Gerrit Smith,” reported Ned House.

FIGURE 16.2 John and Mary Brown, sitting for the last time at a meal prepared for them in the jailer’s family residence on the evening of December 1, 1859. New York Illustrated News, December 17, 1859.

Of course, it would have been dangerous had the old man spoken further of Smith, because the Peterboro magnate was one of his closest supporters and had managed to evade arrest after being admitted to an insane asylum on November 7. Smith’s medical retreat was a buffer against arrest, but it was not without a basis in reality because his mental health had all but imploded under the stress of Brown’s defeat and the real threat of being seized as an accomplice. Smith remained at Utica until late December, when he had clearly recovered his mental and emotional stability. Thereafter, he denied his role as one of the key supporters of the Virginia invasion and managed to avoid prosecution, as did Brown’s other influential supporters.21

According to Avis’s account, throughout the conversation Mary had to “stifle” her emotions but repeatedly seemed to break down, almost convulsing with sobs. “Cheer up, Mary, cheer up,” the old man kept admonishing until she regained her composure. Mary would later say that she had never seen her husband more composed or calm. From the time he recovered from his wounds, Brown told his wife, he had sustained a good appetite and never lost one night’s sleep. However, he was noticeably anxious about finalizing certain matters, such as the payment of some debts without the funds being taken by unscrupulous lawyers. He was also concerned that his gravestone would read according to his own inscription, which he had written out in advance for his wife.

In 1857, Brown had salvaged his grandfather’s Connecticut memorial stone, which had been put aside and forgotten for years after his relatives had replaced it with a new marker. The stone was not actually a gravestone, because his ancestor, Captain John Brown of the Eighteenth Regular Connecticut Militia, was buried near New York City. Grandfather Brown received his commission in the spring of 1776 and led his men to the aid of continental forces just north of New York. However, as a result of a dysentery epidemic in the camp, he became mortally ill and died in September.

John Brown was proud of his grandfather, and quite fond of the “old relic,” and believed its preservation would make for an exhibit of great interest to family descendants in the twentieth century. Apparently, his original intention for the granite marker was not as a gravestone, but as a double memorial in remembrance of his patriot grandfather and his fallen son Frederick, buried far away in Kansas, the victim of a proslavery vendetta murder in 1856. After Brown had it shipped to his home in 1858, he had the verso side of the “old family Monument” inscribed for Frederick. However, with the tragic failure at Harper’s Ferry and his own imminent execution, he decided to add the names, birth, and death dates of his fallen sons, Oliver and Watson, along with his own, “Executed at Charlesto[w]n, Va., Dec. 2, 1859.”22

As minutes became hours, the two moved from the table to the sofa, the wife pointing out her husband’s leg irons and that he had put on two pairs of woolen socks to ease the discomfort. In fact, Brown had not worn a chain throughout much of his incarceration because of the consideration of Jailer Avis but in the final days was constrained to do so, particularly for visitations by state authorities and designated journalists. When he was visited, perhaps earlier that same day, by Thomas Sultzer of the Baltimore Clipper and Augustus Rawlings of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Brown’s leg irons were also noted in a sketch by Alfred Berghaus of Leslie’s. Mary thought the leg irons “a family relic” and expressed a desire to have them, telling Jailer Avis that she also had the shackles that had been forced on her stepson, John Junior, by proslavery thugs in Kansas. Before Avis could politely respond, the old man intervened, telling Mary that he had already asked for the chains and had been refused.

The conversation continued, mainly on family matters, especially the schooling of their younger daughters. According to Avis, who was obligated to “guard” them in his own parlor, Brown expressed the desire that the girls certainly should be educated, even if it meant sending them to a boarding school. Perhaps he was anticipating the generosity of his friends, because both Rebecca Spring and Franklin Sanborn maintained schools in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and Concord, Massachusetts, respectively. As Mary’s biographer points out, the schooling of the Brown girls actually was the first enthusiastic project among a variety of Brown’s admirers, and the tugging and pulling of competing interests became something of a burden to the new widow.23

The sounds of footsteps from the corridor outside the apartment intruded on their waning moments, and the old man changed the conversation to his own death. With regard to his execution, he told Mary, there was to be no religious service by proslavery clergymen, “either in the jail or on the scaffold.” Brown further stated his desire to be “accompanied to the scaffold by a dozen slave children and a good old slave mother, with their appeal to God for blessings on his soul.” He had repeatedly declared these sentiments in writing and conversation and seems even to have requested a slave entourage, something that Virginia authorities would never permit. Still, he told Mary, he “contemplated his death with composure and calmness,” and although it would have been pleasant to enjoy a longer life, it was the will of God for him to “close his career,” and he was content, and would submit to his “legal murder” without murmuring. These words proved too much for Mary, who began to sob again. She should cheer up, the old man admonished. His spirit would soon be with her again when they were reunited in heaven.

It was now getting close to eight o’clock in the evening, and General Taliaferro appeared in the doorway, informing them that their time had come to a close. The two were then escorted from the Avis residence, back across the corridor into the jail, where she momentarily stood with him again in his cell. “Mary, I hope you will always live in Essex County,” Brown told her. “I hope you will be able to get all our children together, and impress the inculcations of the right principles to each succeeding generation.”

Brown then pressed a bundled silk handkerchief into her hand, asking her to keep it in his memory. Inside of the handkerchief was enfolded his bloodstained pillowcase.24 He also gave a bundle of his selected correspondence to her, including a personal will that he had drawn up earlier that day. “I give you all the letters and papers which have been sent me since my arrest,” he told his wife, adding that he wanted her to take the little trunk containing all of his clothes back home too. “I have something else to add to my statement,” he said in reference to his will. “Perhaps I will have time to do it tomorrow.” Then, turning to the jailer, Brown asked the hour of his execution. “Eleven o’clock,” Avis answered solemnly.

There was nothing else to be said, and Taliaferro informed Mary that the carriage was now awaiting her at the door. Surrounded by onlookers, the two modestly refrained from the intimacies of a last embrace. Instead, they clasped hands and parted, Brown saying, “God bless you and the children.” Struggling to hold back her tears, Mary gasped, “God have mercy on you,” maintaining her emotions until reaching the front door. Convulsing in sorrow, she momentarily regained her composure and stepped outside, entering the carriage that would return her to the Wager House at Harper’s Ferry.25

Brown’s last full day on earth had proved to be a busy one. Before the arrival of his wife, he had received a visit by “Obie” Wise, the governor’s son, who was serving in Richmond’s Company F, and Colonel Francis H. Smith, superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute at Lexington, Virginia. Obie may have been present informally on behalf of his father because Governor Wise had placed Smith in charge of the execution, and Smith had accordingly brought eighty cadets with officers and weapons, including one of his faculty members, Thomas J. Jackson, later known as Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson of the Confederate Army. Little record of their meeting with Brown is preserved, although Jailer Avis told a reporter that Brown firmly resisted any suggestion of being attended by clergy on the scaffold. The old man told Smith and Wise that “he would as soon be attended to the scaffold by blacklegs or robbers of the worst kind as by slaveholding ministers, or ministers sympathizing with slavery.” What he really desired, he added, was to “be followed to the scaffold by barefooted, barelegged, ragged negro children, and their old gray headed slave mother. . . . He would feel, he said, much prouder of such an escort, and wished he could have it.”26

Likewise, before his wife’s arrival, he had labored over a preliminary last will that entailed the dispensing of personal possessions to his children and small payments to be made on some outstanding debts. Most notably was the bequeathing of “as good a copy of the Bible as can be purchased at some Book store in New York or Boston at a cost of Five Dollars each,” to every member of his immediate family to the third generation. These gift Bibles, purchased from monies inherited from his father’s estate, were Brown’s final expression of evangelical faith. However, their dutiful purchase and distribution, months and even years after his death, were perhaps the ultimate way that he hoped to influence his family beyond the grave. The will was witnessed by Jailer Avis and given to Mary, although the matter of his estate was not fully settled.27

The rest of his writing on December 1 consisted of mostly short notes, scrawled in response to a number of correspondents that he did not wish to leave unanswered. According to Avis, Brown received over twenty letters that very morning, although only a handful of his responses to these writers have survived. However, as if in biographical serendipity, these letters taken together almost form a trail of memory that gradually leads back to his youth. The first, representing the recent years of his public life and antislavery struggles, was answered in response to the abolitionist journalist, Richard Hinton. Brown had come to know Hinton back in Kansas, the latter being a reporter for the Leavenworth Times and a special correspondent for the Boston Daily Traveler. Using a pseudonym, Hinton had written to Brown from Boston, although the old man immediately recognized the identity of the author. Brown dashed off a brief acknowledgment, concluding, “I trust God is with me ‘in very deed’. May, he ever be with you & all yours.”28

Another correspondent to be answered was the prosperous wool merchant Edward Harris, from Woonsocket, Rhode Island, whom Brown knew from the previous decade. Harris was not only a successful manufacturer and community icon, but was considered an “extremist” in his antislavery views. Harris wrote to Brown on November 20, although Andrew Hunter may have deliberately detained the letter in the hopes of undercutting the trend of Brown’s correspondence being published in the newspapers.

In his letter, Harris recalled their former association in the wool trade, adding that he never dreamed that his old associate would “immortalize” his name “with the host of martyrs which have gone before you, who chose to obey God rather than man.” In closing, Harris wrote, “All I can say is this: Hold on; trust in God to the last, and Christ will redeem you to Himself. Die like a Christian, and like a man. . . .” Adding generosity to his words, Harris included a check for one hundred dollars. Brown’s extremely short response reveals the weightiness of the hour. “My dear sir,” he wrote, saying he had little time to acknowledge Harris’s “kind and comforting letter” and generous monetary gift. Offering his “earnest thanks,” Brown closed with a benediction that God might reward him a “thousandfold.”29

If Harris’s letter brought Brown back to the 1840s, then a letter from a Pennsylvania associate brought him back yet a decade further. James Foreman was Brown’s employee in Randolph Township, Pennsylvania, in the early 1830s, when the latter ran a successful tannery operation and enjoyed the profile of a respected community leader.

In those days, Brown had brought his first wife and young family to the lush and unsettled area in the vicinity of Meadville, quickly clearing the trees and erecting a two-story tannery and cabin. Throughout nine years in Randolph Township, Brown was involved in almost every civic interest, from serving as the local postmaster to community development, schooling, livestock improvement, and religious life. He employed a small group of local men, establishing a community life for resident employees such as Foreman, which included study, debate, competitions, and spiritual formation.

After the death of Dianthe Lusk, his first wife, in 1832, Brown found himself a young widower with five children, a tremendous burden for him to carry amid his grief and labors. To assist him, the newly married Foreman and his wife opened their home to the grieving family, taking them in until they could gain stability. The following year, Brown remarried, taking seventeen-year-old Mary Day as his new wife, and then relocating with his family back to Ohio in 1835.

With news of Brown’s defeat at Harper’s Ferry, Foreman thus wrote to the old man, stating that he always held him “in grateful remembrance, as the best friend I ever had, and to whom I owe every thing for whatever I am or may be.” His wife sent her “best respects,” Foreman added, concluding that they believed that his mind was “fully made up to put your trust in God, who works all thing after the counsel of his own will, and for the best possible good.” Writing as if to a teacher and a father, Foreman’s words, although succinct, were loaded with feeling and intent, including a salutation to a shared Calvinistic confidence in the sovereign purpose of God.

Night had fallen, and the writer was now dependent on whatever lamplight filled his lonely cell. Taking up his pen, Brown addressed Foreman as “My Dear Friend,” explaining that he had only received his letter that same evening. He was “very grateful for all the good feeling expressed” in the letter, and he prayed for God’s abundant blessing and salvation in their lives. “I am very cheerful, in hopes of entering on a better state of existence in a few hours, through infinite grace in ‘Christ Jesus my Lord,’” he wrote. Then, in closing, he added allusions to two of his favorite biblical texts: “Remember ‘the poor that cry,’ and ‘them that are in bonds as bound with them.’ Your friend as ever, John Brown.”30

That evening, the old man likewise wrote a last letter to his half-brother, Jeremiah Brown, in Hudson, Ohio, mainly to finalize some details concerning the disposal of inheritance and possessions. Bidding his brother farewell, he added in postscript: “I would write to all my friends [but] cannot. Am quite cheerful, & composed.”31 Yet if any letter carried John Brown back to memories of his youth, it probably was the surprising letter he received from a woman in Columbus, Ohio.

Harriet Randall wrote to Brown on November 28, only three days before, including a weekend—which may suggest that an admiring Ohio postal official might have expedited the letter’s delivery. Randall, now married to a Baptist minister, was somewhat younger than Brown and had not seen him for many years, and the old man might not have immediately recognized her by her married name. As she explained their shared background in Hudson, Ohio, the old man must have immediately remembered her as the daughter of Heman Oviatt, an old family friend and associate. Recalling the intimate friendship and collaboration between the Oviatt and Brown families in the building of Hudson, Harriet had written to express her “most intense interest” in the unfolding drama in Charlestown.

Harriet wrote that she was disturbed by his “hasty trial” and “merciless sentence,” but also inspired by his “truthful and noble speech” in court. She had read his letters in the newspaper and rejoiced that God had given him “grace to conquer.” The Virginians might think they were crushing him, she concluded, but the Almighty would “lift you above all fear and pangs, and you will rejoice and triumph.” It must have grown late, and the old man was growing weary for the rest that preceded final rest. Perhaps, too, he began to ponder in long, lingering memories of old Hudson, of his youthful bouts with schooling, of a mother lost in his eighth year, and of a godly, stammering father who taught him to love God and hate slavery.

Harriet was too young to remember John Brown as a boy, but she probably knew him as a sprouting youth prone to lonely adventures in the woods and along streams; his shyness around females; and his love of animals and livestock. Did she remember, too, how his youthful play could suddenly change to rage on behalf of the bullied and the weak and that he could go in an instant from playfully knocking off “old seedy Wool hats” to trouncing bullies?

“My Very Dear friend,” the old man wrote hastily, “I can only say one word to Your most kind letter. . . . I trust God is With me ‘in very deed.’ May he ever be with you & all yours. Your Friend, John Brown.”32

CHAPTER 17

THE MAJESTY OF DEATH

There he stood . . . the cynosure of all eyes on the field and afar off.

“My Dear Wife,” John Brown wrote early in the morning of Friday, December 2, “I have time to enclose the within & the above which I forgot yesterday & to bid you another Farewell: ‘be of good cheer’ and God Almighty bless, save, comfort, guide, & keep you, to ‘the end.’” These were the old man’s last words to his wife, who perhaps was sleeplessly stirring in her bed over in Harper’s Ferry, dreading the rising sun of her husband’s last day.

Brown had arisen that morning with an urgent need to clarify and correct the last will that he had written the previous day for his wife. Along with somewhat incomplete information regarding the inscription on the old gravestone (he could not remember the birthdates of Oliver and Watson), Brown dashed off a letter directing that any of his personal property “not previously disposed of by me,” including his land in North Elba, would go to his wife. On her death, he added, the proceeds would be equally dispersed among his living children, and a “Childs share” be given to surviving children of his fallen sons. “No formal will” could be otherwise used without the knowledge of his “dutiful and dearly beloved family.”1

Brown may have been advised that his document was legally inadequate, at least as it regarded property that he held and lost in the South. Determined to salvage as much as possible for his family, the old man sent word to Andrew Hunter, who promptly made his way over to the jailhouse, no doubt wondering why the prisoner had sent for him in almost the last hour. Hunter was immediately apprised of the task at hand, which was to prepare a “true last Will and Testament” as it applied to Brown’s lost property “scattered about in the States of Virginia and Maryland,” articles both domestic and “of a war like character.” The document was written out and witnessed by Hunter and Jailer Avis. The procedure took about ninety minutes, but before Hunter could get away, the old man asked him to prepare a brief codicil, adding that his captor “friends” Avis and Campbell were each to receive one of his Sharps rifles, or at least one of his Colt revolvers.

The rest of the time was consumed by Brown’s determined insistence that one dollar sent to him through the mail had gone missing. Hunter assured him that all monies from the mail had been given to him, but he stubbornly protested that the dollar in question had not been put into his hands, and shortly the discussion seems to have become disagreeable. Brown typically was careful to the penny, but this was also his last opportunity to provide for his family, and he was not going to be satisfied until a good-faith effort was made to locate the lost dollar. After some inquiry, the mailing was located, and it was determined—much to the old man’s satisfaction and, no doubt, to Hunter’s relief—the dollar had already been given to Mary Brown.2

Brown thanked Prosecutor Hunter, shaking his hand warmly and expressing gratitude for his kindness and attention. Perhaps moved by emotion, or maybe even pricked by pangs of conscience, Hunter gratuitously brought up to Brown “why his trial came on so promptly.” Hunter told him that the calendar of the court had required haste, because there would have been “no other term until spring.”3 Of course, this was a lame excuse, because there was neither a legal nor an ethical reason why wounded prisoners without suitably prepared attorneys of their own choosing had to be rushed to judgment, simply for the sake of accommodating the legal calendar. In fact, Andrew Hunter had played the role of Procrustes for the slaveholders of Virginia, and the iron bed of legality he prepared for John Brown and his men was little more than revenge.

However, if the prosecutor’s conscience was pricked, his basic sensibilities never softened, nor does he seem to have ever acknowledged his leading role in railroading Brown to his death by means of a hurried, biased trial. In 1887, he was still defending the dubious procedure by appealing to a “very anomalous system peculiar to Virginia,” which required that a trial be held within ten days of the issuance of the warrant. Yet there was no reason why a practical delay could not have been granted once the trial had begun, and an array of legal scholars today certainly would challenge Hunter’s rationale. Furthermore, it is hard to overlook the fact that Hunter himself was a slaveholder, and held four people as property in his household, including a six-year-old “mulatto” boy, who may have been either his son or grandson.4

Nor should Brown’s genuine kindness or tendency toward half-praise while in Virginia be mistaken for approval. He may have told Hunter that his trial was “fairer than he expected,” but coming from the old man, such words were but veiled criticism. As Brian McGinty observes, Brown’s public statements about the trial should not be taken as the last word on the subject. By the time his trial was concluded, he had come to terms with accepting his punishment, welcomed martyrdom, and put aside any quibbling “about denied requests for delay, arguments about jurisdiction, instructions to the jury, or the effectiveness of the assistance he received from counsel.” The day before his hanging, he was far more blunt in telling “Obie” Wise and Colonel Smith what he thought of the outcome of his trial. He was not to be executed, he said, but “publicly murdered.”5

Brown’s generosity toward his captors otherwise was straightforward, the old man giving his books to the guards, his sword to Colonel Baylor, who opposed him at Harper’s Ferry, and his pocket watch to Avis. He also gave his Bible to John Blessing, a local man who operated a confectionary business. Blessing had served as a jail guard but had brought Brown special foods and had helped to dress his wounds. He had tried to give Blessing his Bible the previous week, but the kind citizen thought the old man should hold on to it a little longer. When he did receive it, the Bible was personally inscribed and its text was peculiarly marked with bracketed verses and folded pages—signifying particular texts that, as Brown put it, “in the most positive language condemn oppression & violence.”6

To another guard, Hiram O’Bannon, he handed a peculiar note that far exceeded the autograph he had requested. O’Bannon was a local blacksmith and apparently enjoyed something of a friendly debate with the old man and his captive raiders. Some days before the execution, O’Bannon had made his request and Brown warmly responded, saying he would do so on the condition that “he should not make a speculation out of it.” O’Bannon had said nothing more of the request, perhaps believing that Brown either had forgotten or was unwilling to give his autograph, especially considering he had consistently refused such requests in the mail. However, Brown had not forgotten, although he had no intention of giving O’Bannon a mere signature.7

Summoning the guard to his cell, the old man handed him a note that read,

Charlestown, Va, 2d, December, 1859.

I John Brown am now quite certain that

the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be

purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now

think: vainly flattered myself that without verry

much bloodshed; it might be done.8

Brown’s note to O’Bannon was undoubtedly written with a view to the historical record, which he hoped would sufficiently explain his reason for the Virginia invasion, including his desire to diminish, not exacerbate, the imminent violence that would beset the land over slavery. Over the generations, the note often has been referred to as a “prophecy,” which to some degree it seems to embody, although Brown was not the only one who warned of an imminent civil conflict. Ultimately, however, the note is an apologia—testimony in defense of his actions in witness against the nation. The Baltimore American correspondent in Charlestown managed to publish the “prophecy” shortly after Brown’s death, but its circulation was limited and brief, and for a time the note slipped into the obscurity of private possession until it was publicly exhibited late in the nineteenth century.9

The jailhouse was strangely quiet, Brown’s men, now including Stevens, were all incarcerated on the second floor of the house and, no doubt, were contemplating their own deaths in the shadow of their leader’s scaffold. From a barred window, some of the raiders could even observe the gathering activity in the open field, less than a half mile from the jail, where the execution was to take place. Like others in town, they could see the “fluttering white pennons” that marked the sentry positions in the field, “a piece of half stubble, half pasture ground.” They could also see the white paper marker on the site of the gallows, and the workers as they began to assemble the prefabricated scaffold, the handiwork of a carpenter laboring at the local Baptist church.10

Downstairs in the jail, the guards were solemn as they moved about “automatically, silently, with bowed heads, lest the tears so near to welling up should overflow.” As Oswald Villard put it, “[t]he majesty of death had now laid its spell upon them, as the dominating personality of the man they guarded had won from them a regard they wished not to bestow.” William Fellows, one of the guards, remembered Brown writing at his desk, the morning sunlight pouring through the window, bathing the old man in its aura. Fellows said that after the Brown was gone, he would not return to his post as an inside guard, and could not bring himself to return to the jail corridor despite the appeals of his relative, Sheriff Campbell. In the Civil War, Fellows fought on the side of the Confederacy, and was even a witness to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, yet it was John Brown’s memory that haunted him throughout life. Fellows never questioned the legality of the execution, but he told a reporter in 1898 that he had never quite recovered from his personal sorrow over the old man’s execution.11

For all of the quiet that prevailed in the jailhouse that Friday morning, the old man himself was anything but solemn. There was almost a glow about him, others pointing out that he even seemed joyful. “He was very cheerful all the way through,” Stevens wrote to Anne Brown, “and appeared as happy on the morning of his execution as I ever saw him.” Stevens afterward wrote to another friend: “The old man was as cheerful on the morning he left as I ever saw him. I felt rather bad to see the old man die in that way, for I believe he has the right of all at heart; but so we good pass away.” Ned House, whose last duty to the Tribune was fulfilled in his eyewitness account of the execution, likewise observed that Brown emerged from the jail “apparently calm and cheerful.” Even Major Thomas Jackson, Brown’s Calvinistic counterpart, wrote to his wife that the old man had ascended the scaffold with “cheerfulness.”12

With only a short time remaining before his departure, Brown turned his attention to one last letter to answer from the previous day, written by another old friend in Ohio. Lora Case had known the old man from about 1820, when Brown was his Sunday-school teacher at the First Congregational Church in Hudson. He always remembered not only the serene, self-controlled manner in which Brown spoke, even in debate, but also his awkwardness in social settings, perhaps in part due to bashfulness. Case long remembered Brown telling him that he had “never attempted to dance” and did not “know one card from another.”

In his letter to Brown, he explained that their “long acquaintance” had made such an impression on his mind that he felt there was “an attachment formed which Death alone can separate.” Now that the time had come for his execution, Case wrote, his prayer was that Brown might “come off conqueror through Him that hath loved us” and finding “a resting-place in heaven” among the other “friends of humanity.” In closing, he asked the old man for “something from your hand,” with “some short sentiment of your choosing,” and, in postscript, offered to take Brown’s youngest daughter into his family in order to rear and educate her. It was a sincere offer, but the idea of parting little Ellen from her mother and sisters was out of the question. “Farewell!” he closed. “May God Almighty strengthen you as you are about to be offered up.”13

The old man’s response to Case was his last posted letter, probably written within two hours of his departure for the gallows. Given their long association and good friendship, Brown wrote a far longer letter than he had written to others the day before. He wrote that he had found Case’s “outburst of warm hearted sympathy” to be “kind & cheering,” especially because it showed a common concern for those “who ‘have no helper.’”

Although he was getting ready for his “last great change,” Brown wrote that he felt it necessary to commend his old friend. Case’s concern for the “friends of humanity” had made him “shine” as a “light in the world” despite “this wicked & perverse generation.” Indeed, Case had struck the high note of true service to the Almighty: “‘Pure & undefiled religion befor[e] God & the Father is,’ as I understand it,” Brown wrote, “an active (not a dormant) principle.” As to the offer of educating his youngest daughter, Brown demurred, passing the issue of his children’s guidance “now entirely to their excellent mother from whom I have just parted.” With these words, he closed the letter in salutation. “Remember me to all yours, & my dear friends.”14

As Brown had requested, Case shared the letter with the community of Hudson at a memorial service one week after the hanging. Like previous letters, the letter to Case was not only picked up quickly by the press in Ohio and then published more broadly across the North but ultimately became one of several of Brown’s most famous jailhouse letters. However, even if it had not been quickly publicized, the old man had made sure that Case’s admiring letter found its place among the rest of the letters he had carefully selected for history. Afterward, one of the jail officials told the Herald correspondent that Brown had “carefully” preserved any letter that “applauded him as a martyr to the antislavery cause.” Even an admirer like Boyd Stutler would later observe that the old man “had a fine eye for propaganda” as it pertained to his correspondence.15

The point is fair enough, because John Brown clearly and deliberately made a priority of influencing the historical record as much as possible. During his trial, he looked to the press in the hope of maximizing his witness in history. When he ascertained that his words had been twisted, omitted, or otherwise misunderstood, he consistently made great efforts to clarify and correct the record. The same jail official likewise told the Herald journalist how Brown had written to the conniving local editor and correspondent, W. W. B. Gallaher, protesting the distortion of his comments about Beecher’s sermon as published in the same journal.16

As to his own correspondence, it may be true that Brown preserved the letters that affirmed his heroic role in the antislavery cause; it is also true that he was deliberate in employing an almost “apostolic” tone in some of his correspondence. Yet it would hardly be unusual for a profoundly religious man, in such terminal circumstances, to have written in tones reminiscent of the Bible because this was his last opportunity to speak against slavery. Furthermore, Brown had received few if any of the hateful letters sent to him, while the overwhelming number of those heaped on his desk were from autograph seekers. He routinely destroyed these letters, along with any anonymous correspondence, including that from admirers.

At worst, John Brown was no more a propagandist than any other notable autobiographer in history, because he employed and exhibited the same tendency to fashion a narrative that represented, to his mind, the clearest illustration of his principles, goals, and purpose. At best, he was far more modest, in that he refrained from writing any kind of self-justifying autobiography. With rumors rife that Brown had written his own story or “explanation,” the Herald correspondent asked the jail official if the old man had written anything “that he would wish to have published.” He responded that Brown had written nothing. In fact, despite being aware of his important role, he had limited himself to an indirect influence, providing “prison” materials without any narration. Even Brown’s unwillingness to make notations in the Bible showed personal restraint, not merely reverence for the sacred text. Another man might have exploited the pages of the Bible in order to advance his own claims, especially knowing that the nation would be more than curious about any such notations. Instead, John Brown pointed the reading of posterity to the biblical text itself.

On the same morning, Ned House’s bags were probably packed, and not a day too soon. After being in Charlestown for five weeks, the longer he remained, the more likely it was that he would be discovered as the despised Tribune correspondent. His vulnerability turned to danger after a writer in the Boston Journal began to criticize him for using his association with the Democratic Boston Courier as a shield to protect his real identity. House afterward protested that he had never been shrewd or deceptive but was never “directly applied to in the matter” by anyone in Charlestown, and so he never had to acknowledge his real purpose.

Of course, House had entered Virginia under false pretense, portraying himself as a sympathetic friend of the South, not as a correspondent of the Tribune. His association with a Democratic paper had given him complete access in Charlestown, which probably explains why he was never suspected. Still, the fact that House had remained there for so long without being detected was not only fortuitous for his well-being but also for history. Certainly, without his assertive eye and bold narrative, the record of John Brown’s last days in Charlestown would largely have been lost to history, except what was conveyed through proslavery reportage.

House wrote that the sun had risen clear and bright, but a haze had set in for a time that he thought “augured badly for the day.” However, at nine o’clock, “almost the entire expanse of the blue heavens was free of clouds, and the thermometer stood so high that the windows of houses were open, and all the world were sitting on their porches or promenading the streets.” Sometime after seven o’clock, House had already walked over to the field of execution in order to observe the “preliminaries.”

By that time, the timber for the scaffold was already hauled out and assembled by the carpenter and his assistants. “The scaffold was about six feet high from the ground, perhaps twelve feet wide, and fifteen or eighteen long,” House wrote, with a handrail that extended around three sides and down the flight of steps. “On the other side,” he continued, were “stout uprights, with a cross-beam which was supported by strong braces. In the center of the cross-beam was an iron hook from which the rope was suspended.” The trapdoor was designed to swing down on its hinges when the supporting rope was cut. “It will thus be seen, that the weight of the prisoner being upon it,” he concluded, “the sheriff had only to cut the cord near the hook, and the trap would fall at once.”17

Olcott similarly described the field of execution, pointing out that small flags were also used to mark off a “narrow strip on the town side,” where “worthy and well qualified citizens,” properly vouched for, would be “allotted positions,” while the “poor country people” were kept at a distance. Olcott thought the field about forty acres, both grassy and corn stubble with a rolling surface, and described the gallows being situated on a “broad hillock near the public road.” However, the site was not chosen merely for display. The journalist observed that a large brass cannon was pointed directly at the gallows, threatening to blow the prisoner and any would-be rescuer “into shreds by the heavy charge of grape-shot.” The gallows stood sufficiently high so that even a devastating blast from the cannon would sweep away the old man from the gallows without harming the troops below.18

At half past ten, Brown was done with his writing and had already spent a few minutes alone in prayer. Now, Jailer Avis and Sheriff Campbell escorted him out of his cell, taking him upstairs to the second floor to bid farewell to his men. Unlike his hopeless request to be escorted to the gallows by a slave entourage, the old man was at least granted this last opportunity to admonish his forlorn raiders before proceeding to the scaffold. As Crosby Noyes of the Washington Star described the scene, with “the air of command as if yet a leader,” Brown “bade them acquit themselves bravely to the end, and not betray their friends.”19

The old man first approached Shields Green and John Copeland, the two black raiders, who were segregated in their confinement as they were in every other aspect of life under white supremacy. At first, Brown reproved Copeland for some remarks he had made about one of the fallen raiders, which the young prisoner felt was harmless since the man was dead. No matter, Brown responded, it was never right to divulge information about your comrades. “I came in to see you, and to bid you farewell,” he said, “and to give you some small change which I have left, but have no use for any longer. All I ask of you is that you will die like men; let there be no flinching on your part.” At this, the raiders shook hands with him but said nothing more.20

When he moved to the cell of John Cook and Edwin Coppoc, the old man’s countenance changed, and kindly admonition turned to frank rebuke. Looking at Cook, Brown charged him with falsehood, because the prisoner was the only one of Brown’s men to have provided the authorities with a detailed description of his involvement with the raid and Brown’s activities. The description, published as a “confession” before Brown’s hanging, was itself precisely the kind of telltale work that the old man loathed.21

Cook’s response to the rebuke was at first to pretend he had no idea of Brown’s complaint, although he probably knew how reticent the old man was about his affairs, and that he would consider divulging any information whatsoever as treachery. For a moment, the two exchanged differing views on the history behind Cook’s role as a spy at Harper’s Ferry. In his confession, Cook claimed that originally he had wanted to go to Kansas, not Harper’s Ferry, essentially denying that he had volunteered to spy for Brown in Virginia.

Of course, Cook was hoping to avoid the death penalty, something he failed to accomplish. The old man probably thought the whole attempt a cowardly sham and stared Cook down. The doomed young man could only mumble that they remembered things differently. Brown reproved the raider Edwin Coppoc similarly but reportedly “let him off with a lighter lecture” because the latter had backed off from an earlier claim that he had virtually been held a prisoner by Brown and forced to go to Harper’s Ferry. “But enough,” the old man urged, “bear up like a man. I hope you will die without fear or trembling.” Slipping a quarter into Coppic’s hand, he moved on to Aaron Stevens’s cell.22

In the initial report of Brown’s last meeting with his men, it was claimed that the old man had rebuked Cook for deceiving and misleading him into expecting great support from enslaved people, who were “ripe for insurrection.” In fact, the statement was speciously introduced, perhaps by W. W. B. Gallaher, and certainly by some Southern reporter, and seems to have been disseminated through the Associated Press, because it even appeared in the Tribune, along with the more trustworthy reports of House and Olcott.23

Actually, the reference to Brown’s alleged disappointment over the supposed lack of support from the slaves was inserted even before the narrative of Brown’s meeting with Cook is described in the report. The same report also includes an almost laughable interpolation, alleging that Brown spoke of Henry Clay Pate as a “brave man.” Taken together, along with another statement about Mary Brown’s glowing approval of her Virginia hosts, it is doubtful these were merely a reporter’s mistakes. Furthermore, no other reliable journalistic source reiterates these statements. Unfortunately, the fictitious notion that Brown was misled by Cook and then disappointed by the response of the slaves has nagged even the best historical narratives, further strengthening the stubborn old myth that Brown failed to attract black support at Harper’s Ferry.24

Stevens had been his cellmate until the last hours of his confinement, and doubtless the two had quiet moments of lengthy discussion. Their interview was reportedly warm and “kindly on both sides,” Stevens telling Brown, “Good bye, Captain, I know you are going to a better land.” In a pleasant but sober tone, the old man responded: “I know I am.”25 Brown further warned Stevens against betraying his friends and pressed a quarter into his hand, admonishing him to remain firm to the end before bidding him farewell (see figure 17.1).

FIGURE 17.1 DeWitt Hitchcock portrayed Brown’s farewell handshake with Aaron Stevens, who had been his cellmate. Stevens was not executed until March 1860, but he seems to have followed Brown’s counsel, never revealing any information to the Virginia authorities beyond his trial. New York Illustrated News, December 10, 1859.

However, reporters were not aware that the old man had already sent a short note up to Stevens earlier that morning, scrawled on a half sheet:

Charlestown, Prison 2d December, 1859.

John Brown to Aaron D Stephens.

“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit, than he, that taketh a city.” Solomon^26

Of course, Brown was sending a message that went beyond the point of the Bible verse itself. After having shared his cell and his confidences with Stevens for several weeks, the old man wanted to be sure that the young raider would exercise the greatest restraint after he was gone, especially because his case had not yet been tried. One other raider, Albert Hazlett, was also confined, although the old man passed by without even looking at him. True to his own philosophy, Brown feigned unfamiliarity with Hazlett in hopes of saving his neck.27

Having bid farewell to his men, he descended the stairs and exited the jail section, entering the main corridor that divided the cells from the Avis residence. Although reports of his attire have varied somewhat, he was wearing a “well worn suit of black cassimere,” the same that he had worn during the raid, including a jacket that was cut and torn by marine bayonets. “He wore the same seedy and dilapidated [outfit] that he had at Harper’s ferry and during his trial,” David Strother afterward reported. The old man wore no shoes or boots but, rather, white stockings, crimson carpet slippers, and a broad brimmed hat that sat low on his head.28 Sheriff Campbell then proceeded to bind his upper arms. In this way he had limited movement, the purpose of the pinion being to prevent any grasping at the noose or flailing of the arms during strangulation.

Brown moved toward the front door, but apparently was met by Mary Avis, the young wife of the jailer, whose sorrowful expression almost gave the impression she was saying good-bye to a beloved family friend rather than a despised convict. Along with her, very likely, stood the Avis children, James, John, and Braxton, ranging from ten to sixteen years of age. These were Avis’s children from his first marriage, perhaps a point of commonality that he and his widowed prisoner did not miss. Brown must have smiled and greeted them softly but probably was more attentive to the two youngest, the children of Avis’s second marriage. Little Edward, the three-year-old, had sometimes played in his cell, rolling and tumbling at the old man’s feet, or laughing as Brown bounced him playfully on his knee. Looking at Avis’s Mary, perhaps he could not help but think of his own Mary, nor could he resist the little baby girl she held in her arms. Little Mary, the newest addition to the Avis household, was barely one year old, and the sight of the infant perhaps pierced him through with memories of his own little Ellen.29 Bidding farewell, Brown leaned over and kissed baby Mary, then straightened and exited the building.

The narrative of John Brown kissing a black baby on the day of his hanging is familiar, although it has long been recognized as fiction, or at least as a conflation of journalistic imagination and Brown’s expressed sentiments. However, it is more likely that Brown kissed two different babies in two different settings in Charlestown, and that these unreported incidents have been at times confused and nearly lost to history as a result.

Charles Fulton of the Baltimore American afterward learned that as Brown was leaving, “a woman of Capt. Avis’ family” stood nearby “with a child in her arms.” He wrote to Miller McKim that this child, inside the jailhouse—not a black baby outside—was the object of Brown’s last endearment. In speaking with Augustus Rawlings of the New York Illustrated News, Fulton initially heard the rumor of Brown having kissed a black baby but dismissed it altogether when he learned that the old man actually had kissed the Avis child.30

The account of Brown kissing the black child as reported in the Tribune thus has been taken as a fabrication. However, it is doubtful that the black-baby kiss was based on what happened inside the jail, because both House and Olcott of the Tribune probably were unaware of the episode at the time. Furthermore, considering how hated Brown was in Charlestown, fear of criticism undoubtedly kept Avis from sharing the episode of affection between the old man and his family. As it was, he had faced heavy criticism from the community because of his kindness toward Brown, and one source says that afterward Avis actually lost his job as a result of being “too kind” to the prisoners.31 To no surprise, when he made an affidavit denying that Brown had kissed a black baby on the day of his execution, he made no mention that the controversial prisoner had kissed his own child. As Cecil Eby observed in 1961, “the family secret was hermetically kept.”32

After the Tribune published the black-baby-kiss episode on December 5, it was supposedly verified by Miller McKim, who erroneously associated the fictional account with what he had learned from Fulton about the baby kiss inside the jail. McKim thus mistakenly explained to the readers of the National Anti-Slavery Standard that the black woman and her child were inside the jailhouse when the kiss took place.33 Of course, this was impossible too. There were no black women and children in the jailhouse, unless they were being held in a cell in preparation for being sold deeper into the South. Nor was Avis a slaveholder, so there was no black woman in his household.

It is far more likely that the black-baby kiss had a distinct origin in a separate incident that had taken place in October, when Brown and his men were first being brought back and forth between the jail and the courthouse.34 The report of the old man having kissed a black child probably floated about as a story, although Ned House either did not hear about it until late in his stay at Charlestown or had jotted it down in his notes but never found occasion to mention it in his correspondence. When he and Olcott briefly met on December 2, the latter looked over House’s notebook and observed that he had left out a number of interesting points from his correspondence in the Tribune, perhaps including the original black-baby kiss in late October.35

Ned House stayed in Charlestown long enough to witness Brown’s hanging and wrote two reports, being obligated to complete the second one in Baltimore, where he had gone with great haste, fearing that he would be discovered. Whether or not he lingered in Baltimore, House seems to have assisted Olcott’s initial reports to the Tribune. Most likely, he was the author of the black-baby-kiss story, having recycled the episode from a scene that took place outside the courthouse at the beginning of Brown’s trial.36

Indeed, the black-baby-kiss account in the Tribune fits awkwardly into Olcott’s report of December 3, as if it were cut and pasted. This is especially true of its admiring and familiar description of the old man, something House was far more likely to have written: “He stood in the midst of that organized mob, from whose despotic hearts tyranny seemed for the nonce eliminated by the admiration they had in once beholding a man—for John Brown was there every inch a man.” After the inserted black-baby-kiss account, the story quite obviously reverts to Olcott’s words, signaled by the telling phrase, “But to return to my narrative.”37

In later years, Ned House was said to have acknowledged that the baby-kiss story originated with him, and he even defended the incident from his own “memorandum.”38 Unfortunately, House’s notebooks, and anything else he may have kept from his daring venture in Charlestown, went with him to Japan, where he embarked upon yet another memorable career later in the century. His papers remained in that country after his death, and unfortunately were destroyed when the United States bombed Japan during World War II.39

When he emerged from the jailhouse at eleven o’clock, Brown found six companies of infantry and one company of horsemen had been deployed in front of the building, along with General Taliaferro and his entire staff, who preceded Brown’s escort to the field of execution. Although pale from his confinement, he appeared strong to observers. As he scanned the area, “his keen eye” taking in every detail, “he wore a smile upon his countenance.” Close to the stairway, there was a “furniture wagon” awaiting him, a light-spring model painted yellow and drawn by two white horses. In the back was a long pine box, inside of which was an oak coffin (see figure 17.2).

FIGURE 17.2 DeWitt Hitchcock captured the same scene of Brown emerging from the jailhouse, his arms pinioned, as he approaches the wagon. Note Mary Avis, the wife of the jailer, and the children watching from a second-floor window in the upper right. New York Illustrated News, December 17, 1859.

The old man looked around at the military display surrounding him and greeted some of the local citizens that he had come to know, one of whom asked him if he thought he could endure his fate. “I can endure almost anything but parting from friends,” Brown said. “That is very hard.” He descended the short steps and then mounted the wagon, sitting on the pine box alongside Jailer Avis. Brown continued looking with interest at the great military display but made no remark as the wagon trundled forward, flanked by two files of riflemen. Following immediately behind was a carriage driven by Sheriff Campbell, accompanied by a number of doctors whose assignment was to finally pronounce the old man dead. Behind Campbell’s carriage was DeWitt Hitchcock of the New York Illustrated News, followed by the infantry and cavalry escort.40

The driver of the furniture wagon was Wells J. Hawks, a native of Massachusetts who had lived in Charlestown for many years. Hawks was eager to drive Brown to the gallows, but not because he was a worried Northern sycophant with a Virginia wife. Hawks was a proslavery man and Virginia loyalist in his own right, having served twice in the Virginia House of Delegates. He had not only hosted Governor Henry Wise in his home but would also later side with Virginia during the Civil War against his native state and country, serving as commissary for a number of Confederate generals, including “Stonewall” Jackson.41

Seated next to Hawks was George W. Sadler, the undertaker, whose only role in the affair was to supervise the removal of the body from the site of the execution and to see that the old man’s remains were placed in the coffin. Next to Sadler was his assistant, Louis Starry, who had built Brown’s coffin. Sadler was another one of Brown’s sympathetic friends during confinement, and seems to have been the source of Olcott’s account of the old man’s conversation while riding in the wagon:

“‘What a beautiful country you have,’ said Capt. Brown to Capt. Avis.

‘Yes,’ was the response.

‘It seems the more beautiful to behold because I have so long been shut from it.’

‘You are more cheerful than I am, Capt. Brown,’ said Mr. Sadler.

‘Yes,’ said the Captain, ‘I ought to be.’ He continued, ‘I see no citizens here—where are they?’

‘The citizens are not allowed to be present—none but the soldiers,’ was the reply.

‘That ought not to be,’ said the old man, ‘citizens should be allowed to be present as well as others.’”42

Others shared Brown’s observation concerning missing citizens, such as Hitchcock of the New York Illustrated News, who reported that townspeople “were closely watched, and were not allowed to go beyond the picket-lines,” while women and children “were admonished to stay quietly at home.” Olcott afterward reported that most of the people of Jefferson County remained at their homes “to protect their property in case of an uprising” and that the few persons present were mostly from other parts of the South. In fact, in a proclamation dated November 28, General Taliaferro had “emphatically warned” countrymen to remain at home and arm themselves.

Olcott’s observation suggests the layers of apprehension that beset Charlestown until the execution was over. Most obvious was the fear of an invasion or rescue attempt, although less stated was a fear of some sort of uprising or revolt by enslaved “property.” During the Civil War, Brown’s daughter Anne served as a teacher for “contraband” refugees from slavery in Union-occupied Norfolk. She recalled a conversation with a black woman who had lived near Harper’s Ferry at the time of Brown’s hanging. According to this “negress,” on the day of the execution, “all the slaves in the region were tied up and given a terrible whipping.” Although the woman may have been exaggerating, at the very least restraint and intense scrutiny were heavily employed by slaveholders in Jefferson County on the day of Brown’s execution.43

Even apart from the fears of slaveholders, military security was so tight that no one could enter Charlestown without being arrested, whether aboard trains or traveling on the road. Perhaps the most humorous example of the restrictive scrutiny operating in Charlestown was the apprehension of three professional pickpockets, who reportedly took a train from New York to Harper’s Ferry, evidently intending to work the crowds surrounding the gallows. According to the Baltimore American, they were immediately arrested, taken into custody, and interrogated. Shortly the savvy thieves appeared on the train platform with shaved heads, looking “like shorn sheep” being herded onto the next train bound for the North.

On the other hand, restrictions were so extreme that it became very difficult for the press. Olcott, who was undercover, noted that his unconcealed brother correspondents “were not afforded the facilities which are common in the Northern States,” and none of the known journalists were admitted within a hundred and fifty feet of the scaffold. Besides a select number of proslavery journalists like Strother, the only other correspondents who were able to gain choice positions near the gallows were incognito, like Olcott, newly “smuggled” into town as a member of Taliaferro’s medical staff.

Writing from Charlestown the day before, Hays of the New York Herald observed that the public press reporters had “no encouragement to believe that they will be allowed to attend the execution to-morrow.” They were banned along with the rest of the civilians and “could not get within ear-shot of the gallows.” Even the eminent Charles Fulton of the Baltimore American sent a telegram to Governor Wise the day before, requesting access to the jail and gallows on behalf of the Associated Press. After the governor “declined to accede” to his request, only the stubborn intervention of Augustus Rawlings of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper obtained some relief, allowing many correspondents a place near Taliaferro’s staff.

To celebrate, Rawlings hosted his colleagues in his room at the Carter Hotel on the night before the hanging, where they drank to excess and nibbled on sandwiches and sardines, lauding their host as “the universal genius.”44 In fact, neither Governor Wise nor John Brown could have had any idea that among the limited civilian presence in the field of execution, including those working incognito within the ranks of the military, was something of a “Who’s Who” of Civil War–era journalism.45

The road from the jail gradually ascended to the field of execution, and it is possible that Brown’s wagon was observed by the slaves of Prosecutor Hunter, whose house was the only residence in the neighborhood of the field where the gallows now stood. As they rode along, Brown spoke very little but characteristically patted his hands on his knees, a personal habit that conveyed contemplation rather than anxiety. When someone in the wagon inquired of his apparent lack of fear, the old man replied, “It has been a characteristic of me from infancy not to suffer from physical fear. I have suffered a thousand times more from bashfulness than from fear.”46

When the procession came in sight of the assembled military and civilians, all conversation came to an abrupt end and “dead stillness reigned over the field,” except for the tramping of the approaching troops. Ned House was situated very close to the gallows, reporting that he watched Brown intently and that he seemed neither nervous nor fearful. “I was very near the old man, and scrutinized him closely,” House reported the following day. “He seemed to take in the whole scene at a glance, and he straightened himself up proudly, as if to set to the soldiers an example of a soldier’s courage.” As his wagon approached the gallows, Brown “cast his eyes over the beautiful landscape and followed the windings of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance.” With almost the wonder of a child, he looked upward at the sun and the sky and all around him and then remarked, “This is a beautiful country. I have not cast my eye over it before—that is, while passing through the field.”

The wagon then passed halfway around the gallows to the east side and halted, and the accompanying troops began to take up their assigned position, except for the Petersburg Grays, who formed a barrier around the wagon, “hemming in the prisoner.” “Why, are none but military in the enclosure?” Brown said. “I am sorry citizens have been kept out.” After a moment, they opened ranks to let the old man pass, and he descended from the wagon with the assistance of Avis and Campbell, bidding farewell to the others.

Walking with “firm step and erect form,” Brown moved ahead of his escort, showing what Noyes of the Washington Star referred to as “the same imperturbable wooden composure which had distinguished him at every step of his progress.” David Strother, correspondent and artist for Harper’s Weekly, likewise stood nearby the gallows with a number of other favored civilians, and thought Brown showed amazing agility and haste in his walk, particularly because he seems to have gone ahead of the somber jailer and the sheriff, who reached the gallows after him.

Strother was even more surprised when the old man pleasantly attempted to wave with one of his pinioned arms, bidding them farewell. According to Andrew Hunter, Brown also bowed to him in polite salutation. However, the prosecutor was distracted and did not see the old man’s gesture. Perhaps it was apropos of the mind-set of Virginia’s slaveholders that John Brown’s prosecutor afterward regretted not having returned the gesture while never acknowledging the travesty of justice that brought the old man to the noose.47

Mounting the gallows steps, Brown turned to Avis first, endeavoring a normal handshake and saying, “I have no words to thank you for all your kindness to me.” Turning likewise to Sheriff Campbell, Brown shook his hand, requesting that there would be “no more delay than necessary.” The wide-brimmed hat was removed and his ankles pinioned, and a white hood was placed over his head and the noose around his neck. However, the steady breeze blowing over the gallows kept pushing the hood up, and the sheriff became frustrated, being without the means to secure it. Calmly, Brown raised his pinioned arms and grasped Campbell’s hand, guiding it to his coat collar, where the old man, always prepared in the littlest ways, had some pins quilted in (see figure 17.3).

FIGURE 17.3 David Strother sketched Brown and Sheriff Campbell on the gallows, moments before the hanging. Sheriff Campbell asks, “Do you wish a handkerchief in your hand to throw as a signal.” Brown responds: “No. I don’t care. I don’t want you to keep me waiting unnecessarily.” This sketch has never been published before. West Virginia and Regional History Center WVU Libraries.

Once he had secured the hood over Brown’s head, Campbell asked him to step forward onto the trapdoor, to which the old man responded, “You have put this thing over my head and I cannot see. You must lead me.” As the sheriff assisted, Brown took careful steps forward onto the trapdoor. Major Thomas Preston, who had accompanied the cadets from the Virginia Military Institute, was struck by the irony of the old man’s instinctive caution on the gallows. “The man who stood unblenched on the brink of eternity, was afraid of falling a few feet to the ground!”48

Campbell then asked if he wanted a handkerchief to throw as a signal, but the old man refused. “No, I don’t care. I don’t want you to keep me waiting unnecessarily.” These were John Brown’s last words, as Strother observed, “spoken with that sharp nasal twang peculiar to him, but spoken quietly & civilly, without impatience or the slightest apparent emotion.” Brown stiffened himself, waiting motionless, although Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial remembered him “rubbing his thumbs hard but slowly on the inside of his forefingers,” bracing himself for the drop.49

But the very thing Brown requested was denied, as the troops who had accompanied him “trod heavily over the ground, hither and thither, now advancing toward the gallows, now turning about in sham defiance of an imaginary enemy.” Concerned, the sympathetic Avis asked Brown if he were tired, but the old man merely reiterated his desire not to be made to wait. “There are eight minutes of suspense,” House wrote in his last correspondence, “while the stupid cavalry are trying to find their proper position.”

“There he stood,” Olcott reported, “in his dark clothes and blood-red slippers, and with the white hood drawn over his head, for eight minutes, that seemed ages—the cynosure of all eyes on the field and afar off.” The cavalry had so blundered that they were not in position when the command was made to give the order. Brown was like some stone “thrown by God into the black and sluggish pool of Slavery, while, ebbing from him in fast-widening circles of sentries and pickets and mounted scouts that surrounded the place for fifteen miles off, went the ripples that he had caused on its bosom.”50

Meanwhile, over at the Wager House in Harper’s Ferry, Mary Brown sat with the McKims and Tyndale, their hands locked, “eyes streaming, hearts uplifted in prayer, waiting for the hour to strike” when their “dear devoted one who was to be sacrificed was beyond the reach of his enemies.” Throughout the North, churches were full of men and women, black and white, all praying for the old man in his hour of death.51

Few if any of Charlestown’s citizens were praying, although many had gathered a mile away, according to the limit imposed by the military. Over at the jailhouse, Cook and Coppic watched through the barred window of their second-story cell, intent on the distant figure of the old man on the gallows. Although he and Brown had not parted on good terms, Cook could not keep his eyes from the distant scene, his emotions now near bursting in grief.52

“At length the valor of Virginia was satisfied,” House wrote, and the command was given. Olcott later wrote that “[o]ne would have thought that, after all their indecent haste to get him tried, convicted, sentenced, and hung, they would have dispatched the poor old man as quickly after that as possible; but not a bit of it.” The whole time, Brown had stood erect, without flinching, and even those who wanted to find a sign of weakness in him could see only the fluttering of his clothing in the wind. To make matters worse, when the command was given, Sheriff Campbell “did not hear or did not comprehend,” and the military order had to be repeated louder in Brown’s hearing. “All read,” the colonel announced once more. It seems likely that the sheriff did not understand the order, although after spending weeks in Brown’s company, his delay also may have expressed the distraction of a regretful mind.53

After eight minutes of waiting, Sheriff Campbell swung down his hatchet, cutting the supporting rope, and the trapdoor fell open, its hinges giving off a wailing screech that echoed across the field. For a moment, the rope caught on Brown’s head, but Campbell quickly snatched it straight, and the old man swung off into the air, plunging downward through the trapdoor about three feet, “then up, then down,” wrote Noyes of the Washington Star. Alban Payne, the doctor from the Virginia militia who had interviewed Brown in jail, described the old man’s death in minimal terms, claiming that besides some slight movements of his hands and feet, “there was no indication of the least suffering.” Hays of the Herald likewise portrayed Brown’s dying moments as one of “slight grasping of the hands and twitching of the muscles.” Even Ned House’s initial report, hurriedly written in Charlestown before his hasty departure, tended to present Brown’s death as fairly placid. “[W]ithout one struggle, without one movement except the heavy fall,” House wrote, “without one sound or sign of suffering, John Brown passed from this life.”54

After he reached Baltimore, undoubtedly sighing with relief, House gathered his thoughts and prepared a more detailed report than the hurried, salutary one he had written in Charlestown. He had evidently revisited the hanging in his thinking after speaking to others, including someone who told him that he had “never seen so hard a struggle” in a hanging. In fact, “for nearly five minutes the limbs jerked and quivered,” and it was apparent to those who had seen hangings before that the old man “seemed to retain an extraordinary hold upon life.”

As Brown struggled for life, the pious Major Thomas Jackson prayed for him, though doubting his soul’s salvation. “With the fall his arms, below the elbow, flew up horizontally,” Jackson wrote to his wife, “his hands clinched; and his arms gradually fell, but by spasmodic motions. There was very little motion of his person for several moments, and soon the wind blew his lifeless body to and fro.” His comrade, Thomas Preston, similarly recalled how as every attempt at breath failed, the old man’s arms dropped and his legs hung as if relaxed, “until at last, straight and lank, he dangled.” However, Noyes of the Washington Star provided the most graphic description: “[T]here was a quick, convulsive movement of the hands; a slight muscular tension of the limbs, then they straightened, and the body swung perpendicular, turning slowly round and round—this motion, with the fluttering of the coat skirts in the breeze, giving it singularly the appearance of a corn-field scarecrow”55 (see figure 17.4).

FIGURE 17.4 Crosby Noyes of the Washington Star wrote that Brown’s “body swung perpendicular, turning slowly round and round . . . with the fluttering of the coat skirts in the breeze giving it singularly the appearance of a corn-field scarecrow.” This sketch by David Strother has never been published before. West Virginia and Regional History Center WVU Libraries.

As the old man’s lifeless body hung, swaying and turning in the wind, the field was quiet. As House put it, “the utmost order and decorum reigned,” so that anyone speaking might have been heard across the solemn landscape. “The fifteen hundred soldiers stood mute and motionless at their posts,” Strother wrote. “The thousand civic spectators looked on in silence.” One of the soldiers watching quietly from a distance was Lieutenant Israel Green, who had been placed in command of some artillery at the entrance to the field.56 His marginal position was befitting the man who could be despised by the North for having so brutally beaten John Brown and by the South for having failed to kill him.

After about twenty minutes, several doctors ascended the scaffold, one feeling for a pulse, another inspecting his neck and another pressing his ear to the old man’s chest in order to detect any evidence of life. When they withdrew, another team of doctors, several regimental surgeons, climbed the steps to take their turn at the body, with as many as twenty more “boy-surgeons” taking turns at the dangling corpse. “To see them lifting up the arms, now powerless, that once were so strong,” wrote House, “was provoking in the extreme.”

After nearly a half hour, John Brown was declared dead, and Major Preston, full of self-righteous indignation and the hubris of the shortsighted, proclaimed aloud, “So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union! All such foes of the human race!” In retrospect, Preston claimed he had spoken with solemnity “and without one shade of animosity” in breaking the silence that had reigned over the field.57 But his words were as malicious as they were perverse. That John Brown would be proclaimed an enemy of the “human race” was flagrant testimony to the racism of Virginia’s noble soldiery and first citizens, who thought themselves human beings, but their enslaved black people as mere property. Indeed, Preston’s words proved seminal, at least for John Wilkes Booth, who stood among Richmond’s finest watching Brown’s strangulation with great satisfaction. A little more than five years later, Booth, another high-minded Virginian, would regurgitate Preston’s hateful rant, standing defiantly on the stage of Ford’s Theater, just beneath his dying victim.

The artist David Strother, somewhat shielded by his associates, mounted the gallows to get a closer look at the man he had so despised in life. Noyes of the Star made note of “Strother, the artist, a thin, sickly young man” on the scaffold but paid no more attention, instead turning away from the “ghastly spectacle” to take pleasure in the beauty of “the Blue Ridge bathed in soft purple haze, and the green, undulating wheat fields on the opposite horizon.” Meanwhile, Strother had lifted the hood from Brown’s face, in order to make a sketch of the old man in death—his mouth open and his eyes bulging from their sockets (see figure 17.5).

FIGURE 17.5 Harper’s Virginia correspondent, David Strother, deliberately made this macabre sketch of Brown’s face in death, apparently intending it as a malicious gesture toward abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. Strother seems to have had second thoughts about sending it, although he kept the image. It has never been published before. West Virginia and Regional History Center WVU Libraries.

Years later, Andrew Hunter, who may have joined Strother on the platform, recalled that the artist had made the sketch with the intention of offending the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, whom he doubtless despised as well. Strother had heard that Child had written of her desire to have an image of Brown “in every condition of life” and wished to fill her home with pictures of the old man. The artist explained that he made this last sketch so that “she might have him, too, when he was finished.” Mockingly, Strother concluded that if he sent the sketch to Child, she would have the best portrait ever taken of John Brown.58

CHAPTER 18

LIKE A STRING THAT SNAPS

A slave state is only fear in the mask of despotism.

If John Brown were to have died easily, he would have to have fallen far enough to cause a rapid fracture dislocation of the neck. However, execution by hanging has never been an exact science, not even when variables such as body weight and depth of fall are taken into consideration. Certainly, underestimating these factors could result in decapitation, while a man with strong neck muscles might die from strangulation even at a greater fall. Although tough and sinewy, Brown was not a heavy man, and Hays of the Herald thought his “fall was not nearly great enough”—perhaps about eighteen inches, resulting in death by slow asphyxiation.

Olcott initially reported that the surgeons had claimed that Brown died almost instantly from a ruptured spinal cord. However, he shortly revised this conclusion, writing that the old man’s “hold on life was strong” and that death had not come easily, “judging from appearances, and the testimony of experienced men.” Hays thought that “Brown seemed to be as peculiar in death as he was in life,” and according to Olcott, some thought it unusual that the old man’s legs had not been drawn up by “convulsive twitchings” during strangulation. However, according to the descriptions of the press and David Strother’s macabre sketch, the old man’s corpse showed evidence of a slow and difficult death—including an open mouth, protruding eyes, “considerable distortion” of the face, and petechial bleeding that made his eyes appear “quite red, especially under the right eye, and seemed like a bruise.”1

The old man’s body was lowered down through the trapdoor, and the lifeless heap was laid into a coffin, facetiously labeled “John Brown, Esq.” As Olcott observed, although the body had hung long enough for the rope to have cut a “finger’s depth” into the neck, its “animal heat” remained long enough to baffle the physicians. The coffin was put back on the furniture wagon and driven down to the jailhouse, where the doctors detained the body “an hour and a half longer to cool.” After “further surgical examination,” they seemed almost superstitiously fearful that the old man might return from the dead, especially, one of them suggested, if his friends somehow were able to resuscitate him by means of a “galvanic battery.”

Not entirely satisfied that John Brown was dead, the doctors adjourned until the afternoon, leaving his body under guard. Later in the day, after two examinations, they finally pronounced him dead, but not without further deliberation concerning the proper disposal of the remains. The artist Strother recalled accompanying an associate to the jailhouse to view the body, and finding it “surrounded by eight or ten persons, only two of which were physicians, “all in earnest discussions.” It was only beginning to cool, Strother recalled, and the face and features of the old man had returned to a more normal appearance. At least one doctor wanted to use “various tests with drugs and acids,” while Edmund Ruffin, the monomaniac of “Southern Rights,” defiantly insisted that the head should be cut off before the body left Virginia. Ruffin became so fanatically insistent that apparently the others in the room became embarrassed by his behavior.2

As Olcott also reported, “the field was quickly deserted” after the body was returned to the jail, the cannon being quickly removed, and the troops marching away in solid columns. Immediately, too, the carpenters dissembled the gallows and placed the deathly instrument in storage, until the hangings of four of Brown’s men scheduled for December 16. Yet there seemed an immediate and almost palpable change in the air. “Like a string that snaps after great tension,” Ned House wrote, “the public mind at Charlestown seemed relieved the moment that the body had been returned to the jail.” Although sentries continued their guard, at least movement in and out of town suddenly seemed more tolerable. As if awakening from a nightmare, some citizens began to reflect on the near panic experienced prior to the hanging and, perhaps with some embarrassment, began to speak of “the excitement rescue” as an “egregious hoax.”

However, concern remained among some citizens, perhaps in unspoken fear of a backlash from their slaves or further apprehensions over the possibility of a Northern invasion to rescue Brown’s doomed raiders. “The dread is not all removed yet,” House acknowledged. This was true particularly as townsmen began to observe “mysterious lights” in the evening sky, the lights shooting up in the direction of Harper’s Ferry and seemingly being answered by fiery meteors shooting up elsewhere.

Olcott was also aware of these mysterious lights, which he described “as of a Roman candle, or a ball of fire,” shooting high up in the air, daily at about seven thirty in the evening. After investigating, military authorities could not explain the “mysterious lights,” leading some to renew fears that “hovering abolitionists” might descend from the mountains to burn Charlestown. Others feared that the shooting lights betokened the possibility of some sort of terror attack, such as “the arrival of boxes or parcels containing ‘hand-grenades’ or some ‘other infernal machine.’”

Far more likely, the lights were intended as signals between blacks in the vicinity, perhaps even the communication of those determined to have their freedom despite the old man’s failure and death. As Jean Libby has observed, the census of 1860 shows that more than six hundred enslaved people fled Jefferson County alone, with another few hundred more fleeing from neighboring Berkeley, Loudon, and Clarke Counties, and a stunning eight hundred more people escaping from nearby Fauquier County. This was a “mass movement of self-liberation that John Brown started, but may not have known actually occurred.”3

By the time the coffin reached Harper’s Ferry, Mary Brown, Hector Tyndale, and the McKims were more than ready to return to the North. On the previous day, in the early morning hours before the old man’s hanging, Mary and her associates had left the Wager House to go for a walk through the neighborhood when suddenly a shot rang out and a bullet whistled past Tyndale. It is not clear whether the shot was a malicious joke or a real attempt on their lives, but fearing the worst, they immediately withdrew to the hotel. Tyndale was all the more disgusted in overhearing rudely voiced remarks threatening that the old man’s body would not be returned.4

Later in the day, while Mary mournfully awaited the body of her husband in Harper’s Ferry, she made some efforts to locate and reclaim the remains of her two fallen sons, along with the bodies of the Thompson brothers, their North Elba neighbors who also were killed during the raid. The cheerless wife was further disappointed to learn that Watson’s remains were now beyond reach, already having been seized and mutilated by students from the Winchester Medical School. However, the rest of the dead raiders had been buried in a common grave on the Maryland side of the Potomac River and were exhumed. Unfortunately, after six weeks in a damp grave, the bodies had decomposed so much that the remains could not be identified. “Mrs. Brown thought herself unequal to the task of recognition” and so left Oliver and his friends to decompose in Southern soil.5

By now, Tyndale was fed up with his Virginia hosts, and when the coffin arrived at the railroad depot, he refused to receive it until he had examined the contents—the scene becoming intense for a moment, when some of the Virginians became angry over his insistence and began to curse and threaten him. A fight may have ensued, except that a railroad brakeman suddenly jumped down and stood with Tyndale, causing the antagonistic Virginians to relent. Tyndale then opened the coffin, confirmed that it held “the veritable body of Brown,” and authorized it to be sealed and shipped.

Tyndale had come to Virginia as a favor to his Philadelphia friends and was no John Brown enthusiast. However, the prejudice and contempt he encountered in Virginia left him embittered and resentful and no doubt more sympathetic to the old man, if only his remains. Just before departing, he encountered a Southern man who courteously approached him, explaining that he knew his sister and wished to send his greetings. “Indeed, I shall do nothing of the kind,” Tyndale barked. “I am very sorry she even knows such a person.”6

With Brown dead, the process of troop withdrawal began in Charlestown, and many of the militia groups began to withdraw, including the Richmond Grays. On Saturday, December 3, a large crowd assembled to bid them a farewell, despite the weather, which had become quite inclement after the old man’s hanging. “Mayor Green addressed the departing soldiery in some appropriate remarks,” reported the Baltimore American, “assuring them that their visit had afforded much pleasure to our citizens, and that the patriotism which had induced them to leave their homes to come to Charlestown and stand as sentinels on our outposts, was duly appreciated.”7

Ned House likewise had said his good-byes to Charlestown, but doubtless they were final and hasty. After completing his reports in Baltimore and staying there long enough to assist Olcott’s initial reportage, he returned to New York and his Bohemian friends. He would take his memories of John Brown with him to Paris in 1860, but afterward return to the Tribune, becoming one of the most memorable correspondents of the Civil War—a role that was tragically initiated by his being an eyewitness to the first Union casualty in May 1861. House was with Colonel Ephraim Ellsworth when the popular young soldier determined to pull down a Confederate flag from the Marshall House Inn in Alexandria, Virginia, which annoyingly stood within sight of the White House. As House was descending the stairs alongside Ellsworth, the owner of the inn, a rebel sympathizer, appeared without warning and killed the young colonel with a shotgun blast.8 Ned House had not only witnessed the last days and death of John Brown but also the first tragedy of a war the old man had hoped to avoid.

These and other experiences were yet ahead of him in December 1859, when he penned his final assessment of John Brown. “Some say ‘he died game,’” House wrote.9 “And so he did. His ‘game’ of life was the resolute and unyielding pursuit of a purpose which to him was holy and noble. . . . Losing, he bowed before his destiny, though never despairing, even in the midst of hopes overthrown and miseries such as few men are called to endure, that the side he had played on must some time triumph. He died game, and his death honored the instrument of shame upon which he met it.”10

It was no secret to the citizens of Philadelphia that the train pulling into the Wilmington and Baltimore Station at Broad and Prime Streets on Saturday, December 3, was carrying what remained of old John Brown. Transport of the body to the city had been wired ahead and had generated a great deal of excitement. According to the Philadelphia Press, a large, “motley” crowd had gathered, composed of blacks and whites of both sexes, young and old. The crowd was eager and distracted—a prime target for the city’s pickpockets, such as the notorious Bill Oliver, who was seized by police, and one known only as “Mysterious Jim,” who proved his moniker by evading arrest.11

The train rumbled into the station just before one o’clock in the afternoon and the widow of John Brown disembarked with her escorts. They were greeted by a contingent of Philadelphia’s antislavery leaders, including the Reverend William Furness, the notable minister of the First Unitarian Church. Wrapped in a plaid shawl and looking quite plain, Mary was described alternately by the press as “stout” and “elderly,” although she went almost entirely undetected by the crowd and likewise managed to evade interviews. Leaning on Hector Tyndale’s arm, she made her way to the home of Edward Hopper on Arch Street, her antislavery host for the night.12

Had reporters been attentive, they might also have taken note of Tyndale’s disgust, which had come to a full boil when he stepped down from the train. Greeted by Furness, Tyndale vented his rage toward Virginia, talking loudly and waving his arms in disgust. “A miracle has happened, Dr. Furness!” he exclaimed. “A miracle has happened! The earth never opened to swallow up those fiends!” The minister managed to calm him down, but Tyndale did not soon forget Harper’s Ferry and its belligerent citizens. A few years later, he returned to Virginia as Major Hector Tyndale of the Twenty-Eighth Pennsylvania Volunteers, and probably took some satisfaction from ordering a number of buildings in Harper’s Ferry to be burned in the course of fighting rebel snipers. Afterward, he deliberately set up his office at the Wager House, the same hotel where he, the McKims, and the newly widowed Mary Brown had waited to receive the old man’s body.13

With Mary’s arrival in Philadelphia, Mayor Alexander Henry, already troubled by anti-Brown turmoil, now had to deal with possible explosions of protest and riot over the presence of the old man’s body in his city.14 The day before, attendees of a vigil for Brown had been accosted and disturbed by a contingent of Southern medical school students, many of whom shortly resigned in solidarity with Virginia and transferred their studies to Richmond, where Governor Wise greeted them with open arms.15 On the other hand, Henry had apprehensions about the response of the black community, one of the most dynamic and politicized African American communities prior to the rise of black Harlem. Not only were blacks eager to greet the old man’s remains, but they probably also shared the apprehensions of their white allies, who feared that retaliation from the South would strike first at Philadelphia’s notable free black and abolitionist population.16

Mayor Henry rightly anticipated that large numbers of the city’s black population would turn out, being both curious to see the coffin and resentful toward the South. Invariably, white hecklers, both Southern students and Northern conservatives, would follow Brown’s admirers, making for an explosive mix. Henry acted first by dispatching a strong force of officers who made no exception in blocking all entrances into the depot. Not content merely to shield the coffin from the crowd, he also refused to allow the body to be delivered to a waiting undertaker and, instead, ordered that the coffin be moved out of the city without delay.

His final measure, afterward called a “deception” by the Philadelphia Press, was to create a decoy coffin—actually a large industrial toolbox covered with blankets—which was carried by six police officers into the depot yard and loaded on a wagon driven by other policemen. The ploy was designed to draw the crowd away from the depot and proved quite successful. As the wagon pulled out, the “almost frenzied throng” immediately set after the decoy coffin.

The Press reporter described the movement of the crowd as “one of ludicrous description.” It seemed to the reporter that “all the boys and Negroes in town were in full speed,” and a number of women pursued the wagon too, likewise joining in “the hue and cry.” The bogus coffin was brought directly to the Walnut Street wharf to create the impression that it was immediately being shipped out. As soon as the crowd subsided at the station, the real coffin was quietly placed in another wagon and driven to the Camden depot, where it was hidden in a baggage crate and shipped on the Amboy boat bound for New York City.17

Mary Brown rested Saturday night in Philadelphia, and continued her mourning trip northward the following day, now joined by the abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips and Richard Hallowell, a Quaker abolitionist who accompanied her and McKim the rest of the way. Meanwhile, the body of her husband was quietly conveyed northward, arriving near the Battery in Manhattan on Saturday evening. Theodore Tilton of Brooklyn, who had hosted Mary when she first traveled south and then interviewed her for the Independent in November, now had the responsibility of receiving the old man’s remains. Enlisting the assistance of Jacob Hopper, a Quaker mortician from Brooklyn, Tilton turned the coffin over to him, emphasizing that he wanted the whole matter done secretly, without letting the press learn anything. Hopper shook his hand, promising to care for matters accordingly.

Rather than carry the body over to Brooklyn, Hopper rented a private room at the offices of McGraw & Taylor, undertakers and coffin manufacturers, at 163 Bowery Street, and then secretly conveyed the body there under cover of darkness. When he opened the coffin, it was clear to Hopper that little care had been shown in placing the body inside, the legs being somewhat twisted from the manner in which it had been lowered from the gallows. The body was still dressed in the same dark suit that Brown had worn during the raid, now dirty, worn, slashed, and cut. The hanging rope, too, had been placed within the coffin as a sign of contempt to the North, with the noose still around the neck. The face had begun to darken, and despite the use of cotton stuffings, “considerable blood had oozed out” of the ears and saturated the coffin where the head lay.

Hopper carefully washed and prepared the body, dressed it in “a neat white shroud, with pleated trimmings, and white cravat,” and placed it to rest in a “simple but elegant” walnut coffin. When Tilton came over to the office to see Brown’s body on Sunday morning, he was struck by the extent to which Hopper had refreshed the old man’s appearance. Resting on a bed of ice, he now seemed but a “sleeper,” Tilton recalled, “for he did not seem dead.”

While Brown had been successfully prepared for burial, the presence of the old man’s body in the city did not remain a secret to New Yorkers. Evidently, one of the proprietors had leaked the news, and by Sunday afternoon there were scores and perhaps hundreds of New Yorkers stopping into McGraw & Taylor to see the old man. One of the viewers was a reporter from the Herald, who wrote that the appearance of the body “had every indication of the deceased being, as it were, in a deep sleep.” The reporter observed that the mark of the rope was visible on the left side of the neck and under the ear, and that the old man’s cropped beard was neatly trimmed and his hair combed back^18 (see figure 18.1).

FIGURE 18.1 Brown, after preparation for burial, is laid out in his coffin. New York Illustrated News, December 17, 1859.

By Sunday evening, six police officers were stationed near the shop to ward off the pressing crowds, and one of the employees afterward wrote that some of the most “illustrious guests—the very biggest bugs” of the city—had filed in to view the body. People tried taking souvenirs, such as the screws from the discarded Virginia coffin. They would have taken Brown’s battle-torn suit too, except that undertaker Hopper already claimed it for himself, a vestige of John Brown that he cherished the rest of his life.19 The same employee found a rifle cap in one of the old man’s pockets and afterward described how he seemed “as serene as if asleep,” the ice having returned a lifelike blush to his face. She had never seen “a finer looking man of his age, after such a death too.” In the end, Hopper prepared an itemized bill but refused payment, declaring “his respect for the old man’s splendid courage.”20

Although Mary Brown had reached her home state, the trek back to North Elba was yet a journey of several days and many miles, including the difficult mountain roads that would bring the old man’s body back to his humble farm in North Elba. Escorted by McKim and Phillips, she traveled northward by rail to Troy, New York, then Rutland and Vergennes, Vermont. Throughout the journey, she met well-wishers, white and black, all wanting to shake the hand of John Brown’s widow. Near Vergennes, the coffin was escorted onto an old sail ferry that took them across Lake Champlain to Westport, New York. Before crossing the lake, Mary sent a message ahead to North Elba, “to apprise the family of the approach of the remains.”21

From Westport, Mary and the humble funeral cortege traveled to Elizabethtown, the county seat, where they remained overnight. Under the direction of the Essex county sheriff, Brown’s coffin was placed in the courthouse under guard, where people from the community also gathered to hear reports from McKim and Phillips. From Elizabethtown, the party faced the most difficult traveling of the journey, following a winding mountain road with its eerie dark canopy of Adirondack forest. To make matters worse, heavy rains had caused the snow to melt, forcing travelers to use carriages instead of sleighs. Weary and frustrated, they were now beset by deep mud and an increasingly steep and challenging road. “The roads were so bad as to be almost impassable,” wrote the Tribune correspondent. After a brief reception by Phineas Norton in nearby Keene, they slowly climbed the mountain pass, ascending until they reached the Brown farm at sunset, being quietly received amid glowing lanterns.22

Mary was greeted by weeping daughters and daughters-in-law, along with the rest of her grieving family. The outpouring of grief deeply moved the Tribune correspondent, who wrote that it was “a scene entirely beyond description.” However, emotion shortly “was put under restraint” so that McKim could provide them with a full report of all the events that had transpired since their mother’s departure for the South. The old man’s remains were carried into the house and brought upstairs, the coffin being set in the open second floor for the night.23

The following day, Thursday, December 8, the funeral began at one o’clock in the afternoon, beginning with the singing of Brown’s favorite hymn, “Blow ye the Trumpet,” an eighteenth-century Methodist invocation of the theme of the Year of Jubilee from the Hebrew scriptures. Next the eulogy was given by the Reverend Joshua Young of Burlington, Vermont, which the Tribune correspondent called “a spontaneous offering.” Religiously speaking, Brown’s first choice would not have entailed having a Unitarian minister perform his funeral service. However, the family had no evangelical clergyman in the immediate vicinity—at least, not one willing to comfort the Browns and face the inevitable conservative backlash. In fact, Young had traveled all night with an associate just to be present at the burial and had had no expectation of being pressed into service.

On Thanksgiving Day, Young had preached about the conflict of Christ with some Pharisees, who had criticized him for healing a man on the Sabbath. Pointing the attention of his listeners to the South, the young minister had invoked John Brown, “the aged prisoner in his lonely cell.” The old man’s deeds had seemed “a new Evangel,” he declared to his congregation, for Brown “loved his fellow man ‘not wisely but too well.’”

After Young’s prayer, McKim spoke, acknowledging that although he had never looked on John Brown’s face “till it was cold in death,” he had come to know the old man through the developments of the recent weeks and now felt honored to stand under his roof. Speaking to Brown’s grieving children, he declared that their fallen father and brothers “not only died bravely, but they died usefully; they were all benefactors; they were all martyrs in a holy cause.” The old man had made a great impact, McKim declared, so that even one of the staunchest proslavery officers at Charlestown had come to him secretly, begging that he might somehow obtain some memento of Brown, which he would “greatly value.”

Wendell Phillips stood to speak, declaring that John Brown had abolished slavery in Virginia. “You may say this is too much,” Phillips continued. But the old man had “loosened the roots of the Slave system,” the way a tempest might uproot a great tree. The fallen tree might remain green for months or even years, just as the slave may yet remain on the plantation. However, slavery would now struggle in dying breath, for John Brown had proved that “a Slave State is only Fear in the mask of Despotism.” Now, the old man could sleep “in the blessings of the crushed and the poor, and men believe more firmly in virtue, now that such a man has lived.”

FIGURE 18.2 Family and friends surround Brown’s coffin. A suggested identification, from left to right: Jane and Roswell Thompson, who lost two sons at Harper’s Ferry; orator Wendell Phillips; Lyman Epps, a black colonist and close friend of the Browns; John and Mary Brown’s son, Salmon, and their young daughter, Ellen, standing just in front of him; activist Miller McKim, holding the arm of Mary Brown; and Brown’s daughter Ruth Brown Thompson, with her husband, Henry Thompson. At the foot of the coffin perhaps is Brown’s friend, Phineas Norton of Keene, New York. It is also possible that the artist, Thomas Nast, placed himself in the picture at the far right, holding a portfolio under his arm. Also note Brown’s family monument stone, which was afterward engraved for his gravestone. New York Illustrated News, December 24, 1859.

Another hymn was sung, during which the coffin was brought outside and placed on a table near the door, the top part of the casket opened for viewing. The face seemed still “almost as natural as life—far more so than an ordinary corpse,” wrote the Tribune correspondent. Like the fallen tree of slavery, the sign of life still appeared on the fallen old man too. Slowly, friends, and then family, came to bid farewell to John Brown.

As the coffin was lowered into the grave, the family’s grief poured forth, and the young minister stood, raising “his deep and mellow voice” in the words of Saint Paul, “I have fought the good fight; I have kept the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me; and not to me only, but unto all that love his appearing.” Young would pay dearly for his words once he returned to Burlington. As he later recalled, Vermont had many conservatives who thought more like New Yorkers than like the antislavery men in Massachusetts. He was so greatly resented that even his warmest parishioners thereafter snubbed him on the street, and the hurt was so great that the young minister finally resigned and took another pulpit.

The funeral was over by three o’clock in the afternoon, and the guests were eager to depart for home, hoping to go as far as possible before dark, although McKim and Phillips only reached Keene by nightfall. The following day, they made their way down to Westport, crossing back over the lake, but remained one more night in Vermont before returning home. On Friday evening, Phillips spoke at Town Hall in Vergennes, addressing a packed house.

John Brown’s family was now left alone to invent a new life without him. Outside the small farmhouse, about fifty feet from the door there stood a large boulder, some ten or twelve feet high, of granite formation. Brown loved this great rock and left instructions that he should be buried next to it, thus pairing his grandfather’s memorial stone with the Almighty’s granite monument to the ages. Two years after the Civil War, a journalist for the New York Times would stand between John Brown’s gravestone and the great boulder, pondering the relationship of one to the other. “Was this rock placed here purposely as a monument for the one who alone and silently lies at its base?”24

CHAPTER 19

A TEXT FOR THE NATION

We calculate the strength of the blow by the rebound.

Throughout the rest of December, the immediate impact of the old man’s death took the form of two contrasting reactions, in meetings of sympathetic support for Brown’s family and imprisoned men, and in anti-Brown rallies promoting the security of the federal union. The most notable pro-Brown rally took place at the Cooper Union in New York City on Thursday evening, December 15. According to the Tribune, the hall was only about three-quarters full, and “nearly one half were ladies.” There seemed to be no citizens of distinction in attendance, the reporter observed, except for the main speakers, the Reverend George Cheever and the abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips, recently returned from Brown’s funeral in the Adirondacks.1

Covered by both the antislavery Tribune and the proslavery Herald, the rally at the Cooper Institute was described as a fund-raiser for the families of Brown and his men, and attendees were charged a twenty-five-cent admission fee, or one dollar, if they wished to receive a photographic image of Brown, probably the one produced by Thaddeus Hyatt, also one of the organizers of the event. Another item for sale at ten cents a sheet was a short collection of Brown’s statements, culled from letters or conversations, including:

“It is nothing to die in a good cause, but an eternal disgrace to sit still in that presence of the barbarities of American slavery.”

“Providence has made me an actor, and slavery an outcast.”

“Duty is the voice of God, and a man is neither worthy of a good home here or in heaven that is not willing to be in peril for a good cause.”

“A man dies when his time comes, and a man who fears is born out of time.”

Cheever, pastor of Manhattan’s Church of the Pilgrims, was perhaps Brown’s most vocal supporter among New York City’s clergymen, and his controversial antislavery sermons were familiar to the readers of city newspapers. Cheever began by upholding the superiority of God’s word to unrighteous laws, and characterized Brown’s execution as “judicial murder.” Yet Brown’s memory would live, he declared “and the seeds thus sown shall spring up again in other places, and men will be raised up to execute God’s will.” These words almost immediately brought hisses and moans from critics who had infiltrated the audience with the intention of disrupting the program.

As Cheever continued speaking, Brown’s sympathizers were increasingly forced to compete against shouting and heckling with their applause, although it seemed the number of their antagonists was increasing during the program. Probably, many of these rude interlopers had come in response to Bennett’s editorial in the Herald prior to the event, in which the proslavery editor declared that the clergymen leading the meeting were “to take part in the posthumous rites in honor of Brown—the robber, the assassin, the insurgent and traitor—whose avowed intention was to subvert this great republic.” It was a Republican conspiracy, Bennett suggested, an attempt at renewing “the bloody struggle” at Harper’s Ferry “on a larger scale.”2

Inflamed by Bennett’s rhetoric and outraged by the threat posed to conservative values and interests, the event virtually was a magnet for hostile white reactionaries. Perhaps it was only the presence of the city police that prevented the Cooper Union from being mobbed and vandalized, as was the site of a similar event in Philadelphia on the same day.3 As the Tribune reporter observed, some of the hecklers at the Cooper Union were themselves policemen in the administration of the former mayor, Fernando Wood, a proslavery businessman shortly reelected in 1860.

Cheever endeavored to continue, exclaiming that it had been little more than seventy years since George Washington was “canonized and rewarded for treason against Great Britain”—a form of treason “incomparably worse” than Brown’s “treason.” Indeed, he declared, Washington’s treason was “less justifiable, not so directly commanded of God, and they who applaud Washington for taking up the sword, now quote against John Brown our blessed Lord’s proverb, ‘They that take the sword shall perish with the sword.’” As Cheever spoke, a well-dressed, middle-aged businessman approached the platform, shaking his cane at the minister and shouting, “Stop that, sir, stop that!’” until the police finally had to remove him.

The minister persevered, shouting, “You see now a resurrection of that kind of patriotism in the merchants and ‘men of property and standing’ that, to drown if possible the thunders of God’s providence and word in John Brown’s death and letters.” Brown’s critics were only “shouting for cotton and the Southern trade,” he charged. “It is a trade union with slavery that these plated patriots are advocating, and not a union for the sake of liberty!”

The growing number of “rowdies” in the hall, intent on disruption, was now impossible to ignore. Even the Herald reporter thought their behavior “indescribable,” perhaps as many as three hundred, mostly young men, being lead in their agitation by a former Democratic city councilman. “I am not going to have my country run down in this scandalous manner,” one of the protestors exclaimed. “I am a working man, I have shoveled coal all day, and I will not hear my country spoken of in this way. I did not come here to preach treason.”

According to the Tribune, a large group of antagonists began to gather in one corner of the hall, groaning loudly at any mention of Brown’s name, and cheering at the mention of Governor Wise and the slave states. As if to form a counterrally, a number of these men began to make “extemporary” speeches “amid boisterous and continued applause.” Although the police finally removed them, other “rowdies” remained scattered throughout the audience, which presented an impossible task to the handful of police stationed inside the hall. Indeed, Cheever’s speech was entirely disrupted, as insult and disturbance became so uncontrolled that many of the women in the audience began to leave their seats, moving around the auditorium in an attempt to evade the heckling. Finally, circumstances became so bad that a detachment of police from the Fifteenth Precinct were sent inside, taking positions throughout the aisles in order to weed out the hecklers.

When Wendell Phillips stood to speak, the “Brownites” (as Bennett referred to them in the Herald) cheered with delight, although groans and hisses were also heard across the hall. “We calculate the strength of the blow by the rebound,” Phillips declared. “Men say John Brown’s enterprise was a failure, but he has proved one thing up to tonight, in the State of Virginia—he has proved that she dares not exist except as a despotism.” Although the hall was largely brought under control, some hecklers continued to hiss or interrupt Phillips, shouting out contradictions (“That’s a lie!”).

Phillips continued by asking what had brought them all together that evening. There must have been something about John Brown’s death “that divides it from common death,” he appealed. “What is it?” The orator asked if Brown was a murderer, at which point someone interrupted, shouting, “Who murdered Mr. Doyle?” At first, Phillips endeavored to continue his line of thought, declaring Brown a “model man,” whose “every act” in captivity “had lifted a million of men to a higher level of life,” even in the opinion of some of his captors.

Yet Phillips could not ignore the reference to the Pottawatomie killings, especially because G. W. Brown’s accusatory articles were almost serially reproduced in the Herald during John Brown’s last days. Phillips responded, declaring that G. W. Brown had only “rake[d] up a forgotten lie in Kansas in order to dishonor the fame of the old man.” Of course, he knew nothing of the real circumstances that had led to the killings. Nor was he aware of the evasive representations made in Brown’s defense. The orator could only reiterate the empty claim that the old man was nowhere near Pottawatomie at the time of the killings.

However, in a sense, Brown himself may have spoken with more clarity about Pottawatomie during the Cooper Union meeting. Among his printed words being sold that evening was the curious statement, “I am responsible for the wise exercise of my powers only, and not for the quality of certain acts.” Without context it is impossible to be certain exactly what the old man meant by these words, but they seem to pertain to the Pottawatomie incident. In Brown’s own estimation, he had taken necessary and justifiable action in that terrible Kansas episode while acknowledging that the “quality” of his actions would never be satisfactory to those privileged by peace and security.

Continuing in his message, Phillips then asked if it was “honest that the slave should rise and take his master by the throat and mark his way to liberty.” To this, the conservatives hissed and shouted, “No! No!” Undaunted, the orator responded, “Well, I was born at the base of Bunker Hill, and say it is right.” His words immediately evoked both hissing and applause, along with cries of “Treason! Traitor!” (See figure 19.1).

FIGURE 19.1 Abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips. New York Illustrated News, December 24, 1859.

Like Cheever, Phillips’s speech contained inevitable allusions to Christ and the American Revolution, including the claim that the Marquis de Lafayette later regretted having supported the Patriots’ rebellion when he realized that the United States had sustained slavery. “Had I known that it was to be a Republic holding slaves,” Phillips quoted Lafayette, “I never would have drawn my sword in the Revolution.” The remark stirred the crowd to cheers and derision as the orator continued, declaring John Brown’s motives were pure. “His purpose was to help the slave. I hide him behind Lafayette; and if the hisses of New York can reach him, God save New York”—this remark only bringing more outrage from conservatives in the audience.

John Brown had given the “Nation a text,” Phillips concluded. He had “lifted nine millions of people up to the discussion of a great question in morals” and had done more to educate the country than had Daniel Webster in forty years of public life. “Bah!” someone shouted, as enthusiastic applause arose in competition with more groans and hisses. “Old John Brown,” Phillips concluded, “lifted upon the gibbet, sacred for the centuries because he has consecrated it, will draw to him every honorable soul in these States.”

The meeting closed with a band playing a dirge, and Brown’s sympathizers shortly exited the hall. However, many of the conservatives remained, hissing and booing, until after the “Brownites” were gone. Even the Herald reporter was scandalized by their behavior. “Never did the Metropolitan Police have as much active business to employ their nerve and muscle as they had last night,” he wrote. In fact, the John Brown gathering had proved one of “the most boisterous, unruly, and disorderly meetings ever held in the Cooper Institute.”4

The following day, the editor Bennett complained about the “John Brown Meeting,” especially “the red hot abolition treason” of Phillips, and “the sanctimonious gall and wormwood” of the Reverend Cheever. In contrast, Horace Greeley lamented that a meeting intended “for the benefit of John Brown’s destitute family, was, for much of the time, a scene of disorder and tumult . . . invaded by a flushed and noisy crowd of well-dressed, and, in many instances, gentlemanly-looking individuals, who seemed determined upon breaking up the meeting.” Greeley concluded that these protestors acted disgracefully, being “palpably animated by the spirit that seeks to dominate in the Union by suppressing discussion, by robbing the mails of alleged incendiary matters, and by threats and violence in the South, and on the floor of Congress.” At least such an oppressive spirit had not taken over New York City, Greeley concluded, because free speech had not yet been trampled on according to the “frenzied demand of the Slave Power.”5 Still, there were ample “Union-saving propensities” at work, as conservatives in the North had set about in desperation to protect their interests and placate the angry slaveholders of the South.

In fact, only three days after John Brown’s hanging, it was reported in the Herald that a planning session of New York’s leading conservatives, composed of “merchants, bankers, retired capitalists, as well as a number of politicians,” had taken place at the Lafarge House. Led by John Jacob Astor Jr. and other prominent New Yorkers, their stated goal was to preserve the “link that binds” the North and the South, “and that is the link of commerce.” Amid applause and cheers, the attendees resolved to schedule a great meeting in favor of the Union on Monday evening, December 19, in order to “show the South that there are thousands and hundreds of thousands ready to stand by them.”6

However, the “Great Union Meeting” in New York was not the first of its kind in the North, although it apparently marked the climax of the conservative reaction to the John Brown episode. The day after Brown was hanged, the business and conservative leadership of Philadelphia rallied in support of the Union cause, planning a “Grand Union Mass Meeting” at Jayne’s Hall on December 7. In the Philadelphia meeting, “[t]he greatest enthusiasm prevailed,” along with the passing of resolutions in support of the South. One of the resolutions thus vindicated Virginia’s actions in suppressing the “Harper’s Ferry outbreak,” awkwardly calling it “a most marked illustration of the value of the Union.” Although Governor Wise was mentioned with great applause, references to Brown and Wendell Phillips invoked the cry, “Hang him! Hang them all!” The racism of the meeting was vivid, with speakers invoking both the supposedly contented slave and the alarmist notion of “thriftless” blacks transformed by abolition into terrifying “hordes of savages from Africa” scattered across the South.7

The day after the Philadelphia meeting, another meeting took place in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, featuring prominent political figures, Caleb Cushing, Edward Everett, and the former governor of Massachusetts, Eli Lincoln. In speaking, Lincoln affirmed Brown’s execution and eschewed any notion that he was a martyr. Although not a proslavery man, he concluded that there was “not an evil which exists, under the Union, which may not be better dealt with in the Union than out of it.” Disunion, he concluded, would never restore harmony between North and South, and “the spirit of dissension and discord” would have to be rebuked.

Everett, who would speak alongside Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg several years later, appealed to the “memory of our fathers—of those happy days when the men of the North and South stood together for the country, on hard fought fields.” Cushing opined on the legal question of whether Brown should have been tried in a federal or a state court, because he had attacked the armory of the United States. However, he concluded that because the old man had committed crimes outside the armory, “John Brown was duly and lawfully convicted in full course of law.”8

Following on the heels of the meetings in Philadelphia and Boston, the Great Union Meeting in New York City was convened on Monday night, December 19, at the Academy of Music, on the corner of Irving Place and Fourteenth Street. The structure, located near the affluent Union Square neighborhood, was only five years old and seated 4,600, and was considered the largest opera house in the world at the time. With plush red seats, a ventilation system for air circulation, a sprinkler system, and four hundred gas chandeliers, the Academy of Music was an impressive site for what was hoped would be a grand demonstration of support for the Union and the slaveholders of the South. The only flaw in the structure was its long, narrow horseshoe shape, based on Italian opera houses, which tended to obscure the view from many seats, notwithstanding the building’s wonderful acoustics.9

The Academy of Music was brightly lit on the outside, and the interior was arranged to maximize the drama of the event, with the stage floor extending over the orchestra. On the stage, a large desk, appropriately covered with the flag of the Union, was situated for the presiding officers. Great flags were suspended on either side of the stage, with large signs along the walls emblazoned with quotations from George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Daniel Webster, proclaiming the sovereignty of the Union and the federal constitution.

According to the Herald, the aisles and passages were thronged, and the building was “most uncomfortably crowded” even before the program started at seven o’clock in the evening. The journalist estimated that as many as six thousand had crowded inside, while many more gathered outside, enjoying fireworks, a “grand display . . . expressly for the occasion.” Inside, an impressive band played “Hail Columbia,” “Yankee Doodle,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and other “national airs,” all received with what seemed to be “endless cheering” (see figures 19.2 and 19.3).

FIGURE 19.2 Panoramic view of the “Great Union Meeting” at the Academy of Music, New York City, December 19, 1859. New York Illustrated News, December 24, 1859.

FIGURE 19.3 Panoramic view of the “Great Union Meeting” at the Academy of Music, New York City, December 19, 1859. New York Illustrated News, December 24, 1859.

The introduction of the meeting was made by Mayor Daniel Tiemann, who declared that “New York has ever been a Union-loving city,” his statement being interrupted by prolonged cheering. “She has ever stood by it,” Tiemann continued, “and I believe she would sacrifice any interest to perpetuate that glorious bond which has for so long a period joined together the different States of our confederacy.” Following the mayor, a clergyman opened the event, invoking the Almighty “to rebuke any spirit of discord, of violence, of strife, in any portion of our land.”

Afterward, resolutions were read, reminding the audience that slavery legally existed, and thus, any “inflammatory appeal” to the contrary would “tend to make this Union less perfect.” After the “recent outrage at Harper’s Ferry” was declared a crime against Virginia and the Union, the hall was filled with resounding applause and boisterous cheers. The resolutions continued, one declaring that the subject of slavery had been “too long mingled with party politics” and that it was now “the duty of planters, farmers, manufacturers, merchants, mechanics, and of every citizen, North and South, East and West, to discountenance all parties and organizations” that challenged the security of the Union. At this, the audience broke out in wild applause.

The first speaker, Charles O’Conor, was a prominent lawyer in the city, a rags-to-riches hero of the Irish Roman Catholic community. O’Conor not only upheld the rights of slaveholders but declared also that black enslavement was not unjust because it was “ordained by nature,” just as it was “an institution created by nature itself . . . with its duties for the black man” that could not be performed “except by the preservation and . . . perpetuation of the system.” These graphically racist remarks brought great applause, as the lawyer continued his screed, upholding the United States as “a white nation.” Indeed, the constitution and laws of the nation were vested in the “political rights” of the white race,” O’Conor declared, while blacks were only “allowed . . . to live under the shadow and protection of our laws,” serving “in the condition of a bondman.” Otherwise, O’Conor contended, the history of mankind showed that blacks would perish in the North American climate, having neither the “intellect to govern or the willingness to work.”

Of course, notwithstanding O’Conor’s creditable legal abilities, his appalling remarks reveal the stupid prejudice and ignorant racism that typically was imbibed at the fountain of “America” by desperate European immigrants before and after the antebellum era. The enthusiastic, even uproarious applause that greeted the words of this Irish immigrant’s son proved the normalcy of white supremacist thinking in the North and certainly puts the lie to the notion that racism was the sole province of white Southerners.

Thinking himself gracious, O’Conor emphasized that despite his state of subservience and “pupilage,” the black man was not to be mistreated. His words, “I say that it is the duty of the white man to treat him kindly; that it is the interest of the white man to treat him kindly,” brought applause. Even if the black man was abused or killed in the slave states, he argued, it was due only to “the misconduct of this external force.” It was Northern abolitionism that was “pressing upon the Southern States,” compelling whites to abstain from beneficence toward the African. As far as the problems of the “mode of sale,” such as the separating of families, O’Conor concluded, “let the South alone and they will correct it. Let our brethren of the South take care of their own domestic institutions, and they will do it.” When O’Conor was finished there was “great and continued cheering,” and then three more cheers for the State of Virginia.

Other speakers followed, including Washington Hunt, a former governor of New York, who called forth the spirit of unity and brotherhood, complaining that “the slavery question has been made to swallow up every other topic of public interest in the minds of many benevolent but misguided persons, whose sympathies are most powerfully and singularly excited by those distant evils, real or imaginary, which lie entirely beyond their control.” It was tragic, Hunt declared, that there were now people “whose minds are so diseased by sectional prejudice that they openly express sympathy with John Brown and his schemes of murder and insurrection.”

Outside the Academy of Music, great bonfires were set on Union Square and Fourteenth Street, with more fireworks, including the firing of a cannon—the effect of which so frightened horses in the streets that a number of carriages were crashed. With the hall being filled to capacity, speakers’ stands were erected outside, and as many as four thousand people gathered at one stand on the Fourteenth Street side of the building. Like the program inside the hall, these street rallies featured a number of speakers, all of them proclaiming dread of sectional conflict, the inferiority of black people, and the errors of the “John Brown platform.”

As the Herald reporter put it, in spite of darkness, bonfires and tar barrels “blazed in every direction, shedding a brilliant light around, so that one could almost distinguish objects as readily as at broad noon.” Another speakers’ stand was set up on Irving Place, between Fourteenth and Fifteenth Streets, which attracted another two thousand people, standing almost directly opposite the Academy of Music. At this stand, the speaker criticized the recent program at the Cooper Institute, citing the speeches of Wendell Phillips “and other worshippers of John Brown” and declaring that “the day was not far distant when the people would hurl from them all such fanatics, and crush out all thoughts of disunion and disunionists.”

Among the communications read inside the Academy of Music was a letter from former president Millard Fillmore, who declined an invitation to attend the meeting because he had withdrawn from participation in politics. However, Fillmore wrote, “the present stormy aspect and threatening tendency of public events” prompted him to join them in calling the country to “mutual forbearance.” As for John Brown, Fillmore believed the tragedy of Harper’s Ferry was the result of the political circumstances that had led to the crisis in Kansas. Brown himself had “exhibited some traits of character that challenge our admiration,” he wrote, “yet his fanatical zeal seems to have blinded his moral perceptions, and hurried him into an unlawful attack upon the lives of a peaceful and unoffending community in a sister State.”

The former president concluded that although he spoke on behalf of those who were “anti-slavery in sentiment,” they had no intention of interfering with slavery as had John Brown. All agitation should cease, Fillmore wrote. “Let harmony be restored between the North and the South, and let every patriot rally around our national flag, and swear upon the altar of his country to sustain and defend it.” Of course, Brown would not have been surprised by the former president’s inclination to sacrifice human freedom for what amounted to white national unity. In writing to Frederick Douglass six years before, Brown declared Fillmore a “traitorous ‘lickspittle’” of the South.10

Prior to New York’s Union Meeting, Horace Greeley had warned the readers of the Tribune that the purpose of the conservative gathering was “chiefly, to promote Southern trade, and, as a means to that end, to denounce the Republican party and uphold the Pro-Slavery party.” The irony of the effort, Greeley pointed out, was that actually “only political communities who have ever threatened to dissolve the Union, or secede from the Union, are the Slave States,” and that the Union Meeting would only “give them greater facilities for this traitorous work.” Afterward, he highlighted the “salient features” of the Union Meeting at the Academy of Music, especially observing that it was a “labored justification and defense of Slavery and slave holding,” and that its speakers and resolutions had evaded the “inalienable birthright” of liberty that is due blacks as well as whites. Of course, the meeting had nothing to say of the interests of free labor, nor did it offer a solution to the fact “that pro-slavery forces are agitating for slavery’s spread, while the North is told not to ‘agitate the subject of Slavery.’”11

From the conservative perspective, Bennett of the Herald assessed the Union meetings in the northeast as a varied and problematic movement. He believed the meeting at the Academy of Music had been a success, although the speeches had fallen short of the real necessity. Still, unlike the other Union meetings, Bennett was pleased that the signatories of the New York gathering had called for the nomination of General Winfield Scott as the next Democratic candidate for the presidency. To be sure, the advancing of Scott’s candidacy seems to have been largely the brainchild of Bennett himself and was duly prompted and promoted in the editorials of the Herald leading up to the New York meeting.12

Bennett opined that it was useless for Union men and conservatives at the North to talk, while the North continued to send antislavery politicians to Congress, because “only the voice of the ballot box” could “satisfy” the South. Only a moderate Democrat like Scott, possibly teamed with Sam Houston, could “avert the impending catastrophe,” he wrote. “It matters not whether the South is foolish or not in taking the meditated leap in the dark. It is resolved upon doing it, and we have to deal with the fact as it exists.” As far as Bennett was concerned, the other Union meetings in Boston and Philadelphia, as well as New Haven and Hartford, Connecticut, “did not achieve anything practical” because Democrats in those cities had not checked the election of Republicans. Union meetings called by “a few thousand merchants” in Northern cities that were “fast losing the Southern trade,” he concluded, were mere “palliatives” that could neither resolve the crisis nor “alter the settled purpose of the Southern States.”

For all of his racism and “doughface” politics, Bennett had a more realistic understanding of the Southern mind than many Northern conservatives, who hoped to curry favor with slaveholders by rallies, resolutions, and hurrahs. His hysteria over the sectional crisis not only reflected sympathy for the slaveholders but also his discerning that Southern leaders were already moving toward secession when John Brown had struck Harper’s Ferry and were now “resolved upon doing it.”13

To no surprise, the Southern response to the Union meetings in the North was at best underwhelming. Commenting on the meetings in Philadelphia and Boston, a writer in the Charleston Mercury dismissed Northern conservatives as “the very rear-guard of Abolitionism,” who “would not lose their golden eggs by killing their goose.” These supposed friends of the Union wanted to contain slavery by a “cordon” of border states, while slaveholders were pushed farther and farther South. For all their resolutions and hatred of that “poor old devil, John Brown,” it seemed “the mountain is to labor in grievous travail, and will bring forth a mole.” A writer in the Baltimore Patriot was even more blunt: “If there be any character in the world that we have any contempt for, it is the dirt-eating dough-face of the Free States. He has no real regard whatever for the South and its institution, and yet, under the pretences of sympathy for them, he will proclaim himself our friend, keeping his eye steadily all the while upon the pecuniary benefit to be derived therefrom.”14

In the May 1860 edition of DeBow’s Review, a Southern journal, J. W. Morgan noted that great stress that had been laid on the several Union meetings that had lately been held “in the great commercial and manufacturing centers of the Free States.” Morgan held “that the Northern people are concerned lest their Southern trade and traffic should be diminished,” and observed that such meetings “amounted to little” as long as the Free States continued sending Republicans to Congress. The South wanted to see more than mass meetings, patriotic resolutions, and conservative speeches, Morgan wrote. The last strand of hope for the Union was that “Republicanism would have to be beaten at the voting polls” and the “lawless spirit of sectionalism” would have to be thoroughly crushed. If the Republican Party triumphed in 1860, he concluded, the people of the South “must needs protect ourselves.”15

EPILOGUE

A TERRIBLE VIAL

The South is arming in every direction.

Although the old man was “left in his grave among the hills,” as one journalist put it, he was anything but absent from the nation. John Brown had been killed by slavery, Horace Greeley wrote in his first editorial after the hanging. Nevertheless, the old man was a hero. His errors may have indicated fanaticism, Greeley concluded, but “not the crimes of a felon.”

The following week, the editor once more opined that the emancipation of slaves was “the great idea” of Brown’s life, and “as years roll on . . . when American Slavery shall have passed away, mankind universally will hail him as a martyr in the cause of civil and religious Liberty.” Samuel Bowles of the Springfield Republican likewise wrote that few men had died “so happily, so satisfied with time, place and circumstance” as had John Brown. He was a “Christian man hung by Christians for acting upon his convictions of duty” and “a philanthropist hung for seeking the liberty of oppressed men,” Bowles declared. No outcry from the offended South regarding “violated law” could ever “cover up the essential enormity of a deed like this.”1

Yet the outcry from the South was undeniable. Even prior to Brown’s hanging, indignant Southern voices had begun to rise on behalf of the most radical measures. In a letter to the Herald that was published on November 20, a writer, identified only as “Virginia,” declared that the excitement throughout the South was not due to the Harper’s Ferry incident, although “that outrage caused a panic in the immediate neighborhood” and “has been regarded with indignation.” However, the “public mind” of the South was “fast coming to the belief that the North and South can live together in harmony but a little while longer.” The men of the South now were preparing for “peril” by “arming themselves” in the event that a “sectional” party came to power, particularly the Republicans, whose leaders were “inimical to the greatest interest of the Southern States.”

“Virginia” concluded that whether right or wrong, the people of the South believed they were right and would act on that belief, refusing to live “in a Union and under a government” controlled by the opponents of slavery. “We tell you plainly, Mr. Editor,” he warned, “the South is arming in every direction. . . . in every town and county large military companies are being organized . . . preparation for civil war which is to be consequent upon a dissolution of the Union.” The only hope for avoiding dissolution, “Virginia” concluded, was a change of sentiment in the North. “Let that sentiment triumph in the election of a sectional President—let the government once be delivered over to the guidance and control of black republican leaders, and you will see the end of the Union very soon.”

Two days after the publication of “Virginia’s” letter, a meeting took place at the courthouse in Martinsburg, Virginia. The main speaker was Charles J. Faulkner, the former congressman who had cross-examined John Brown with Senator Mason after the raid and then refused to serve as the old man’s defense attorney. In the Martinsburg meeting, Faulkner reportedly declared that there could be no “coalition” between “Black Republicanism” and “South Americanism.” The South would not submit “to the federal triumph of any party that bases its organization upon an acknowledged warfare upon the institution of slavery,” he concluded. “The triumph of any such party will be deemed by the Southern States cause at once for a separation from the federal Union. This is now inevitable.”2

Nor was belief in the inevitability of secession limited to Virginia. After serving as a moderate nonsecessionist governor in Alabama, Andrew B. Moore changed his position following the Harper’s Ferry raid. Moore had defeated an extreme pro-secession rival for reelection in 1859 and probably would have continued to hold a conservative position, believing that his state was not ready for such radical measures. However, the Harper’s Ferry raid had changed his mind. In his reelection inaugural address, made on the day before Brown’s hanging, Moore decried the intention of “black republicans” to be satisfied with nothing except the “extermination of the institution of slavery.” The “irrepressible conflict” proclaimed by Senator William Seward of New York the previous year, declared Moore, had now developed a “new form” in John Brown’s raid.

Moore argued that the extent of the Republican “conspiracy” showed that they even intended to go beyond political action within Congress and the territorial legislatures, in order to achieve their goals by “conspiracy, violence and bloodshed.” Appealing to his own moderate record as a constitutionalist, Moore lamented the necessity of disunion as “a great calamity.” Yet now he preferred disunion, not consenting to have Alabama remain in the Union as “an unequal and degraded member.” From Moore’s revised position, the fate of the nation now hung from a single thread—the upcoming Presidential election.3

If Alabama’s gubernatorial voice represented the moderate secessionist opinion of the South, then governor William Gist of South Carolina—whose state had the highest proportion of enslaved blacks—was the voice of radical secessionism. Gist, a plantation owner and veteran politician, solicited cooperation and support from all the cotton-growing states of the South in preparation for breaking with the federal union.4

Undoubtedly to the dismay of Northern conservatives, the New York Herald reported that Gist was particularly aggravated to learn that Vermont had passed a resolution to delimit slavery from the territories and resist the admission of new slave states. Speaking to the legislature of his own state, he decried the Vermont resolution as expressing the attitude of all the nonslaveholding states, concluding that “the signs of the times” now clearly indicated “an approaching crisis in the destinies of the South.” Brown and his men may have been but “a few fanatics,” Gist declared, but those who admired him had now grown to “gigantic proportions” and that “with very few exceptions, the entire Northern people are arrayed against us, and pledged to our destruction.”

“Harper’s Ferry is the truthful illustration of the first act in the drama to be performed on a Southern theatre,” and the South now had to unite for its defense against a “treasonable and incendiary attack upon the South.” To Gist, “moderation and conservatism and statesmanship” were not any more trustworthy than sailing the ocean in a cardboard boat. The only alternative now was a “united South,” which either could “enforce equality in the Union, or maintain our independence out of it.”

Gist continued that he no longer believed that the South could “live in peace and harmony in the Union,” and this required that the slave states “form a confederacy with ability to protect itself against any enemy, and command the respect and admiration of the world.” This required “the co-operation of the Southern States in concerted action in defense of our institutions, whenever they may be put in jeopardy by all the departments of the government passing into the hands of our enemies.” Once more, the coming election would “settle the question of our safety in the Union,” he concluded. South Carolina would have to “exhaust every means to get the co-operation of the Southern States in this vital and important movement,” remembering also that sovereign statehood gave South Carolina and the other states of the South “a clear and unquestionable right to resume her position as a sovereign in the family of nations.”5

On the day of Brown’s hanging, the Baltimore American noted Gist’s proposition to the South Carolina Legislature, in which he had invited “the Slave States to unite in the formation of a Southern Confederacy” but concluded that no action had yet been taken on it. However, Gist was not content to wait for the outcome of the 1860 presidential election. On December 22, after a number of resolutions were produced in response to the governor’s declaration, the South Carolina Legislature chose one written by Christopher G. Memminger to present their case to the other slave states, especially Virginia.

Memminger was a naturalized citizen, born in Germany but was both reared and trained as a lawyer in the South. A zealous advocate of “states’ rights,” Memminger, through his resolution, affirmed an ordinance passed by the state in 1852. At the time, South Carolina had proclaimed its right to secede following California’s admission to the Union as a free state and the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. He believed there was a precedent established because South Carolina had called for a secession convention at the time, winning the admiration if not the support of Virginia.

Now that the rights of slave states had been increasingly assaulted “in new and more alarming forms,” Memminger concluded that the Southern states should immediately meet in concert to decide upon “measures for united action.” Likewise, a special committee should be formed in order that South Carolina might make a renewed appeal to Virginia, “in earnest desires to unite with them in measures of defense.” He also called for South Carolina to set aside a large amount of money to prepare for “military contingencies.”

Not only did Memminger’s resolution pass unanimously in the legislature, but Governor Gist also appointed him the Commissioner of South Carolina, charged with the mission of renewing the appeal to Virginia. In early 1860, Memminger thus wrote to the newly elected governor of Virginia, John Letcher, declaring that the “indignity” of Brown’s raid was equally an offense to South Carolina and that he had been commissioned to propose a union between their two states in the name of “common defense.”6

On January 19, Memminger spoke before the bar of the Virginia Legislature, first recounting their shared history of interest in states’ rights and then renewing the call for a “Southern Congress” between South Carolina and Virginia. The Harper’s Ferry raid, Memminger argued, had provided their two states a kind of instrument that could “measure the heights of the flood which is bursting over the land.” Certainly, he continued, “the implacable condition of Northern opinion” was made clear in “the sounds of lamentation” over Brown’s execution throughout the North.

“These are indications which you cannot disregard,” Memminger argued further. Every tolling bell in the North was an approval of Brown’s “insurrection and servile war” at Harper’s Ferry. In recent local elections in the North and even in Washington city, he added, candidates with antislavery views had “proved stronger than they ever were before.” And whereas the North and South formerly faced each other as undeclared opponents with “enmity rankling in their bosoms,” John Brown’s invasion had forced the two sections to recognize that actually they were “standing in hostile array.” At every point, or so it seemed, the slave states were being kept at bay, with only the “forms of the Constitution” left to the South.7

In closing his appeal to the Virginia body, Memminger asked why they should waste time “in surmise,” when realities were now thrust openly before the South. Since the Republicans showed no sign of wavering, should they not now “act in concert”? Surely, he appealed, the South might yet unite “in declaring anew her bill of rights” or seek independence if deprived of equality within the Union. Finally, pointing out that “free institutions” had to be maintained by “constant and untiring effort,” he quoted from William Cullen Bryant’s 1842 poem “The Antiquity of Freedom”:

O Freedom! Thou are not, as poets dream,

A fair young girl, with light and delicate limbs

And wavy tresses gushing from the cap. . . .

A bearded man,

Armed to the teeth, art thou.8

Although Memminger’s address had no immediate result in political terms, there is no doubt that his arguments influenced the thinking of the state’s leadership and helped inculcate the rationale for Virginia to follow South Carolina into secession in 1861.9 Memminger and his Virginia allies could never have grasped it, but in historical retrospect, Bryant’s image of freedom seems more apropos of John Brown—the “bearded man” who had come to Harper’s Ferry, “armed to the teeth” with pikes and Sharps rifles. Was it freedom, too, that had gone so joyfully from the jail to the gallows at Charlestown?

David Strother, the artistic genius whose loyalty to Virginia and slavery did not entail secession, believed that from the day of John Brown’s execution, the statesmen and political leaders of the Old Dominion had “been smitten with Judicial Madness.” When the call to secede finally came, Strother wrote, the people willingly followed, as if the old man’s blood, “spilled in vengeance,” had “inoculated” the entirety of Virginia with an “epidemic frenzy.” In the meantime, while the nation pretended a return to normalcy, Virginia “continued arming, drilling & preparing for War, against whom & to what end no one seemed to know.” Excited young men asked no questions, “while the forebodings and warnings” of more sober critics were treated with contempt. Indeed, those “who questioned or caviled were menaced with hanging”—the gallows now having become “the favorite prescription for all who opposed the absolute domination of Southern Opinion.”10

As far as the old man was concerned, by the time of the 1860 presidential election, the dominant perception in the South was “that John Brown spoke for the Republican party, and that the Republican party spoke for the North.” Of course, the Republicans had repudiated Brown’s actions all along, and candidate Abraham Lincoln—certainly no abolitionist in any sense—repeatedly dismissed the old man in public presentations, notably in a speech given in Kansas on the day after Brown’s hanging.

“Old John Brown has just been executed for treason against a state,” he told an audience in Leavenworth. “We cannot object, even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right.” In another speech in the same town, candidate Lincoln “emphatically denounced” Brown’s actions at Harper’s Ferry, and certainly “believed the old man insane.” The Illinois Republican went on most notably to dismiss Brown as a brooding fanatic in his famous speech at the Cooper Union on February 27, 1860, and went on denying his party’s association with Brown in a few more speeches made in New Hampshire and Connecticut.11

Still, as Peter Wallenstein concludes, Northern support in the Republican victory of 1860 “further demonstrated what many Southern voters and politicians thought they already knew.” For the many secession-prone leaders, nothing explicitly oppositional toward the South needed to come from the newly elected Lincoln administration. To slaveholders, the Republican victory seemed to reveal the true intentions of the North, allowing the South to play the role of the offended one, robbed of its freedoms and betrayed by its allies in the free states.

In reality, as Oswald Villard wrote, the movement toward secession “was too far under way for any peaceable solution.” Indeed, “the minds of too many Southern leaders besides Governor Wise were thoroughly committed to it even before the raid.” Almost a year after Brown’s hanging, Alexander Stephens declared that many Southern leaders did not desire to stay in the Union because they were “disunionists” whose real agenda was to “press their object.”12

In mid-December 1859, Abraham Lincoln’s former law partner, William Herndon, wrote to Theodore Parker, one of Brown’s “Secret Six.” Complaining of the “haughty despotism” of the South, Herndon wrote that throughout the slave states, “‘fanatics’ are driving out all good men.” The Harper’s Ferry raid “has somewhat awoke us to the ‘irrepressible conflict,” and his death had “sent a thrill of horror through the American world.” Even Parker, now in Europe, had “no idea of the influence of John Brown’s acts,” he wrote. Although Herndon did not approve of the old man’s actions, he deeply sympathized with Brown and his motives. “Poor old John Brown,” wrote Lincoln’s associate. “He was good and great and is immortal—will live amidst the world’s gods and heroes through all the infinite ages. ‘I still live’ of John Brown will ever ring along heaven’s blue domes of the future.”

To what extent Lincoln shared Herndon’s sentiments about Brown is not known, although after his victory, the president-elect set aside his Republican apologetics at least once. On January 2, 1860, Lincoln wrote from Springfield, Illinois, to a man from western Virginia, who had sent him a kindly request for a “plain reply.” In his letter, J. A. Spencer of Wheeling wrote to inquire if he would have exercised a presidential pardon had he already been in office and John Brown’s case had fallen under federal jurisdiction.

In answer, Lincoln wrote, “I have carefully reviewed the testimony in said case, and in my opinion Brown committed no offence against the Federal Government meriting such severe punishment as he received. The most he committed against the Federal Government was a gross misdemeanor.” Lincoln acknowledged that had he been the governor of Virginia, he might have pursued the same course as Governor Wise. “Yet even then there were strong mitigating circumstances. Brown was no doubt a monomaniac on the subject of negro slavery,” he concluded, “and as such, close confinement would have been more in accordance with the dictates of justice.”13 His response seems fairly consistent with the record, though not with the myth of the “Great Emancipator.”

In his political quest, Abraham Lincoln had used John Brown as a foil, as he did in challenging some Missourians during a speech on the same day the old man was hanged. Responding to the threat of secession from the Union if the Republicans won the election, Lincoln challenged: “You have elected your Presidents and we submitted; if we elect one, our duty will be to make you submit.” John Brown had “attacked contrary to law” and “has just been hanged for treason against the State of Virginia; and we cannot object.” If the South now undertook to destroy the Union contrary to law, Lincoln warned, “our duty will be to deal with you as John Brown has been dealt with.”

As far as slavery was concerned, it would take the better part of the Civil War for the sixteenth president to embrace the abolition of slavery as a priority, although it is doubtful that even then he could ever relate to the humanity of black people as had John Brown. Lincoln was, as Frederick Douglass put it, “preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.” During the first years of his administration, Douglass recalled, Lincoln was “ready and willing at any time . . . to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country.” Indeed, Douglass concluded, as far as black people were concerned, he was neither “our man or our model,” for in his “interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.” Quite in contrast, Douglass later wrote of John Brown, that he “saw slavery through no mist or cloud, but in a light of infinite brightness, which left no one of its ten thousand horrors concealed.”14

During the dreadful years of the Civil War, the orator Wendell Phillips stood once again upon the stage of the Cooper Union in New York. It had been four years since his speech at the John Brown meeting, although he preferred to remind his audience that he “had the honor to assist in giving the body of John Brown to the keeping of the hills he loved.” At the time, Phillips continued, “Selfishness, which calls itself Conservatism,” had sneered at the old man’s life “as a ridiculous failure,” and some of his friends had even sought to excuse him on the grounds of insanity. “We know better now,” the orator nodded, knowing that his audience also understood. “The echoes of his rifles had hardly died away on the banks of the Shenandoah before South Carolina prepared for war in defense of her system. . . . Well might he say, as he did to Theodore Parker, ‘I may fail; I may expiate my rashness on the gibbet; but I open a terrible vial.’”15

Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun.

And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them!

On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them.

Ecclesiastes 4:1, one of the verses marked in John Brown’s prison Bible^16

NOTES

PROLOGUE

1. Edwin Morton, “The Archer,” from Verse (Occasional) (Lavanchy, Switzerland: Morges, 1889). Morton’s self-published collection features poems he had written over a period of three decades. Although most of the poems were written in the 1850s, they are not compiled in chronological order. “The Archer” is undated but is strongly suggestive of the John Brown episode; this supposition may be strengthened by the fact that many of the poems in the collection allude to episodes of Morton’s earlier life, especially its tributes in remembrance of Gerrit Smith. Thus, it is more than reasonable to suggest that “The Archer” was Morton’s veiled tribute to Brown.

2. According to John Brown Junior, who also knew Morton, he had met the latter at Gerrit Smith’s house “nearly every time” he was there, and that Morton was both a tutor for Smith’s son and a private secretary as well. Morton was “to some extent” acquainted with Brown’s plans and had spoken “familiarly” with John Junior on the subject. Transcript of testimony of John Brown, Jr. in Gerrit Smith vs. the Tribune Company of Chicago (Sandusky, OH, 19 July 1867) in Mr. & Mrs. John Brown Jr. folder, Box 6, OGV.

3. See John Brown to Mary Brown, 10 Nov., DHSP. Emendation of “whiped.”

4. Emerson quoted in the frontispiece of PLJB.

5. PLJB, 7; John McKivigan, Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 49.

6. “The Harper’s Ferry Outbreak . . . Our Richmond Correspondence,” NYH, 7 Nov., 9; “The Harper’s Ferry Affair. The Excitement and Crisis in the South. Our Richmond Correspondence,” NYH, 8 Nov., 1.

7. JBT, 83 and 111. Also see “The Harper’s Ferry Outbreak . . . Our Richmond Special Despatch,” NYH, 6 Nov., 1.

8. “Old John Brown as a Presidential Hobby,” NYH, 18 Nov., 2.

9. Albert Fried, John Brown’s Journey: Notes & Reflections on His America & Mine (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978), 266.

10. Interview with “Captain Cockerell” in F.A.B., “Poor Old John Brown; People Who Witnessed His Brave Raid and Execution,” The Press [Philadelphia?], 27 Jan. 1884, in the John Brown clipping files, NYHS.

CHAPTER 1

1. After surveying Brown’s letters, I found that he suffered with “the ague” several times in the 1850s. His letters show that he had several bouts of the ague and other afflictions (“a terrible gathering in my head”) that debilitated him at times, affected his vision, and left him weak. Brown was quite sick in early to mid-1859, the year of Virginia invasion, and probably had only started to feel better a month or two prior to the raid. “I have the ague some yet,” he wrote in later June of 1859. See John Brown to John H. Kagi, 23 Jun. 1859, DHSP.

2. Benjamin Mills, one of Brown’s captives at Harper’s Ferry, described him as walking with a slight stoop. See “John Brown’s Raid; Related by a Kentucky Gunsmith Who Was Master Armorer at Harper’s Ferry,” The Courier-Journal [Lexington, KY], Aug. 1881, SC02-0095, BBS. From youth, Brown was afflicted with difficulties in his eyes, apparently some sort of sporadic inflammation, that brought ruin to his studies as a youth and beset him after the death of his first wife in 1832, and subsequently in later years. It is also quite likely that he suffered from Bell’s palsy (or possibly a small stroke) following the Kansas crises in 1856–1857—the condition of his drooping face muscles being famously captured in a daguerreotype that often has been mistaken as a “mad.” See Jean Libby, John Brown Photo Chronology (Palo Alto, CA: Allies for Freedom, 2009), 40–41.

3. John Brown to John Brown Jr., 21 Aug. 1854 [excerpt], in LLJB, 191.

4. Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., “Fire from the Midst of You”: A Religious Life of John Brown (New York: NYU Press, 2002), 111–12.

5. Handwritten document by James G. Blunt, Reel 2, John Brown Collection, KSHS.

6. Abolitionist Martin Delany claimed that Brown had considered basing his operation in Kansas. While this is possible, probably Delany was mistaken in memory. See [Frances E. Rollin], Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1883; reprinted, New York: Arno Press, 1969), 88.

7. Eleanor Atkinson, “The Soul of John Brown: Recollections of the Great Abolitionist by his Son,” The American Magazine (Oct. 1909), 636.

8. Mary Brown stated that her husband had been seeking for twenty years “for some opportunity to free the slaves” and concluded that “when at last the enterprise of Harper’s Ferry was planned, we all thought that the time had now come.” See Theodore Tilton, “A Personal Interview with Captain Brown’s Wife,” New York Independent, 17 Nov., 1. This suggests the idea of Harper’s Ferry was long a part of Brown’s plan, but that the follow through—the planning of the actual move into the South had taken time to materialize.

9. Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (Hartford, CT: Park Publishing, 1882), 340.

10. John Brown, Jr. later testified that his father had formed the Virginia plan by 1836 and shared it with some associates. See testimony of John Brown, Jr. in Gerrit Smith vs. the Tribune Company of Chicago (Sandusky, OH, 19 July 1867) in Mr. & Mrs. John Brown, Jr. folder, Box 6, OGV.

11. David W. Bride to David H. Strother, 27 Dec. 1869, No. 496.113, GLC. Emphasis in italics is mine.

12. Boyd B. Stutler, “John Brown and the Oberlin Lands,” West Virginia History (April 1951), 183–99.

13. Brown’s words to the reporter relayed in “The Virginia Insurrection. Old Brown’s Doings,” NYTr, 20 Oct., 6.

14. “The Contemplated Field of John Brown’s Operations,” Southern Argus [Norfolk, VA] 28 Dec., relayed under same title in the Memphis Daily Appeal, 10 Jan. 1860, 3. It was also reprinted under the same title in NYH, 30 Dec., 1; “GATH . . . Reminiscence of Old John Brown of Harper’s Ferry,” Cincinnati Enquirer, 2 May 1883, in John Brown clipping file, NYHS.

15. “The Contemplated Field of John Brown’s Operations.”

16. “John Brown’s Raid. Recollections of Prosecuting Attorney Andrew Hunter,” Times Democrat [New Orleans, LA], 5 Sept. 1887, 6.

17. Richard Hinton, “John Brown and His Men,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Magazine (Jun. 1889), 699.

18. “Data of John Brown Found,” Washington Post, 6 Oct. 1919, 3; Boyd B. Stutler to Max Gard, 14 Oct. 1953, RP04-0029, BBS; “One of Brown’s Map Men,” NYTr, 12 Dec., 6.

19. See testimony of Andrew Hunter, 13 Jan. 1860, in SCHF, 63-64.

20. “Arrest of One of the Harper’s Ferry Conspirators in Tennessee. Dr. Wm. R. Palmer Tried and Committed to Jail—Curious Disclosures. [From the Memphis Enquirer, Nov. 10.],” NYH, 16 Nov., 5; “The Arrest of Dr. Wm. R. Palmer,” NYTr, 18 Nov., 3 “Startling Disclosure!” Fayetteville [TN] Observer 17 Nov., 2, and “Proposed Negro Insurrection in Shelby County; Preliminary Examination of a Follower of Brown,” 24 Nov., 1; “Dr. W. R. Palmer,” Nashville Patriot, 6 Jan. 1860, 2.

21. Avalanche editorial reported in “Dr. W. R. Palmer,” Nashville Patriot, 6 Jan. 1860; “The Case of Palmer,” NYTr, 17 Nov., 4.

22. For example, see “Mad Brown’s Insurrection,” NYTr, 20 Oct., 6.

23. The materials allegedly recovered consisted of a letter from the wife of the messenger (the latter supposedly having dropped them on the train), an unopened letter from an abolitionist spy named Thatcher to be hand-delivered to John Brown, and the messenger’s own memorandum of travel details and expenses. All three of these documents held information that was consistent not only with the chronology of the raid but also with names, places, and terminology that seem reliable points of reference. The materials are transcribed in a number of newspapers, especially “Arrest of One of the Harper’s Ferry Conspirators in Tennessee. Dr. Wm. R. Palmer Tried and Committed to Jail—Curious Disclosures,” NYH, 16 Nov., 5; “The Arrest of Dr. Wm. R. Palmer,” NYTr, 18 Nov., 3; the Memphis Avalanche of 10 Nov. reprinted in “Proposed Negro Insurrection in Shelby County. Preliminary Examination of a Follower of Brown,” Fayetteville Observer [TN], 24 Nov., 1.

24. Relayed to the Argus from “The Palmer Case-Failure of the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” Athens [TN] Post, 18 Nov., 2.

25. The editor of the Memphis Bulletin claimed that “W. R. Palmer” was a name that turned up in the publication of the “miscellaneous contents of ‘old Brown’s’ carpet-bag.” Obviously, this would reinforce the claim that Palmer was more than a mere victim of a cunning personal opponent. But thus far, I can neither verify nor disprove this claim. See the Athens [TN] Post, 18 Nov., 1.

26. In 1905, the editor of The American Historical Review wanted to publish these mysterious documents involving Brown and Palmer, and sought the opinion of historian Albert B. Hart. In turn, Hart asked Brown’s old associate and biographer, Franklin B. Sanborn, to examine the documents. Sanborn thought them likely a hoax perpetrated by an antislavery Northerner. Yet clearly he was not certain. Even though he had never heard the names of the alleged associates mentioned in these documents, he still hoped the materials would be published, and wanted Hart to consult Thomas W. Higginson, another of Brown’s surviving associates. Sanborn also suggested that positive evidence of Palmer’s divorce might lend greater authenticity to the documents. Unfortunately, Hart took Sanborn’s doubts as the final word, concluding that the letters were untrustworthy and advising the editor not to publish them. Had Sanborn known more details about the Palmer case, and that Tennessee newspaper reportage confirmed many aspects of his story, he might not have been inclined to question the authenticity of the documents. See F. B. Sanborn to Albert Hart, 2 May 1905, and Albert B. Hart to Andrew C. McLaughlin, 5 May 1905, both in HAW.

27. “Startling Disclosure!” Fayetteville Observer, 17 Nov., 2.

28. In the 1830s, Brown had considered establishing a school for blacks in Pennsylvania, and in the late 1840s, he transposed this idea to a Canadian context, although neither plan ever materialized. John Brown to Frederick Brown, 21 Nov. 1834, in LLJB, 40; John Brown to John Brown Jr., 24 Mar. 1846, in LLJB, 62; and John Brown to John Brown Jr., 15 May 1847, Lee Kohns Memorial Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection, NYPL.

29. For a brief overview of the Forbes debacle, see Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., John Brown—the Cost of Freedom (New York: International Publishers, 2007), 58–59.

30. The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner, Vol. 1, edited by Charles Shively (Weston, MA: M&S Press, 1971), 37–38; it is incorrect for one writer to say that Brown “tried to implement Spooner’s plan in his abortive raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.” See The Lysander Spooner Reader, edited by Sheldon Richman (Baltimore: Laissez Faire Books, 2012), 10; also see the fine website LysanderSpooner.org, by Professor Randy E. Barnett, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory, at Georgetown University Law Center.

31. This document was composed by John Brown in early 1858 and published in Canada after Brown’s secret convention in Chatham, Ontario, in May of that year. It was among the documents found at Brown’s Maryland farm following the raid and was published almost immediately by both the NYTr (20 Oct., 4) and NYH (20 Oct., 3), and afterward in SCHF. It has been republished over the years, but the best version, with introductory essay, is Boyd B. Stutler, Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States (Weston, MA: M & S Press, 1969). See also DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You,” 244–46.

32. “Plan of Operations . . . Conversations with Capt. Brown,” BACA, 24 Oct., 1.

33. Memphis Avalanche, 10 Nov., relayed in “Proposed Negro Insurrection in Shelby County; Preliminary Examination of a Follower of Brown,” Fayetteville Observer, 24 Nov., 1.

34. In November, thirty enslaved people and a white man named Williams were arrested in Fayette County, and it was believed they were involved in a plot that extended to neighboring states and counties. Other plots involving enslaved people and whites took place in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri. Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1943, 1987), 347; “Arrest of One of the Harper’s Ferry Conspirators in Tennessee,” NYH, 16 Nov., 5.

35. “The Contemplated Field of John Brown’s Operations,” Memphis Daily Appeal, 10 Jan. 1860, 3; “Great Agitation in Kentucky—a Stampede of Negroes in Missouri,” BACA, 18 Nov., 1; It is not clear whether Copeland was referring to Mammoth Cave or to another planned uprising, alleged by reports in the area of Cynthiana, northeast of Lexington. See “Copeland’s Confession,” NYH, 5 Nov., 1.

36. “The Contemplated Field of John Brown’s Operations.”

37. Charles P. Tidd did have a brother, W[illiam?] P. Tidd from Ohio. After the raid, the latter heard that Virginia’s governor had placed a $500 reward on his head. He wrote to Wise, inquiring as to what had become of his brother, even asking for his inquiry to be forwarded to captured raider John Cook. Was Wise mistaken in his information, or was the latter Tidd actually a spy who was endeavoring to cover his tracks by pretending ignorance? Or was this episode just a skewed version of another incident that supposedly involved the arrest of an alleged brother of the two Coppocs, the Quaker brothers numbered among Brown’s men? According to the New-York Daily Tribune, on the morning of November 30, the alleged Coppoc was arrested “in disguise” only about thirty miles from the Charlestown jail. Yet this account seems mistaken, and may yet relate to an entirely different incident, namely the capture of raider Albert Hazlett, who was apprehended under the pseudonym of Harrison. Like the alleged “Coppoc” mentioned in the Tribune, Brown and his men pretended not to know Hazlett in the hopes he would be set free. In the Tribune account, “Coppoc” was unfortunately identified by raider John Cook, and this may very well correspond to the case of Albert Hazlett, who finally went to the gallows. See “An Epoch in History,” The Richmond Dispatch, 22 Dec. 1901, 20; “From Charlestown,” NYTr 1 Dec., 5; “Mistaken in Their Man,” NYTr, 6 Dec., 6.

38. In the 1970s, historian Benjamin Quarles told grassroots researcher Jean Libby that “not every primary source about John Brown has been found, as often as he has been studied, and this was especially true of material involving black men and women contemporary with the radical abolitionist.” In her own right, Libby went on to uncover a number of such sources that narrators of the Harper’s Ferry raid have continued to disregard. See From Slavery to Salvation: The Autobiography of Rev. Thomas W. Henry of the A.M.E. Church, edited by Jean Libby (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), xvii.

39. Ibid. For example, Brown’s unsuccessful attempt to reach the Rev. Thomas W. Henry, a black clergyman living in Baltimore at the time of the raid who was on his “reliable” list.

40. “Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry—Great Excitement,” Huntingdon Globe [PA], 26 Oct., 2.

41. See Gath [George A. Townsend], “Reminiscences of Old John Brown, of Harper’s Ferry,” Cincinnati Enquirer, 2 May 1883, in NYHS; [Alban S. Payne], “John Brown and His Companions,” reprinted in The Spirit of the Times [NY], 14 Jan. 1860, 584. Payne signed these pieces as “Nicholas Spicer.”

42. DeCaro, John Brown—the Cost of Freedom, 351.

43. SDOH, 323.

44. See John Brown’s “Words of Advice” (1851) in DeCaro, John Brown—the Cost of Freedom, 135; “The Execution of John Brown,” NYIN, 10 Dec., 60.

CHAPTER 2

1. Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass; Written by Himself (London: Christian Age Office, 1882), 279. One should remember that Frederick Douglass alone survived to provide a record of his involvement with Brown, particularly their differences over the Harper’s Ferry invasion and their secret meeting at Chambersburg prior to the raid. While Douglass was fundamentally honest, this does not mitigate that he engaged in common autobiographical techniques, including conflation and stylization. See my discussion in John Brown—the Cost of Freedom (New York: International Publishers, 2007), 64–69.

2. Transcript of “John Brown’s Raid; Related by a Kentucky Gunsmith Who was Master Armorer at Harper’s Ferry,” The Courier-Journal [Lexington, KY], no date, in the Gunther Collection folder, Box 8; and Katherine Mayo’s interview with “Mrs. McFaden,” 21 Mar. 1908, in HF Raid folder, Box 9, both in OGV; David S. Reynolds, John Brown Abolitionist (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2005), 105.

3. “Letter from Old Brown’s Lieutenant. From The Kansas State Record,” NYTr, 27 Dec., 7.

4. SDOH, 310-11.

5. “Harper’s Ferry. Great Excitement!” VFP, 20 Oct., 2. Another report from a Virginia source stated that Shepherd had been shot “for refusing to join in the movement.” See “Domestic Intelligence; Early Casualties,” HW, 29 Oct., 694.

6. Another report states that Brown’s men initially offered Shepherd a weapon and asked him to stand guard. Shepherd not only refused but “expostulated with them,” after which he was warned to join them. “Seeing an opportunity, he attempted to escape, and was shot dead.” See “The Late Invasion at Harper’s Ferry.—[From Our Own Artist Correspondent],” HW, 5 Nov., 712.

7. Testimony of train conductor Phelps, 27 Oct. 1859, LTE, 69.

8. Oswald G. Villard, “How Patrick Higgins Met John Brown,” HW, 26 Jun. 1909, 7–8; “Old Railroader Who Was an Eye-Witness of the John Brown Raid Tells His Story,” anonymous, undated newspaper clipping from the Housman Scrapbook, BBS microfilm.

9. Although Thompson’s remark was done in a lighthearted manner, he was quite serious. William Thompson was one of two brothers who came with Brown from North Elba, New York. The Thompson family was twice intermarried with the Browns, and Williams was a passionate abolitionist in his own right. According to Annie Brown, William had comedic gifts and could do impersonations that greatly amused people, but he could also be quite sober and sensible when needed. See interview with Annie Brown Adams, Petrolia, CA, 15 Feb. 1893, in William Thompson folder, Box 17, OGV.

10. Reynolds, John Brown Abolitionist, 120.

11. Villard, “How Patrick Higgins Met John Brown,” 8. Villard transcribed Higgins’s speech in a manner intended to preserve his thick Irish accent, although his rendering tends toward caricature for effect. I have chosen to transcribe Higgins’s speech without using the artificial Irish accent applied by Villard. However, where Higgins himself put the word nagur in the mouth of William Thompson, I am more than certain that the latter had actually used Negro.

12. A prominent slaveholder in the area later referred to Shepherd as “very trustworthy.” Besides being a well-liked former slave and client of his former master, Shepherd had received special permission from the county to remain in Virginia—making him doubly exceptional, because emancipated blacks were not typically permitted to remain in the state. See the testimonies of John Starry and Lewis Washington, respectively, in SCHF, Sec. 2, 24 and 39.

13. VILL, 639n14.

14. “A Matter for Reflection,” VFP, 27 Oct., 2.

15. Wise’s speech, 5 Dec., in Doc. No. I. Governor’s Message and Reports of the Public Officers of the State, of the Boards of Directors, and of the Visitors, Superintendents, and other Agents of Public Institutions or Interests of Virginia (Richmond, VA: William F. Ritchie, 1859), in West Virginia Archives and History; Speech of Washington Hunt quoted in “E Pluribus Unum; Immense Conservative Demonstration at the Academy of Music,” NYH, 20 Dec., 4.

16. VFHF, 30; Quarles notes that Shepherd had worked at the railroad station for twelve years and was “very well off,” having assets of about $15,000—no small sum in 1859. Benjamin Quarles, Allies for Freedom & Blacks on John Brown (New York: Da Capo Press, 2001), 93.

17. Mary Johnson, “An ‘Ever Present Bone of Contention’: The Heyward Shepherd Memorial,” West Virginia History Vol. 56 (1997), 1–26.

18. My observation is in part reminiscent of what Louis Lomax observed in the Civil Rights era: “The Negro cause has always been laced with white people.” Louis E. Lomax, The Negro Revolt (New York: Signet Books, 1964), 194. It is interesting, however, that some black scholars themselves have suggested that Lomax, a prominent media spokesmen for the Civil Rights movement, may have collaborated with government surveillance.

19. Regarding Shepherd, Higgins told the raiders, “I would to be as wealthy as he is.” Villard, “How Patrick Higgins Met John Brown,” 8. A local history describes Shepherd as having “accumulated a good deal of money” as well as property in the town of Winchester. AHF, 31; VFHF, 41.

20. For instance, Otto Scott, a particularly malignant neo-Confederate enemy of Brown, wrote, “The first casualty of John Brown’s blow for black freedom was a free black man,” Otto Scott, The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement (Murphys, CA: Uncommon Books, 1979), 288. Quite on the opposite pole, the admiring playwright and biographer, Barrie Stavis, wrote, “It is a tragic and ironic comment that the first casualty was a free negro.” Barrie Stavis, John Brown: The Sword and the Word (New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1970), 129.

21. VFHF, 35.

22. Interestingly, W. E. B. Du Bois, Brown’s famous black biographer, passingly refers to the fatal shooting of “the local colored porter” without making further comment. See W. E. B. Du Bois, John Brown (1909; rpt. New York: International Publishers, 1962), 313. Benjamin Quarles discusses the incident as a supreme irony, but still as an accident of the darkness. Quarles, Allies for Freedom, 94.

23. “The Trial of John Brown. Sixth Day,” NYTr, 1 Nov., 5.

24. VFHF, 29–31; Boyd B. Stutler, “Old John Brown’s Fort,” The West Virginia Review (Jun. 1926): 336–38.

25. VFHF, 31.

26. VFHF, 34; “The Insurrection in Virginia . . . The Latest Despatches; Special Report to the New York Herald,” NYH, 24 Oct., 1.

27. “To My American Readers and Friends,” Douglass’ Monthly (Nov. 1859), in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 2, edited by Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 464. Douglass does not name Anderson but refers to him as an “eyewitness, and a prominent actor in the transactions at Harper’s Ferry, now at my side.” However, Douglass mentions meeting Anderson in The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 326; “Gov. Wise’s Speech on the Insurrection,” NYTr, 24 Oct., 5.

28. See James L. Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989), 70–71.

29. PLJB, 295; “News, Rumors, and Gossip from Harper’s Ferry,” NYH, 1 Nov., 3.

30. Hinton says that John W. was a cousin of W. W. B., although he mistakes the name of the latter’s paper. See JBHM, 337 and 395. John W. was not a resident of Charlestown, and possibly resided in Washington, D.C. It appears that his father, John S. Gallaher, cofounded the Virginia Free Press in Charlestown with his brother, Horatio N. Gallaher, but left it to pursue a political and journalistic career in Washington. The latter Gallaher took over operation of the Free Press, assisted by his son, W. W. B. Gallaher. See excerpt from History of Berkeley County, Virginia (1928), on Rootsweb.Ancestry.com, http://goo.gl/D13X7q.

31. “The Outbreak at Harper’s Ferry—Complicity of Leading Abolitionists and Black Republicans,” NYH, 20 Oct., 6.

32. “The Abolition Invasion of Harper’s Ferry—a Lesson from the Slaves,” NYH, 27 Oct., 6.

33. DHSL, 2.

34. D. H. Strother, “The Late Invasion at Harper’s Ferry—[From Our Own Artist Correspondent],” HW, 5 Nov., 712.

35. See HW, 19 and 26 Nov. 26 issues.

36. Jean Libby has pointed out that Strother’s illustrations of blacks prior to the Harper’s Ferry raid—like the image of loyal slaves armed to defend their master—were “detailed and uncaricatured.” Jean Libby, “The Slaves Who Fought with John Brown,” unpublished paper, 15 Sept. 1988, 11.

37. Ibid., 45.

38. Jean Libby’s lecture, John Brown Farm, Lake Placid, NY, 21 Oct. 2000.

39. Hannah Geffert, “They Heard His Call: The Local Black Community’s Involvement in the Raid on Harper’s Ferry,” in Terrible Swift Sword, edited by Peggy A. Russo and Paul Finkelman (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 26; John H. Kagi to Mary Kagi Mayhew, 24 Sept. transcript in Edward Bartling, John Henry Kagi (1938, 1940), 42; Interview with Owen Brown published in L. B. Sperry, “At Las Cacitas; Recollections of a Visit to the Late Owen Brown, in California,” Chicago Inter-Ocean (Feb. 1889), Connelley Scrapbook Vol. 3, BBS microfilm.

40. The majority of so-called free blacks were not actually emancipated, as Hayward Shepherd and a few other exceptions who actually were granted permission to remain in Virginia despite the state’s prohibition of free black residency were (see the earlier discussion; note 12). Blacks commonly classified as “free” were still legally enslaved, but were “counted as free.” This circumvented the law and allowed blacks to remain in Virginia, probably under some form of patronage or obligation to their masters. See Geffert, “They Heard His Call,” 32.

41. Geffert, “They Heard His Call,” 24 and 25; Thomas W. Higginson’s notes from conversation with Charles P. Tidd, 10 Feb. 1860 (Letter #167, Vol. 2), Box 9, Higginson Collection Folder, OGV.

42. Later in life, Anne Brown Adams told Katherine Mayo that her father was greatly disappointed in the conduct of the freedmen. “Their only real desire throughout seemed to be to save their skins—F. Douglass and all.” Annie Brown Adams interview, 2–3 Oct. 1908, Anne Brown Adams folder, Box 1, OGV. Anne’s remarks could be cranky and have to be carefully weighed. However, although a teenager at the time of the raid, she was close to her father and quite observant. She had ample opportunity to hear Brown’s private reflections upon free black support in the months leading up to the raid, and I believe her criticism of Douglass must be considered as having some substance.

43. See John Brown—the Cost of Freedom, 84–89. Also see Robert M. Copeland, “My Man Antony,” Putnam’s Magazine (Apr. 1869), 444–55.

44. VFHF, 59–61.

45. Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 324.

46. See my extended discussion about Douglass’s autobiographical stylization of his 1859 meeting with Brown in John Brown—the Cost of Freedom, 64–69.

47. In retrospect, Anne Brown Adams contended that she heard Douglass make a verbal commitment to do so in the 1840s. She also claimed that when she reminded her father of Douglass’s promise in 1859, he affirmed her recollection. Henry Thompson, Brown’s trusted son-in-law, was far more direct, stating quite contemptuously, “Fred Douglass backed out.” Interview with Henry Thompson, 22 Aug. and 1 Sept. 1908, Henry Thompson folder, Box 17, and interview with Anne Brown Adams, 2–3 Oct. 1908, Box 7, Frederick Douglass folder, both in OGV.

48. F. B. Sanborn speculated that Douglass knew from the summer of 1859, “if not sooner.” Franklin B. Sanborn, Recollections of Seventy Years, Vol. 1 (Boston: Richard D. Badger/Gorham Press, 1909), 153.

49. John Brown to John Henrie Kagi, 16 April, in DHSP.

50. The Autobiography of Dr. William Henry Johnson (Albany, NY: The Argus Company, 1900), 194–96.

51. Shortly after Brown’s defeat, brief notice appeared in the New York Herald, the New-York Daily Tribune, and other newspapers stating simply that “arms recently furnished to a colored volunteer company” in Philadelphia had “been taken away by the Adjutant General, in consequence of the Harper’s Ferry affair.” See “Arms Taken from a Colored Company,” NYTr, 22 Oct., 5, and NYH, 23 Oct., 1.

52. “John Brown’s Invasion. Correspondence of the Conspirators,” NYTr, 26 Oct., 6. Also see Sanborn, Recollections of Seventy Years, 154.

53. Following the Harper’s Ferry invasion, a journalist in Chambersburg investigated Brown and Douglass’s presence in town prior to the raid. He learned that Douglass had told local “colored” residents that he would return in October 1859. I assume that this intended follow-up meeting was moved to Philadelphia in light of Brown’s efforts to do enlistment in that city. See Justice, “The Footprints of the Tragedy” (reprinted from the Philadelphia [?] Press), BACA, 24 Oct., 1.

54. Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 325; The Autobiography of Dr. William Henry Johnson, 194–96; “John Brown. Fred Douglass Eulogizes the Famous Martyr to Freedom. An Historic Speaker on a Revolutionary Subject. Interesting Lecture Before a Large Audience in Music Hall,” uncited [Boston] newspaper, 21 May 1886, Frederick Douglass file, Box 7, OGV.

55. Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 325.

56. Sanborn, Recollections of Seventy Years, 176.

57. “GATH . . . Reminiscence of Old John Brown of Harper’s Ferry,” Cincinnati Enquirer, 2 May 1883, in John Brown clipping file, NYHS. I assume Brown meant Lewis Henry Douglass, who was the eldest son, being about twenty-nine years old in 1859.

CHAPTER 3

1. Alfred Barbour to John Barbour, 24 Oct., 1. Sold on the Museum Quality Americana website. Accessed 12 Sept. 2013, from http://goo.gl/3BsbVz.

2. The wagon described in “The Late Rebellion,” BDE, 19 Oct., 1, John Zittle, A Correct History of the John Brown Invasion at Harper’s Ferry, West Va., Oct. 17, 1859 (Hagerstown, MD: Mail Publishing Co., 1905), 79–80; “Captain Brown’s Statement to Gov. Wise,” BACA, 20 Oct., 1; F. B. Sanborn to T. W. Higginson, 8 Mar. 1858, Higginson Collection folder, Box 9, OGV. One source, perhaps legendary, says that Brown instructed his men to listen for daily orders by these nine-inch boatswain whistles and that Brown may have tried out the whistle around Harper’s Ferry prior to the raid because some townsmen were said to have heard the “piping.” See “Piped His Men,” Hartford [KY] Republican, 15 Apr. 1904, 2.

3. The barrels of gunpowder packets taken from Brown were later used by federal troops against the rebel army in the early part of the Civil War. See “How John Brown Saved the Capital,” Huntingdon [PA] Globe, 2 Jan. 1862, 2.

4. VFHF, 61.

5. Transcription of reminiscence of Anne Brown [Chicago Historical Society Collection], Nov. 1866, in Box 2, John Brown Family Histories & Biographies, Annie Brown Letters folder, GEE; VFHF, 38. Also see Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War (New York: Henry Holt, 2011), 237.

6. “The Harper’s Ferry Insurrection. Trial of Captain Brown,” BACA, 28 Oct., 1; VFHF, 62.

7. VFHF, 38; Benjamin Mills, “The John Brown Raid,” Courier-Journal [Louisville, KY], August 1881, SC02-0095, BBS; “The Harper’s Ferry Outbreak . . . The Fourth Day’s Proceedings,” NYH, 31 Oct., 1.

8. “Trial of John Brown. Third Day,” NYTr, 29 Oct., 7; “Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry,” BACA, 19 Oct., 1.

9. “The Virginia Insurrection. Old Brown’s Doings,” NYTr, 20 Oct., 6.

10. “John Brown’s Invasion. Correspondence of the N.Y. Tribune. About Brown,” NYTr, 9 Nov., 5. Both Osborne Anderson and Antony Hunter, an enslaved man from nearby Shepherdstown, later affirmed Brown’s assurance that hundreds of blacks were waiting to join him had he not gotten bogged down in Harper’s Ferry. See DeCaro, John Brown—the Cost of Freedom, 77–89.

11. “The Virginia Insurrection,” 6; “John Brown’s Invasion. Correspondence of the N.Y. Tribune. About Brown.”

12. “The Virginia Insurrection,” NYTr, 20 Oct., 4; “The Insurrection in Virginia . . . the Latest Despatches,” NYH, 24 Oct., 1; Testimony of [A. J.] Phelps, in LTE, 69; JBT, 49–50. Simpson Donavin later recalled that conductor Phelps was initially belligerent toward Brown. See SDOH, 308. Donavin’s later reminiscences may have minor variation or error in detail (e.g., he says Russell entered the engine house with his sword pointed downward, although Russell actually had a cane, not a sword, by reliable accounts), but his memory and firsthand witness is substantive.

13. VFHF, 36; Interview with Salmon Brown, 11–13 Oct. 1908, in Salmon Brown folder, Box 6, and interview with J. B. Noxon, 3 Jan. 1909, in JB in Cleveland, March 1859 folder, Box 4, both in OGV.

14. John Brown to John Brown, Jr., 8 April 1858, MS02-0019, BBS; Lillie B. Chace Wyman, “Harriet Tubman,” The New England Magazine (Mar. 1896), 116.

15. The respected author Tony Horwitz is unnecessarily cynical on the point of Brown’s sympathy for his hostages, and his criticisms are not very weighty. For instance, he asks why Brown did not have an “advance plan” to deal with such “challenges” and then questions Brown’s real concern for his captives because he did not surrender rather than endanger them further. Of course, Brown had no advance plan because his strategy, if only followed, would not have entailed these “challenges.” Second, just because Brown took painstaking efforts to protect his captives does not change the fact that they were still captives, and that he intended to use them both to secure the safe passage of his men, as well as to exchange them for enslaved people. Finally, the consistency of Brown’s claims of concern for his captives is obvious in eyewitness testimony, and in his own admissions. See Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 237.

16. Joseph Crane to David H. Strother, 25 Oct., MS12-0089, BBS; AHF, 53; JBHM, 312.

17. Based on the evidence in Donavin’s description, clearly this was one of the raiders, not a local black man. As such, this was Lewis Leary, who would be considered a “mulatto” and was twenty-five years old at his death. The other “mulatto” raider, thirty-four-year-old Dangerfield Newby, was shot dead at Harper’s Ferry. See Thomas Featherstonaugh, “The Final Burial of the Followers of John Brown,” New England Magazine, Apr. 1901, 133. John Starry testified that Leary was a “yellow fellow.” SCHF, 27.

18. “The Late Rebellion,” BDE, 19 Oct., 1; JBHM, 317; Charles Galbreath, “Colonel Simpson K. Donavan [sic],” Ohio History Vol. 30 (Jul. 1921), 347.

19. VFHF, 41; SDOH, 314.

20. Eight of the wounded Martinsburg fighters, including a county sheriff, are listed in “Execution of Brown To-Day,” NYH, 2 Dec., 1; “Domestic Intelligence. The Arrival of Troops and First Fighting,” HW, 29 Oct., 694–95; “John Brown’s Raid,” Washington Post, 1 July 1883, 3.

21. “The Engine Room at Harper’s Ferry,” NYTr, 11 Nov., 5; also see the retrospective description of the bloody wall by Murat Halstead, who covered this episode for The Cincinnati Commercial, in “The Tragedy of John Brown,” The Independent [New York], 1 Dec. 1898, 1545. This article was reprinted in Ohio History xxx (July 1921), 290–99.

22. In his magisterial biography, Robert McGlone makes a fair effort to explain the closing moments of the engine house episode, although I differ with him on key points, especially his baseless denial that Brown received bayonet wounds. Still, he appreciates the importance of acknowledging that surrender was sought and that Brown’s stance in the engine house was not “suicidal.” See Robert E. McGlone, John Brown’s War against Slavery (New York: Cambridge, 2009), 299–304.

23. “[T]he men were instructed how to distinguish our citizens from the insurgents; to attack with the bayonet, and not to injure the blacks detained in custody unless they resisted.” Col. Robert E. Lee to Adjutant General, Harper’s Ferry, Va., 19 Oct., in SCHF, 41.

24. Years later, Green claimed Brown was kneeling when he attacked him, but other hostage eyewitness accounts recall Brown standing. See the account of Benjamin Mills, “The John Brown Raid,” Courier-Journal [Louisville, KY], August 1881, SC02-0095, BBS; Jesse Graham, in Hinton, John Brown and His Men, 307; John E. Daingerfield, “John Brown at Harper’s Ferry,” The Century (June 1885), 265–67. The latter does not say that Brown was standing, but the description of Green’s attack on Brown makes it unlikely he was kneeling as Green claimed in retrospect.

25. David H. Strother, “The Late Invasion at Harper’s Ferry.—[From Our Own Artist Correspondent],” HW, 5 Nov., 714; Reminiscence of Jesse Graham in Robert Shackleton, Jr., “What Support Did John Brown Rely Upon? The Famous Raid and its Localities,” Magazine of American History (Apr. 1893), 356; “The Harper’s Ferry Outbreak. Verbatim Report of the Questioning of Old Brown by Senator Mason, Congressman Vallandigham, and Others,” NYH, 21 Oct., 1.

26. SDOH, 320; “How John Brown Saved the Capital.”

27. John Brown to Mary Brown, 31 Oct., MS02-0044, BBS; “Harper’s Ferry Outbreak; Special Despatch To The Herald,” NYH, 21 Oct., 1.

28. “Brown has three sword or bayonet stabs in his body, and one sabre cut over his head.” “The Harper’s Ferry Insurrection. Trial of the Insurrectionists,” BACA, 26 Oct., 1; “He fell under two bayonet wounds—one in the groin, and one in the breast—and four sabre-cuts on the head. During the fight he was supposed to be dead, or, doubtless, he would have been shot.” “The Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry,” NYT, 19 Oct., 8; “Brown himself was wounded by sabre cuts by Lieutenant Stuart [sic], and, perhaps, by the bayonets of the marines.” “Execution of Brown To-Day,” NYH, 2 Dec., 1. Another contemporary wrote that when “Captain Brown was knocked down, a bayonet pierced his kidney.” Willard C. Gompf, “John Brown’s Raid by One Who Saw It,” NYT, 13 Oct. 1929, 12xx. In a number of letters Brown either made reference to the “bayonet stabs” in his body or to the specific wounds. See Brown to Reuben Chapman, 21 Oct. 1859, in Mason Arnold Green, Springfield 1636–1886 (Springfield, MA: Nichols and Company, 1888), 514; Brown to Judge Thomas Russell, 21 Oct., in #299, Box 2, Folder 4, KSHS; Brown to Mary Brown, 8 Nov., MS020047, BBS.

29. The oral history referring to Brown’s words to blacks inside the Harper’s Ferry engine house is conveyed by the landmark research of Jean Libby, who did extensive work on the black involvement in the Harper’s Ferry raid, including extensive field research in Jefferson County, West Virginia. The oral history of Brown in the engine house was relayed by an unidentified member of the Wainwright Baptist Church, Charles Town, West Virginia, on 2 Mar. 1977. See Jean Libby, “The Harpers Ferry Slave Insurrection—1859,” unpublished ms. (1983), 36n58; also see reminiscence of Harper’s Ferry hostage, Benjamin Mills, in the Louisville [KY] Courier Journal (Aug. 1881), Sanborn Scrapbook, SC02-0095 A-F, BBS.

30. After his defeat Brown was brought into the armory office where initially he was held prisoner. He was escorted by Major William Russell, who had burst into the engine house following Lieutenant Green, with no weapon except a cane. “I could have killed you,” Brown told him, “but I spared you.” The Major bowed and thanked him. See “The Attack on the Armory—Old Brown,” NYTr, 20 Oct., 6.

31. Bernard C. Nalty, “The United States Marines at Harper’s Ferry, Marine Corps Historical Reference Series No. 10” (Washington, DC: Dept. of the Navy, 1962), 6; “The Harper’s Ferry Outbreak. Verbatim Report of the Questioning of Old Brown by Senator Mason, Congressman Vallandigham, and Others”; “Harper’s Ferry Outbreak; Special Despatch to the Herald,” NYH, 21 Oct., 1.

32. See hostage testimonies of Armistead Ball in Zittle, A Correct History of the John Brown Invasion, 62; Jesse Graham, in JBHM, 306. Two other raiders in the engine house, Shields Green and Edwin Coppoc, managed to get out of harm’s way by disarming themselves in advance and staying close to the hostages. Coppoc later claimed that his gun had misfired, but more likely he had dropped his gun and moved toward the hostages, or else he would also have been killed. Green, a black man, placed himself among the enslaved men. While he could not elude arrest, at least he escaped being similarly killed.

33. Clearly, Brown was beaten after he fell unconscious—a fact that was revealed during examination by defense attorney George Sennott in 1859. After admitting under cross-examination that he had beaten Brown on the face and head after he was down, Green was asked how many times he had done so. Embarrassed, he claimed that Brown was “trying to defend himself with his gun,” which clearly was not true. At this point, the state’s prosecuting attorney, Andrew Hunter, intervened and Sennott desisted. See “Correspondence of The N.Y. Tribune; Other Portraits (relayed from the Cincinnati Commercial, 15 Nov.),” NYTr, 18 Nov., 5. Also see “The Engine Room at Harper’s Ferry,” NYTr, 11 Nov., 5; and Franklin B. Sanborn, “Notes and Comments II,” North American Review (Jan. 1886), 115–16.

34. Israel Green, “The Capture of John Brown,” North American Review (Dec. 1885), 567.

35. J. E. B. Stuart to Elizabeth Stuart, 31 Jan. 1860, MS10-0039 [transcript], BBS.

36. J. A. Imesdell to Oswald G. Villard, 15 Oct. 1907 and A. W. Bell to Oswald G. Villard, 21 Nov. 1907, in Lieut. Israel Green folder, Box 8, OGV.

37. “Sketch of the Whole Affair; Connected Account of its Origin and Progress, and of the Principal Actors Therein,” NYH, 19 Oct., 3.

38. Henry David Thoreau personally recalled John Brown saying, “I would rather have the small-pox, yellow fever and cholera altogether in my camp, than men without principle.” See Sanborn, Recollections of Seventy Years, Vol. 1, 112.

39. One historian thus refers to Lincoln’s “non-recognition policy” toward the Confederacy. See William C. Harris, “The Hampton Roads Peace Conference: A Final Test of Lincoln’s Presidential Leadership,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 21, no. 1 (Winter 2000). Retrieved on 4 Feb. 2013 from http://goo.gl/IPtSFF.

40. George B. Delamater, “John Brown of Civil War Fame Was A Pioneer Resident of Titusville Section of Crawford,” Enterprise-News [Cambridge Springs, PA], a reprint of the 1888 edition, 12 Nov. 1931, 3. “My father had often spoken of the possibility of failure and the certainty of his being hanged in such an event, and had endeavored to prepare our minds for it, but I did not think failure possible.” Interview with Ruth Brown Thompson in Lou V. Chapin, “The Last Days of Old John Brown,” Overland Monthly (April 1899), 326. At one point Brown stayed in Boston with Judge Thomas Russell and family, and after holding their baby girl, said to the child in the presence of her parents, “When you are a young lady, and I am hanged, you can say that you stood on Old Brown’s hand.” Transcript of speech by [Nellie] Russell at the Bussey Institute, Jamaica Plains, 11 Jan. 1908, in Judge Thomas Russell folder, Box 15, OGV.

CHAPTER 4

1. “Negro Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry,” BDE, 18 Oct., 1; “The Late Rebellion,” BDE, 19 Oct., 1.

2. Steven Lubet, “Execution in Virginia, 1859: The Trials of Green and Copeland,” North Carolina Law Review 101 (2013), 92.

3. “Colonel S. K. Donavan,” Ohio Archaeology & History Vol. 30 (1921), 347; SDOH, 326. As to Donavin’s reputation, he was later remembered as a man of “deep convictions, . . . conscientious in whatever he undertook . . . , forceful and uncompromising. He cared more for the truth than he did for the material rewards of public service.” Regretfully, Donavin never compiled and published his expansive writings and lectures. See William Gibson, Letters To My Son Volume I (Cleveland, OH: The Caxton Company, 1917), 185.

4. Donavin’s description can be found relayed in “The Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry,” NYTr, 21 Oct., 5, and in “Personal Appearance of the Insurgents,” HW, 29 Oct., 695.

5. “The Late Rebellion”; SDOH, 313; JBHM, 546; Typewritten transcript of David H. Strother’s diary, BBS microfilm; AHF, 31; VFHF, 34; Letter of Peter Crow, 20 Oct., in “Narrative of an Excited Eye-Witness,” NYT, 28 Oct., 1; “The Trial of the Conspirators,” HW, 12 Nov., 729; “Extraordinary Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry,” HW, 29 Oct., 695.

6. SDOH, 320; “The Harper’s Ferry Outbreak. Verbatim Report of the Questioning of Old Brown by Senator Mason, Congressman Vallandigham, and Others,” NYH, 21 Oct., 1; “The Late Rebellion.” Donavin has Brown saying he was sixty-three years old. Of course, this may have been an error of the reporter or the publisher.

7. “The Trial of the Conspirators,” HW, 12 Nov., 729; DHSL, 2, 6–9. The sketch described is found in HW, 5 Nov., 713, with the cutline “The Guard Room.”

8. DHSL, 1, 42, and 48; George Alfred Thompson, “An Interview with Port Crayon,” Philadelphia Daily Evening Bulletin, 9 Jul. 1868, 6; F. B. Sanborn, “Comment by a Radical Abolitionist,” Century Magazine (26 Jul. 1883), 414.

9. According to SS1860, Alexander Boteler owned fifteen people ranging from one year to fifty-five years of age.

10. Two accounts of Boteler’s meeting with Brown are preserved, the first being an interview with “GATH,” the renowned journalist, George Alfred Townsend, published as “American Art . . . Reminiscences of Old John Brown of Harper’s Ferry,” Cincinnati Enquirer, 2 May 1883, in NYHS. Perhaps the interview prompted Boteler to revisit the episode in his own article, published twice, as Alexander Boteler, “Recollections of the John Brown Raid by a Virginian Who Witnessed the Fight,” Century Magazine 26 (July 1883), 399–411; and “John Brown’s Raid,” The Washington Post, 1 Jul. 1883, 3. Boteler’s essay is quite similar to the interview given to Townsend, but the former seems a bit more contrived, with references to a lack of support for Brown’s raid, and the old man muttering that he was “disappointed” by a lack of support from blacks and whites in the area of the raid, a point not mentioned in the interview. Likewise, the impression created from both accounts is that Boteler made friendly overtures to Brown at first, such as offering to assist him in getting letters home to his family, but did so in order to manipulate the conversation.

11. See Richard F. Belisle, “Memorial Honors Only Marine Killed in John Brown Raid,” Herald-Mail [Hagerstown, MD], 24 May 2011.

12. “American Art . . . Reminiscences of Old John Brown of Harper’s Ferry”; Richard Baxter, Jesuit Juggling: Forty Popish Frauds Detected and Disclosed (rpt., New York: Craighead & Allen, 1835), viii; John Brown to Mary Brown and family, 30 Nov. 1859, 4, transcribed from the original in the DHSP. Emendations of “undiing” and “vilanies.”

13. Livingston Grahame, “Old John Brown,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 19 Dec. 1880, 18; Henry Wise to Fernando Wood, 4 Nov., in VILL, 503; DHSL, 14; “The Late Invasion at Harper’s Ferry,” HW, 5 Nov., 714; Baltimore Sun report relayed in “Gov. Wise Lecturing the Harper’s Ferryites,” NYTr, 22 Oct., 7.

14. “Our Richmond Correspondence,” NYH, 1 Nov., 10.

15. Cecil B. Eby, “The Last Hours of the John Brown Raid: The Narrative of David H. Strother,” Virginia Magazine 73 (1965), 175–76; DHS, 15–16; Richmond Enquirer report relayed in “Captain Brown’s Interview with Governor Wise,” NYTr, 21 Oct., 1; John E. P. Daingerfield, “John Brown at Harper’s Ferry,” The Century Magazine (Jun. 1885), 267; Barton H. Wise, The Life of Henry A. Wise of Virginia, 1806–1876 (New York: Macmillan Co., 1899), 13; “The Harper’s Ferry Insurrection. Trial of Captain Brown,” BACA, 28 Oct., 1.

16. Apparently some account existed in Harper’s Ferry that in conversation with Wise, Brown also foretold the destruction of the town, a prediction that would be fulfilled during the Civil War. AHF, 42.

17. DHSL, 17, 19–21; “GATH . . . Reminiscences of Old John Brown, of Harper’s Ferry.”

18. Richmond Enquirer report relayed in “Captain Brown’s Interview with Governor Wise”; “District-Attorney Ould’s Report,” NYTr, 22 Oct., 7; Transcript of testimony of John Brown, Jr. in Gerrit Smith vs. the Tribune Company of Chicago (Sandusky, OH, 19 July 1867), in Mr. & Mrs. John Brown Jr. folder, Box 6, OGV; Tilton, “A Personal Interview with Captain Brown’s Wife.”

19. “John Brown’s Invasion. Correspondence of the N.Y. Tribune. About Brown,” NYTr, 9 Nov., 5.

20. Relayed from the NYT in “The Virginia Insurrection. Old Brown’s Doings,” NYTr, 20 Oct., 6; See Brown’s note, “Vindication of the Raid,” which was found among his papers and published in the Baltimore Clipper on 20 Oct. John H. Zittle, A Correct History of the John Brown Invasion (Hagerstown, MD: Mail Publishing Co., 1905), 77.

21. After 1844, the Harper’s Ferry armory stopped producing Hall’s breech-loading rifles and produced percussion muskets and muzzle-loading rifles. While needful of improvement, Brown’s 1853 Sharps was a slanting breech carbine that was sturdy, was more powerful, and was capable of being fired three times as fast as the muzzle-loading rifles held in the arsenal. See C. Meade Patterson, “John Brown’s Sharps,” The Gun Report (May 1959), 21–24, 31–34; Martin Rywell, The Gun That Shaped American Destiny (Harriman, TN: Pioneer Press, 1957), 8; Merrit Roe Smith, Harper’s Ferry Armory and the New Technology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 281, 287.

22. This was an extremely effective measure in preventing the men of Harper’s Ferry from fighting back. Unfortunately for Brown’s men, they were not aware that some rifles had been moved to an unguarded stock house at the back of the armory during flooding. When these guns were secured, they were used to drive away the raiders stationed at the rifle factory. See “John Brown’s Raid at Harper’s Ferry: An Eyewitness Account by Charles White,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 67 (Oct. 1959), 387–88.

23. W. S. Downer’s statement in “The Insurrection in Virginia . . . the Latest Despatches,” NYH, 24 Oct., 1. Armistead Ball, master machinist of the armory, later testified that Brown told him that he intended to seize the government weapons in order “to arm the blacks to defend themselves against their masters” and that he made a “proposition” to the armory officers even though the weapons were already “in his possession.” But Ball’s testimony is highly questionable for a number of reasons: Brown claimed otherwise, emphasizing the superiority of his own stock of weapons; there is no testimony from Brown’s men that taking the arms was ever on the agenda; there is no evidence that any effort was made to seize the weapons, nor any testimony of the removal of significant numbers of weapons; his own weapons were brought to Harper’s Ferry, while none of the arsenal holdings were reported on Brown’s wagons; and Brown had specifically ordered one thousand pikes with which to arm the liberated blacks. See “Trial of John Brown. Third Day,” NYTr, 29 Oct., 7.

24. The Congressional Globe, 7 Dec. 1859 (Washington, DC: John C. Rives), 5, 11; Herman von Holst, The Constitutional and Political History of the United States (Chicago: Callaghan & Co., 1885), 177–78; William H. Coffin, “Settlement of the Friends in Kansas,” Transactions of the Kansas State Historical Society VII (Topeka, KS: W. Y. Morgan, 1902), 333; Report of The Special Committee to Investigate the Troubles in Kansas. House of Representatives Report No. 200 (Washington, DC: Cornelius Wendell, 1856), 1130–31.

25. “John Brown’s Invasion. Correspondence of the N.Y. Tribune. About Brown.”

26. The Congressional Globe, 7 Dec., 13–15.

27. See chapter 2, note 30.

28. “The Harper’s Ferry Outbreak. Verbatim Report of the Questioning of Old Brown by Senator Mason, Congressman Vallandigham, and Others, NYH, 21 Oct., 1; “Captain Brown’s Statement to Gov. Wise,” BACA, 20 Oct., 1; Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald, 50, 73.

29. “The Harper’s Ferry Outbreak. Verbatim Report of the Questioning of Old Brown by Senator Mason”; “Brown’s Appearance—Gov. Wise’s Speech,” NYTr, 22 Oct., 7; Vallandigham’s letter to the Cincinnati Enquirer dated 22 Oct. is relayed in “Letter from Hon. C. L. Vallandigham and Harper’s Ferry Insurrection,” Memphis Appeal, 29 Oct., 4.

30. Vallandigham said that the first four statements attributed to him were actually from an anonymous “bystander.” The date of Brown’s move to Ohio is mistakenly rendered “1850” instead of 1805, as is also the erroneous phrase “my native place is York state; my father lived there till his death, in 1805.” See “Letter from Hon. C. L. Vallandigham and Harper’s Ferry Insurrection.”

31. JBT, 297n31; “Letter from Hon. C. L. Vallandigham”; Benjamin Mills, one of Brown’s hostages and an armory officer, said: “Several persons attempted to ask Brown questions, but Governor Wise waved his hand and said, ‘Let me do the talking.’” See “John Brown’s Raid,” Louisville Courier Journal, Aug. 1881, SC02-0095, BBS.

32. See note 29 in this chapter.

33. “The Harper’s Ferry Outbreak. Verbatim Report of the Questioning of Old Brown by Senator Mason.”

34. “Brown’s Appearance—Gov. Wise’s Speech”; “Letter from Hon. C. L. Vallandigham and Harper’s Ferry Insurrection”; Giddings to Cincinnati Gazette, 14 Nov., relayed in “Letter from Joshua R. Giddings,” NYT, 22 Nov., 8.

35. “Brown Another Balfour of Burley,” NYT, 26 Oct., 5; PLJB, 274–75.

36. The Congressional Globe, 13

37. SCHF, 7.

38. “Harper’s Ferry, Oct. 20, 1859,” NYH, 21 Oct., 1. Sam Patch was a popular figure in the 1820s, renowned for his daring high dives; he was killed in 1829, after plummeting 150 feet into the Genesee River near Rochester, New York. A poster for the event boasted that there “is no mistake in Sam Patch,” and that “Some Things Can Be Done As Well As Others.” Richard M. Dorson, “The Wonderful Leaps of Sam Patch,” American Heritage 18:1 (Dec. 1966). Retrieved on 4 Jul. 2013 from http://goo.gl/6bk1fn.

39. PLJB, 273.

40. “Gov. Wise Returns to Richmond—an Interesting Speech. From the Richmond Whig, 22d,” NYTr, 26 Oct., 6; “The Question of Jurisdiction,” NYTr, 19 Oct., 5; “District-Attorney Ould’s Report,” NYTr, 22 Oct., 7; “The Virginia Insurrection. Old Brown’s Doings,” NYTr, 20 Oct., 6; “The Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry,” NYTr, 21 Oct., 5; trans., “Statement of Edmund H. Chambers. Captain John Brown,” 29 July 1882, KSHS; “Gov. Wise’s Speech on the Insurrection,” NYTr, 24 Oct., 5.

CHAPTER 5

1. “The Harper’s Ferry Outbreak,” NYH, 20 Oct., 3; “John Brown’s Son Talks of His Father,” Kansas City Star [MO], 21 Oct 1906, 1; Interview with Annie Brown Adams, 23 May 1893, in Annie Brown Adams folder, Box 1, OGV.

2. The Thompsons were a large family and at least the adult children, if not the parents, supported the Browns in the antislavery cause. The most zealous in this regard was Henry Thompson, who married Brown’s eldest daughter Ruth in 1850, and later fought alongside his father-in-law in Kansas. The Browns were also related to the Thompsons by the marriage of Watson Brown to Isabella (“Bell”) Thompson in 1856. Possibly, there was a youthful romance between Dauphin Thompson (age twenty-one) and Anne Brown (age sixteen) prior to the Harper’s Ferry raid. See Michael J. Konowal, “The Dauphin Thompson Carbine and Brown’s Raid at Harpers Ferry,” Manuscripts 64:4 (Fall 2012), 280.

3. Lou V. Chapin, “The Last Days of Old John Brown,” Overland Monthly (April 1899), 326.

4. PLJB, 287; “Personal Portraits,” The Spectator, 29 Nov., 1; “Key to John Brown’s Prison,” San Francisco Call, 1 July 1906, 3; JBT, 89–90.

5. “Public Feeling . . . Brown in Jail,” NYTr, 5 Nov., 5; “Harper’s Ferry Outbreak,” NYH, 21 Oct., 1. The jailhouse was destroyed in the early 1900s, but my description is based on pictures of the structure and a reliable first-floor layout in “The Trials at Charlestown. Correspondence of the N.Y. Tribune,” NYTr, 12 Nov., 6.

6. “Public Feeling . . . Brown in Jail,” NYTr, 5 Nov., 5; W. W. B. Gallaher, “Examining Court,” VFP, 27 Oct., 2; JBT, 85. The conspiracy to kill Brown and his men was revealed afterward by the trial judge. See Richard Parker, “The Trial of John Brown,” Daily Globe Democrat [St. Louis], 8 Apr. 1888.

7. “Harper’s Ferry. Great Excitement!” VFP, 20 Oct., 2; Col. John T. Gibson to Gov. Henry Wise, 18 Oct., in “Documents Relative to the Harper’s Ferry Invasion Appended to Governor Wise’s Message” (Doc. No. I. Governor’s Message and Reports of the Public Officers of the State, of the Boards of Directors, and of the Visitors, Superintendents, and other Agents of Public Institutions or Interests of Virginia. Richmond: William F. Ritchie, 1859). West Virginia Archives & History website. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/XtCKly.

8. John Brown to H. L. Vaill, 15 Nov, transcribed from the original manuscript, sold by Sotheby’s on 3 April 2008, N08507, Presidential and Other American Manuscripts from the Dr. Robert Small Trust, Lot 18. Also see transcription by Louis Ruchames in A John Brown Reader (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1959), 135–36; and Leonard Bacon, “A Prisoner of Jesus Christ,” The Independent [New York], 24 Nov., 1, with an introductory letter from the Reverend Leonard W. Bacon.

9. “John Brown’s Invasion. A Visit to John Brown. By a Lady,” NYT, 2 Dec., 6. To be sure, as Stephen Lubet has observed, Avis also endeavored to solicit descriptions of John Brown’s son Owen and other escaped raiders. Yet given the intensity of criticism he faced as a result of showing kindness to Brown, he may have been hard pressed to cooperate with the prosecutors in order to preserve his reputation and even save his job. Steven Lubet, John Brown’s Spy: The Adventurous Life and Tragic Confession of John E. Cook (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 245.

10. “Harper’s Ferry Outbreak; Special Despatch To The Herald,” NYH, 21 Oct. 1859, 1; Brown to Thomas Russell, 21 Oct. 1859, John Brown Collection, #299, Box 2, Folder 4, KSHS; Brown to Reuben Chapman, 21 Oct. 1859, in Mason A. Green, Springfield 1636–1886: History of Town and City (Springfield, MA: C. A. Nichols and Co., 1888), 514; Brown to Daniel Tilden, 22 Oct. 1859, in PLJB, 344; “Letter from John Brown,” NYT, 28 Oct., 1; “Our Charlestown Correspondence,” NYH, 27 Oct., 3.

11. JBHM, 337; Virgil A. Lewis, The Soldiery of West Virginia (Charleston, WV: Dept. of Archives and History, State of West Virginia, 1911), 190.

12. “Harper’s Ferry Outbreak; Special Despatch To The Herald,” and see addendum to this interview in “Our Charlestown Correspondence,” NYH, 27 Oct., 3. Gallaher’s interview was also published in “A Visit to the Prisoners in Charlestown,” BACA, 24 Oct., 1.

13. Oswald G. Villard, Some Newspapers and Newspaper-men (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1923), 275; Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald, 56; “The Exposure of the Nigger Worshipping Insurrectionists,” NYH, 28 Oct., 4.

14. “The New-York Tribune,” NYTr, 19 Nov., 1; “Horace Greeley—The New York Tribune,” The Cambridge History of English and American Literature XVI (New York: Putnam, 1907), 35.

15. The definitive biography of House is James L. Huffman, A Yankee in Meiji Japan: The Crusading Journalist Edward H. House (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2003). Also see the wealth of information on House and other Bohemians on the excellent website The Vault at Pfaff’s: An Archive of Art and Literature by New York City’s Nineteenth-Century Bohemians (Lehigh University) at http://goo.gl/NqTkMu.

16. Fernand Baldensperger, American Reconstruction: 1865–1870 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), 18; Junius Henri Browne, The Great Metropolis; A Mirror of New York (Hartford, CT: American Publishing, 1869), 154; Mark A. Lause, The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009), 61; “Edward Howard House,” Appletons’ Cyclopedia of American Biography, Vol. 3, edited by James Wilson and John Fiske (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1892), 272.

17. Lause, The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians, 109; “The Execution of Friday Last. Correspondence of The N.Y. Tribune,” NYTr, 5 Dec., 5; Katherine Mayo, “Sculptor’s Visit to John Brown,” The Evening Post [suppl.], 13 Nov. 1909, 2; transcript of telegram from T. Bernard to F. S. West, 16 Nov., RP11-0021, BBS; “John Brown’s Invasion . . . Humors of the Local Press,” NYTr, 7 Nov., 6.

18. Boyd B. Stutler, “An Eyewitness Describes the Hanging of John Brown,” American Heritage 6:2 (Feb. 1955); Samuel S. Olcott, “How We Hung John Brown,” Lotus Leaves: Original Stories, Essays, and Poems (Boston: William F. Gill and Company, 1875), 235.

19. Spirit of Jefferson interview relayed in the BACA, 24 Oct., 1.

20. “John Brown’s Adirondac Life . . . Recollections of a Colored Companion—a Quiet Farmer with a High Mission,” NYTr, 17 Oct. 1886, 10; Evan Carton, Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America (New York: The Free Press, 2006), 340; “Harper’s Ferry Outbreak; Special Despatch to the Herald.”

21. “Trial of the Harper’s Ferry Conspirators,” The Spectator [Staunton, VA], 1 Nov., 2; “Our Charlestown Correspondence. Appearance of the Prisoners in Court,” NYH, 28 Oct., 2; “Brown’s Magazine,” NYH, 21 Oct., 1; JBT, 97.

22. “Trial of the Harper’s Ferry Conspirators,” 2; “Personal Portraits. Correspondence of the N.Y. Tribune,” NYTr, 17 Nov., 5.

23. “First Examination of the Prisoners” (based on the NYH, 26 Oct.), in LTE, 55–56. Also see “Examination of the Harper’s Ferry Conspirators. Brown’s Speech,” NYTr, 26 Oct., 5.

24. Ibid.

25. JBT, 101–2; “The Herald on Republicanism,” NYTr, 24 Oct., 4.

26. The Reverend Lawrence M. Colfelt (1849–1932) was a prominent Presbyterian minister who recounted an extended meeting with Andrew Hunter during a visit to Charlestown around 1869. Although brief, Colfelt provides a trustworthy testimony of Hunter’s recollection of the baby kiss incident, as well as other interesting details of their meeting. See L. M. Colfelt, An Autobiography (Philadelphia, 1927), 49–50. The segment pertaining to the baby kiss was also published in the Bedford Gazette [Bedford, Pa.], 17 Dec. 1926, 5; David H. Strother’s lecture on John Brown, Cleveland, Ohio, 23 Dec. 1868, 45; “Trial of John Brown Described by Eye-witness of Stirring Event,” Washington Herald, 14 Apr. 1909, 8; “Trial of the Harper’s Ferry Conspirators”; 1860 U.S. Federal Census - Slave Schedules, Eighth Census of the United States (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1860), Reel M653.

27. Richard Parker, “The Trial of John Brown,” Daily Globe Democrat [St. Louis], 8 Apr. 1888; “Our Charlestown Correspondence; The Court House,” NYH, 10 Nov., 5; “Trial of the Harper’s Ferry Conspirators”; “Trial of the Insurrectionists,” BACA, 27 Oct., 1; “The Harper’s Ferry Outbreak,” NYH, 27 Oct., 3; DHSL, 44.

28. LTE, 61; JBT, 114; “The Trial at the Circuit Court,” NYTr, 26 Oct., 5.

29. This is not an exhaustive discussion of Brown’s trial, particularly the fascinating debate surrounding the controversial count of treason against Virginia. The definitive study trial is Brian McGinty’s excellent and highly recommended work The Trial of John Brown, a studious and well-written consideration of Brown and his trial. The indictment is discussed on pages 110–13.

30. SDOH, 324. Although I generally trust Donavin’s account, given his role as a journalist at Harper’s Ferry and Charlestown, I have used this quotation somewhat cautiously. Negatively, there is no other newspaper report of these words after the reading of the indictment, so it is possible that he has “re-created” Brown’s remarks made prior to the reading of the indictment. The question is indicated in Brown’s claim to be “without counsel.” Taken literally, it could not be true unless Brown was speaking prior to the reading of the indictment. As I have stated, however, Brown more likely was expressing his disdain for court-appointed, proslavery lawyers being forced on him. Because there was no official court transcription prepared by a stenographer, we must rely on reporters’ transcriptions, which may also have gaps. As Strother’s 1868 speech reveals, reportage of Brown’s words was hardly exhaustive, even in the thorough presentation of the Herald. Donavin himself concluded these remarks “received no attention”—which seems as true of the press as it was of the court.

31. LTE, 66; “The Harper’s Ferry Insurrection. Trial of Captain Brown,” BACA, 28 Oct., 1; DHSL, 44; JBT, 117; “Special Dispatch to the N.Y. Tribune,” NYTr, 27 Oct., 5.

32. “Trial of the Insurrectionists,” BACA, 27 Oct., 1; “The Harper’s Ferry Outbreak,” NYH, 27 Oct., 3.

33. “The Harper’s Ferry Outbreak; Continuation of Wednesday’s Report,” NYH, 27 Oct., 8; “John Brown’s Trial,” Richmond Dispatch, 17 Mar. 1901, 3; “The Harper’s Ferry Outbreak,” NYH, 27 Oct. 1, 3; Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald, 54–55.

34. “The Rise and Progress of the Bloody Outbreak at Harper’s Ferry,” NYH, 27 Oct., 8; “Judicial Assiduity in Virginia,” NYTr, 28 Oct., 4. Emendation of “clinique.”

CHAPTER 6

1. “Trial of the Harper’s Ferry Conspirators,” The Staunton Spectator [VA], 1 Nov., 2; SDOH, 325; “The Harper’s Ferry Insurrection. Trial of Captain Brown,” BACA, 28 Oct., 1; JBT, 154–55; “John Brown’s Trial,” Richmond Dispatch, 17 Mar. 1901, 3.

2. McGinty first noted the great number of slaveholders presiding over the judgment of John Brown but undercounts the enslaved people held by Brown’s jurors by one. JBT, 126, 306n23; SS1860.

3. Whether victims were jailed during Brown’s incarceration is not known, although one enslaved woman was placed in a cell at some point before the Harper’s Ferry raiders were hanged, the tragic scene of which is mentioned in ABR.

4. “Thursday’s Proceedings” NYH, 28 Oct., 1; “The Trial of Capt. Brown,” NYTr, 28 Oct., 5; Howard Wolf, “1859 Editor of Summit Beacon Revealed as John Brown Insanity Defense Sponsor,” Akron Beacon Journal, 9 May 1930, GEE; “Trial of the Harper’s Ferry Conspirators”; Walter E. Harris, “Last John Brown Juror,” The Washington Herald, 2 Jun. 1907, 6.

5. See Parker’s remarks under second day, in LTE, 66.

6. See Hiram Griswold to Henry A. Wise, 7 Nov., and Wise’s notes on verso; Henry A. Wise to Francis T. Stribling, 10 Nov., both in HAW; JBT, 243.

7. VILL, 509; the affidavit scheme was reported in the local Akron Beacon Journal, 16 Nov. and relayed in “An Effort for Brown,” Chicago Press & Tribune, 22 Nov., 2, so it is possible that Wise was made aware of the documents even before he received them. The affidavits are held in the Library of Congress collection; copies are held in the Edwin N. Cotter Jr. Papers, Feinberg Library, State University of New York at Plattsburgh.

8. Erickson mocked and diminished his former competitor in the wool business, concluding that he had a “delusional mind.” See Erickson to Wise, 8 Nov., HAW, and transcription in Tatham Papers folder, Box 17, OGV; Grinnell wrote a thinly veiled anonymous letter to the press, describing Brown quite graphically as a kind of wild-eyed “monomaniac,” and referring to his “desperate resorts.” See “Captain John Brown,” NYTr, 14 Nov., 7.

9. W. W. Durbin to Henry A. Wise, 29 Nov., HAW. Durbin’s writing to Wise is recounted quite interestingly by his descendant, in James D. Robenalt, Linking Rings: William W. Durbin and the Magic and Mystery of America (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004), 41–42.

10. Tilton, “A Personal Interview with Captain Brown’s Wife”; VILL, 509; “From Boston. From Our Own Correspondent,” NYTr, 26 Oct., 6.

11. “Thursday’s Proceedings”; “The Trial of Capt. Brown.”

12. “Trial of John Brown. Third Day,” NYTr, 29 Oct., 7; PLJB, 376; [Alban S. Payne], “John Brown and His Coadjutors,” The Spirit of the Times [NY], 21 Jan. 1860, 592; “A Visit to Charlestown. Interviews with Old Brown,” NYT, 7 Nov., 4; See Henry Wise to Henry Wilson, 15 Nov., in Barton H. Wise, The Life of Henry A. Wise of Virginia, 1806–1876 (New York: Macmillan Co., 1899), 250.

13. “Trial of John Brown. Third Day”; SDOH, 326; George H. Hoyt, “Recollections of John Brown’s Trial by One of His Counsel,” Leavenworth Daily Conservative, 25 Aug. 1867, 1.

14. Hoyt, “Recollections of John Brown’s Trial by One of His Counsel,” Leavenworth Daily Conservative, 28 Jul., 1, and 4 Aug. 1867, 1; SDOH, 326; VILL, 484; JBHM, 365-66.

15. LTE, 73–74; Hoyt, “Recollections of John Brown’s Trial by One of His Counsel,” 28 Jul, 1, and 4 Aug. 1867, 1; JBHM, 367.

16. Hoyt, “Recollections of John Brown’s Trial by One of His Counsel,” 4 Aug., 1; “He Tried John Brown; Sole Survivor of the Jury that Convicted Him,” Washington Post, 7 Nov. 1897, 11.

17. Hoyt, “Recollections of John Brown’s Trial by One of His Counsel,” 11 Aug., 1; “John Brown’s Raid. Recollections of Prosecuting Attorney Andrew Hunter,” Times Democrat [New Orleans], 5 Sept. 1887, trans. in A. Hunter folder, Box 10, OGV; Richard Parker, “The Trial of John Brown,” Daily Globe [St. Louis], 8 Apr. 1888; “The Trial at the Circuit Court,” NYTr, 26 Nov., 5; “Examination of the Harper’s Ferry Conspirators. Brown’s Speech,” NYTr, 26 Nov., 5.

18. A document apparently discarded by Botts and Green had a series of directives in Brown’s handwriting, including “We gave to numerous prisoners perfect liberty. Get all their names. We allowed numerous other prisoners to visit their families, to quiet their fears. Get all their names.” Partial trans., PLJB, 324–25.

19. Hoyt, “Recollections of John Brown’s Trial by One of His Counsel,” 11 Aug., 1; LTE, 77–78; “Trial of John Brown. Third Day,” NYTr, 29 Oct., 7.

20. JBHM, 367; Hoyt, “Recollections of John Brown’s Trial by One of His Counsel,” 11 Aug., 1, 25 Aug., 1, and 8 Sept., 1; Parker, “The Trial of John Brown”; “Brown’s Trial,” NYTr, 3 Nov., 5.

21. “Old Brown,” VFP, 3 Nov., 2; Hoyt, “Recollections of John Brown’s Trial by One of His Counsel,” 4 Aug., 1; 1 Sept., 1; and 8 Aug., 1; JBHM, 367; “George H. Hoyt,” VFP, 3 Nov., 2.

22. See trans., Hoyt to LeBarnes, 31 Oct., Hoyt folder, Box 10, OGV.

23. JBHM, 366–67; JBT, 182–84; “The Harper’s Ferry Affair . . . Brown’s Property,” NYTr, 9 Nov., 5; “Mr. Griswold and His $250 Fee,” NYTr, 21 Nov., 6; Editorial, NYTr, 29 Nov., 4; “Mr. Hiram Griswold Once More,” NYTr, 1 Dec., 6.

24. PLJB, 360. Also see NYT, 30 Nov. 1859, 2, NYH, 30 Nov., 4, and NYTr, 30 Nov., 6.

25. The treason count is a particularly interesting but complicated matter. It is excellently and expansively addressed in JBT. Regarding Chilton’s argument, see 192–93.

26. LTE, 78–79; SDOH, 326; JBT, 195–97.

27. “Our Special Despatch from Charlestown; Visit of the Military to Old Brown,” NYH, 31 Oct., 1; “The Trials at Charlestown. Correspondence of The N.Y. Tribune,” NYTr, 12 Nov., 6; “The General Newspaper Despatch,” NYH, 31 Oct., 1; Hoyt, “Recollections of John Brown’s Trial by One of His Counsel,” 27 Oct. 1876, 1.

28. Hoyt, “Recollections of John Brown’s Trial by One of His Counsel,” 27 Oct., 1; JBHM, 367–68; “Visit to the Harper’s Ferry Insurrectionists,” New York Sun, 31 Oct., 1; “Our Special Despatch from Charlestown; Visit of the Military to Old Brown”; “The Frederick City United Guards,” NYTr, 31 Oct., 5. See my discussion about Brown’s early presence on the Northwest frontier in “The Useful Frontier: John Brown and the Canadian Preface to the Harper’s Ferry Raid,” in The Fluid Frontier, edited by Veta Tucker and Karolyn Smardz Frost (Wayne: Michigan State University Press, 2015).

29. William J. Clark, “Osawatomie Brown’s Soul Is Marching On,” Washington Post, 12 Aug. 1906; Gerrit Smith, John Brown [a broadside] (Peterboro, NY, 15 Aug. 1867), MS14-0080, BBS; James Monroe Gregory, Frederick Douglass the Orator. Containing an Account of His Life; His Eminent Public Services; His Brilliant Career as Orator; Selections from His Speeches and Writings (Springfield, MA: Willey & Co., 1893), 49.

CHAPTER 7

1. “The Trial of John Brown. Sixth Day,” NYTr, 1 Nov., 5; [Thomas Russell], “A Visit to Charlestown. Interviews with Old Brown” [relayed from The Boston Traveler], NYT, 7 Nov., 4; trans. Cushing to Wise and Mason, 31 Oct., and uncited newspaper clipping, “The Last Hours of John Brown” (based on a speech by Russell), both in Judge Thomas Russell folder, Box 15, OGV; LTE, 89-93.

2. LTE, 91–94; “Public Feeling—Sentence of Brown—State of the Prisoner,” NYTr, 5 Nov., 5; Katherine Mayo, “Sculptor’s visit to John Brown,” New York Evening Post, 13 Nov. 1909, Supp., 2A; Walter E. Harris, “Last John Brown Juror,” Washington Herald, 2 Jun. 1907, 6; “Our Washington Despatch,” NYH, 1 Nov., 3.

3. Brown insisted that his defense be “confined to the theory that he contemplated no ‘treason’ or ‘insurrection’ or ‘murder.’” Hoyt, “Recollections of John Brown’s Trial by One of His Counsel,” 13 Oct. 1867, 1.

4. Brown to Mary Brown, 31 Oct., MS02-0044, BBS. Emendations of “terrible,” “conciouness,” and “mortifycation.”

5. “E.B.” to Brown, 27 Oct., in PLJB, 348.

6. Initially, I considered Elizabeth Buffum Chace (1806–1899) a possible candidate for E.B. One of the notable daughters of the renowned Quaker abolitionist, Arnold Buffum, Elizabeth was an ardent abolitionist and an associate of William Lloyd Garrison. After Brown was hanged, she draped the door of her home in black. However, she was from Fall River, not Newport, and her handwriting differs from that the handwriting in E.B.’s second letter to Brown on 9 Nov.

7. Brown to “E.B.,” 1 Nov., PLJB, 348–49; “E.B.” to Brown, 9 Nov., in Intercepted Letters file, Box 23, Folder 4, HWE. Also see “The John Brown Letters,” Virginia Historical Magazine 10:1 (July 1902), 25–27.

8. After their rediscovery in the Virginia state archives in 1901, a portion of the ninety-six confiscated letters were published in the Virginia Historical Magazine, volumes 9:4–11:1 (Apr. 1902–Jul. 1903); Boyd B. Stutler, “John Brown’s Lost Carpet Bag,” Manuscripts (Summer 1959), 4.

9. “A Letter from John Brown,” NYTr, 7 Nov., 7.

10. There are several letters from Brown to David Lee Child in the spring of 1857, suggesting they had spoken while Brown was in Boston and were supposed to either meet or collaborate in some manner, although by mid-May 1857, Brown did not know what had become of Child. The brief “memorandum” of the battle of Osawatomie written by Brown at the request of Child is found in OGV. It includes a note of verification in the hand of Lydia M. Child.

11. “Personal,” NYTr, 8 Nov., 6.

12. Lydia Maria Child to Brown, 26 Oct., in John Brown Collection, #299, Box 2, Folder 4, KSHS.

13. [Thomas Drew], The John Brown Invasion: An Authentic History of the Harper’s Ferry Tragedy with Full Details of the Capture, Trial, and Execution of the Invaders (Boston: James Campbell, 1860); “Personal,” NYTr, 1 Dec., 5; “The Harper’s Ferry Insurrection,” NYTr, 11 Nov., 1; advertisement in NYTr, 14 Nov, 1.

14. Child quoted in Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz, The Tie that Bound Us: The Women of John Brown’s Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 80. See Correspondence Between Lydia Maria Child and Governor Wise and Mrs. Mason (Boston: American Antislavery Society, 1860).

15. PLJB, 347–48.

16. Brown’s lawyers, Hoyt and Griswold, were not aware that Cook made his extensive confession and somehow found out about it “accidentally.” See excerpts of Hoyt’s letter of 31 Oct. in JBHM, 368, and under Higginson to Browns, 4 Nov., MS07-0004H, BBS. Although it was later published in pamphlet form in Virginia, the New-York Daily Tribune published Cook’s revelation first, apparently through the clever correspondence of Ned House. See “John Brown’s Invasion; Cook’s Confession,” NYTr, 26 Nov., 7. The definitive work on Cook is Steven Lubet, John Brown’s Spy: The Adventurous Life and Tragic Confession of John E. Cook (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).

17. Hoyt, “Recollections of John Brown’s Trial by One of His Counsel,” 18 Aug. 1867, 1; Hoyt to LeBarnes, 31 Oct., trans. in MS07-0004 G-H, BBS and Hoyt folder, Box 10, OGV (also JBHM, 369); “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, Nov. 7, 6; “Affairs at Charlestown, Virginia. All Strangers under Surveillance—Messrs. Jewett and Hoyt Advised to Leave,” NYH, 14 Nov., 4.

18. LTE, 94; Brown to New England friends, 1 Nov., in “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, 18 Nov., 5; “More Counsel for Brown,” NYH, 1 Nov., 3.

19. “Public Feeling—Sentence of Brown—State of the Prisoner,” NYTr, 5 Nov., 5; “The Proceedings of the Court,” NYH, 3 Nov., 3; “Brown’s Trial,” NYTr, 3 Nov., 5.

20. McGinty, JBT, 226; “Brown’s Trial”; VILL, 420–21.

21. LTE, 95; “The Proceedings of the Court,” NYH, 3 Nov, 3–4; Harris, “Last John Brown Juror,” 6; “The Harper’s Ferry Outbreak . . . Old Brown Sentenced to Death,” NYH, 3 Nov., 3–4; Cleon Moore to David H. Strother, 4 Nov., MS12-0044, BBS; “A Visit to Charlestown. Interviews with Old Brown,” NYT, 7 Nov., 4.

22. “Brown’s Trial,” NYTr, 31 Oct., 4; “Republican Meeting in the Eighteenth Ward,” NYTr, 5 Nov., 5; “The Plymouth Course. ‘The Lesson of the Hour.’ Lecture by Wendell Phillips,” NYTr, 3 Nov., 3; “Extraordinary Address of Wendell Phillips on the Insurrection,” NYH, 1 Nov., 10; Editorial, Springfield Republican, 2 Nov., clipping in John Brown file, CVHM, Springfield, MA.

23. Editorial, Springfield Republican, 2 Nov.

24. “Brown’s Speech Before Sentence,” NYH, 4 Nov., 4; “The Virginia Fright,” BACA, 23 Nov., 5; Cleon Moore to David H. Strother, 4 Nov., MS12-0044, BBS; “The John Brown Letters,” Virginia Magazine of History ix (1902), 394.

25. Notes from memoir of Rev. George V. Leech, Baltimore Conference Methodist Episcopal Church, unpublished mss., in JB First Days in Charlestown Jail folder, Box 4, OGV; Samuel V. Leech, The Raid of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry as I Saw It (Washington, DC: The DeSoto, 1909), 12; Brown to James W. McFarland, 23 Nov., in NYTr, 21 Dec., 7. Also see PLJB, 359.

26. Given the trust between Brown and Jailer Avis, it seems he spent most of his time in jail without his leg irons. “Since his trial, Brown has not been manacled.” “Facts, Incidents, Rumors, &c,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, 19 Nov., 1; “Brown has not been in irons since the first night, and every possible indulgence is shown him.” “A Visit to Charlestown,” NYT, 7 Nov., 4.

27. Account of Boteler visit in “Statement of Dr. Francis Bacon, Hartford, Conn.,” 13 Feb. 1908, in JB First Days in Charlestown Jail folder, Box 4, OGV. See VILL, 592n15.

28. Helen Ainslie Smith, One Hundred Famous Americans (New York: George Routledge and Sons, 1881), 447; “Gerrit Smith and the Harper’s Ferry Outbreak,” NYH, 2 Nov., 1; “Hard Times with the Abolitionists—Gerrit Smith in a Mad House,” NYH, 10 Nov., 6.

29. “Facts, Incidents, Rumors, &c.,” National Antislavery Standard, 19 Nov., 1, relayed from the NYH, 7 Nov. The detail of Brown and Stevens singing hymns is preserved by Rebecca Spring, who visited Brown around this time. See Rebecca Buffum Spring to Elizabeth Buffum Chace, 15 Jan. 1860, in Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman and Arthur Crawford Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace, 1806–1899: Her Life and its Environment, Vol. 1 (Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1914), 209.

CHAPTER 8

1. Ad for Barnum’s Museum in NYTr, 5 Nov., 7; “Brackett’s Bust of John Brown,” NYTr, 11 Feb. 1860, 9; Katherine Mayo, “Sculptor’s Visit to John Brown,” The Evening Post, 13 Nov. 1909 (suppl.), 2; “John Brown’s Invasion . . . A Revival of Wrath,” NYTr, 7 Nov., 6; “John Brown’s Invasion . . . Terrors of a Camera,” NYTr, 8 Nov., 6.

2. “John Brown’s Invasion . . . Terrors of a Camera”; “The Last Hours of John Brown.” Anonymous, undated newspaper clipping based upon a speech by Thomas Russell at the Massachusetts Club’s Commemoration, and speech by Mary Russell at the Bussey Institute, Jamaica Plains, Mass., 11 Jan. 1908, both in Russell folder, Box 15, OGV; “A Visit to Charlestown. Interviews with Old Brown” (relayed from the Boston Traveller) NYT, 7 Nov., 4; Thomas W. Higginson to Browns, 4 Nov., MS07-0004, BBS; Moore to Strother, 4 Nov., MS12-0044, BBS.

3. Brackett returned to Boston and completed the bust of Brown, which George Hoyt declared “marvelously successful.” Lydia Maria Child suggested that were the bust rediscovered in the future, it might be taken as the head of Jupiter, “were there not something so Christian in its character.” Harriet Tubman saw the bust too, and after gazing at it as if in a trance, she said, “It was not John Brown that died at Charlestown. It was Christ;—it was the Savior of our people.” “Brackett’s Bust of John Brown,” Liberator, 6 Jan. 1860, 3; Lydia Maria Child, “Brackett’s Bust of John Brown,” NYTr, 11 Feb. 1860, 9; Earl Conrad, Harriet Tubman (New York: Paul S. Eriksson, 1943, 1969), 143. For Tubman’s further reflection on Tubman’s meaning, see Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (New York: One World Ballantine Books, 2004), 177.

4. “Sculptor’s Visit to John Brown”; Memoir of Edwin Brackett quoted in JB First Days in Charlestown Jail folder, Box 4, OGV; “John Brown’s Invasion. Correspondence of the N.Y. Tribune,” NYTr, 8 Nov., 6.

5. Moore to Strother, 4 Nov.; “Public Feeling,” NYTr, 5 Nov., 5; Harris, “Last John Brown Juror,” Washington Herald, 2 Jun. 1907, 6.

6. Thomas W. Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays (published by the author, 1898), 226; VILL, 513; Higginson to the Browns, 4 Nov., MS07-0004, BBS; “Personal,” NYTr, 8 Nov., 6. Higginson does not name Mary’s intended Philadelphia escort, but it likely was Tyndale, because he was the one who finally escorted her to Virginia the following month.

7. Thomas W. Higginson to J. Miller McKim, 5 Nov. and 9 Nov., trans. in J. M. McKim Papers (Cornell University) folder, Box 12, OGV. Ned House rendered Brown’s panicked message, “Do not, for God’s sake, come here not. John Brown.” See “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, 7 Nov., 6; Katherine Mayo’s notes on the telegraphs in Mrs. John Brown and Family folder, Box 6, OGV; excerpt from Hoyt to LeBarnes, 8 Nov., JBHM, 373–74; Susan I. Lesley to Catherine Robbins, 27 Nov., in Life and Letters of Peter and Susan Lesley, Vol 2., edited by Mary Lesley Ames (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909), 377; William Still, The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia: William Still, 1886), 762n.

8. Brown wanted Mary to join him in Maryland when he set up his headquarters in the summer of 1859, but she refused to go. When their daughter Annie went to do housekeeping in her place, Mary also tried to discourage her from going. See “Statement of Annie Brown,” Nov. 1866 [Chicago Historical Society], Annie Brown Letters folder, Box 2, Clarence S. Gee Papers, Hudson Library and Historical Society Collection, Hudson, OH.

9. Higginson to McKim, 9 Nov.; Brown to Thomas W. Higginson, 4 Nov., MS02-0046; Brown to Samuel G. Howe, [4 Nov.], under letter of Howe to Higginson, 9 Nov. trans., JB Jail Letters 1859 folder, Box 5, OGV.

10. See chapter 18, note 5.

11. Life and Letters of Peter and Susan Lesley, 377; Brown to “Dear Wife & Children Every One,” 8-9 Nov., MS Am. 507, John Brown Collection, Boston Public Library. Emendation of “seperation.”

12. See “Disposal of John Brown’s Personal Property,” Pittsburgh Daily Morning Post, 9 Nov., 1; Hoyt to LeBarnes, 8 Nov., JBHM, 374; Brown to Mary Brown, 10 Nov., DHSP. Emendations of “whiped” and “dayly.” Frances Ellen Watkins to Mary Brown, 14 Nov., in Still, The Underground Railroad, 762.

13. “Trial of the Insurrectionists; A Female Sympathizer,” BACA, 9 Nov., 1 (also NYTr, 10 Nov., 5). Also see “Distinguished Visitors,” VFP, 10 Nov., 2.

14. Besides press reportage on her visit, there are several narratives provided by Rebecca Buffum Spring. The earliest is based on an interview made shortly after her visit with Brown, published in an article actually focused on Mary Brown. See Theodore Tilton, “A Personal Interview with Captain Brown’s Wife,” The Independent [New York], 17 Nov., 1. She narrated her first account in “A Visit to John Brown. By a Lady,” NYTr, 2 Dec., 6. Two narratives were published a half-century later: Rebecca Buffum Spring, “How I Brought First Aid to Wounded John Brown,” New York Press, 13 Oct. 1907, 4; and ABR. Katherine Mayo, assistant to Brown biographer Oswald Garrison Villard, published an edited version of the latter in 1909, as part of a series in Villard’s own newspaper. See “In an Angry City to Visit Brown,” New York Evening Post, 30 Oct. 1909 (suppl.), 1–2.

15. [Spring,] “A Visit to John Brown. By a Lady”; Spring, “How I Brought First Aid to Wounded John Brown.”

16. “John Brown’s Invasion. Correspondence of the N.Y. Tribune. About Brown,” NYTr, 9 Nov., 5; “Distinguished Visitors,” VFP, 10 Nov, 2; Spring, “How I Brought First Aid to Wounded John Brown.”

17. Spring, “How I Brought First Aid to Wounded John Brown”; ABR, 117–18; “A Visit to John Brown. By a Lady”; Interview with Rebecca Spring, Sept. 1908, in Rebecca Spring folder, Box 16, OGV.

18. Spring, “How I Brought First Aid to Wounded John Brown”; ABR, 119–21 and 136–37; “A Visit to John Brown. By a Lady”; Tilton, “A Personal Interview with Captain Brown’s Wife.”

19. “A Visit to John Brown. By a Lady”; Tilton, “A Personal Interview with Captain Brown’s Wife.” I have preferred these two sources from late 1859 in recounting this conversation.

20. “A Visit to John Brown. By a Lady”; Interview with Rebecca Spring, Sept. 1908, in Rebecca Spring folder, Box 16, OGV; Rebecca Spring wrote to Andersen, telling him that she had given his story to Brown in jail, but unfortunately her letter is lost. However, we know of this episode from a letter Andersen wrote to Bernhard Severin Ingemann, 14 Feb. 1860, in Hans Christian Andersen Center, Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies, University of Southern Denmark. See Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank, The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen: A New Translation from the Danish (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 27, 240.

21. “In the Uttermost Parts of the Sea,” Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales: A New Translation by Mrs. Paull (New York: Scribner & Co., 1867), 482–84.

22. James Redpath claimed that Brown had no clean clothing given to him until November 7, the time of Rebecca Spring’s visit. See PLJB, 373.

23. “A Visit to John Brown. By a Lady”; Tilton, “A Personal Interview with Captain Brown’s Wife”; ABR, 124–27; Spring, “How I Brought First Aid to Wounded John Brown”; “The Trials at Charlestown. Correspondence of the N.Y. Tribune,” NYTr, 12 Nov., 6.

CHAPTER 9

1. “The Trials at Charlestown; The Record of A Day In Charlestown,” NYTr, 12 Nov., 6; VFP, 10 Nov., 2.

2. “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, 15 Nov., 6.

3. “The Trials at Charlestown”; “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, 15 Nov., 6.

4. “John Brown’s Invasion; Fresh Eruptions,” NYTr, 14 Nov., 7; “Clarke County. Incendiaries,” Virginia Free Press, 10 Nov., 2; see Jean Libby, Black Voices from Harpers Ferry (Palo Alto, CA: published by the author, 1979), 175–77; “Revival of the Harper’s Ferry Excitement,” NYH, 18 Nov., 5; “John Brown’s Invasion; More Tribulation,” NYTr, 21 Nov., 6; “John Brown’s Invasion; The Cry Is Still They Come,” NYTr, 22 Nov., 6.

5. “The Excitement in Virginia,” NYH, 27 Nov., 1; “The Harper’s Ferry Trouble,” NYH, 29 Nov., 1.; “Excitement and Alarm in Virginia,” NYH, 20 Nov., 1; Libby, Black Voices from Harpers Ferry, 176; “The Execution of Brown . . . Our Charlestown Despatch,” NYH, 3 Dec., 1.

6. “Excitement at Charlestown, Va.” NYH, 16 Nov., 5; “John Brown’s Invasion; Expulsion of Strangers,” NYTr, 16 Nov., 6.

7. JBHM, 370–73; See Hoyt’s letter to the editor, 16 Dec., in “The Expulsion of Mr. Hoyt from Charlestown,” NYTr, 17 Nov, 5; George Sennott to Samuel Howe, trans., 15 Nov., CVHM.

8. VILL, 340–41; “John Brown’s Invasion; Brown’s Property,” NYTr, 9 Nov., 5; Sennott wrote to Howe, saying to tell Stearns that “if we get back 100 guns, he may think it a clear gain.” Sennott to Howe, 15 Nov.

9. Sennott to Howe, 15 Nov. Hoyt’s intentions were certainly spread in the newspapers almost immediately. For instance, see “Disposal of John Brown’s Personal Property,” Pittsburgh Daily Morning Post, 9 Nov., 1; “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, 15 Nov., 6.

10. Letter of Hoyt, 16 Dec., in “The Expulsion of Mr. Hoyt from Charlestown”; JBHM, 371.

11. “John Brown’s Invasion; More Precautions,” NYTr, 11 Nov., 2; George Hoyt to Mary Brown, 11 Nov. (trans.), in Mrs. John Brown and Family folder, Box 6, OGV; “John Brown’s Invasion; Personal Portraits, NYTr, 16 Nov., 6.

12. Hoyt’s letter to the editor, 16 Dec., in “The Expulsion of Mr. Hoyt from Charlestown”; “John Brown’s Invasion; Colonel J. Lucius Davis,” NYTr, 19 Nov., 5; “John Brown’s Invasion; Expulsion of Strangers,” NYTr, 16 Nov., 6.

13. Jewett’s cartoon appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 26 Nov., 414; “Personal,” NYTr, 17 Nov., 3; Leslie to [W. W. B. Gallaher], 19 Nov., in Virginia Free Press, 24 Nov., 2.

14. In the twentieth century, the foremost Brown aficionado, Boyd Stutler, made an extensive study of the journalists and artists covering Brown’s last days in Charlestown. He concluded that Berghaus actually had been sent to Virginia first, but returned to New York upon the arrival of his junior associate, William S. L. Jewett. Thus, some of the initial sketches published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper are from Berghaus, followed by an extensive number by Jewett, and finally by Berghaus again, following Jewett’s “forced” departure. See Boyd B. Stutler to Elliot A. P. Evans, 7 Nov. 1951, RP04-0135B, BBS.

15. Notwithstanding some consideration of handing Stevens over to the federal government for trial, he and Albert Hazlett were finally tried in a Virginia court and executed in March 1860. As Steven Lubet observes, “President Buchanan declared the question of federal jurisdiction [with respect to Stevens and Hazlett], ‘a matter quite indifferent to me,’ leaving the disposition of the cases to Virginia justice.” Steven Lubet, John Brown’s Spy, 257. Had Buchanan felt otherwise, he would have faced a fight, because Governor Henry Wise of Virginia privately declared that he had no intention of handing Stevens over to federal authorities. “He will not be delivered up with my consent,” Wise wrote to Andrew Hunter. See Wise to Hunter, 18 Dec. 1859, HAW.

16. “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, 16 Nov., 6; letter of George Sennott in “Treatment of the Counsel of John Brown at Charlestown, Va.,” Philadelphia Press, 16 Nov., 2; Sennott to Howe, 15 Nov.; “John Brown’s Invasion; Expulsion of Strangers.”

17. “Lawyer Sennott,” VFP, 17 Nov., 2; “Sennott & Co.,” VFP, 24 Nov., 2; “John Brown’s Invasion; More Tribulation,” NYTr, 21 Nov., 6.

18. “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, 16 Nov., 6. This extended article contains separate correspondence from House, dated 12 and 15 Nov.

19. See correspondence relating to Robert Washington Bowyer in documents dated 2–29 Nov., in Folder 2—Detectives, Box 23, HWE; see Hinton’s card with anonymous note on verso, dated 17 Nov., HAW; telegram from T. Barnard to F. S. West, 16 Nov., HAW.

20. “Can get no New York papers here unless it might be the Herald: or the New York Observer.” John Brown to J. Miller McKim, 25 Nov. (trans.), in Jail Letters 1859 file, Box 5, OGV. Original in Boston Public Library Collection, M895; Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., “Fire from the Midst of You”: A Religious Life of John Brown (New York: NYU Press, 2002), 271. The texts marked by Brown in this way are noted in VILL, 653n122.

21. William Fellows, “Saw John Brown Hanged,” New York Sun, 13 Feb. 1898, 2. Fellows named the other titles but not the biography of L’Ouverture; Beard’s was the most recent publication on the Haitian leader.

22. John Brown to Mary Brown, 16 Nov., in B. F. Gue, “John Brown and His Iowa Friends,” Midland Monthly (Feb. 1897), 108–9; “[P]rison rules require that all I write or receive should first be examined by the Sherriff [sic] & or State’s Attorney.” John Brown to Rebecca Spring, 24 Nov., LLJB, 599–601; Andrew Hunter wrote to Governor Henry Wise that “many letters to old Brown were intercepted here, most of them nonsense or idle brave words—but some very significant, which were given and attended to.” Hunter to Wise, 18 Nov., HAW; Hiram Griswold to Gov. Henry Wise, 7 Nov., HAW; “The Trials at Charlestown; Brown and His Place of Confinement,” 12 Nov., 6. Also see chapter seven, note 8, and this chapter, note 41.

23. Fellows, “Saw John Brown Hanged.”

24. Susan I. Lesley to Catherine Robbins, 27 Nov., in Life and Letters of Peter and Susan Lesley, Vol. 2, 378.

25. Brown made a particularly important visit to Philadelphia from March 9–16, 1858, when he met with the city’s black leadership, including William Still and Stephen Smith, along with nationally known black leaders Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnett. See VILL, 323.

26. John Brown to Mary Brown, 26 Nov. (trans.), in John Brown Letter Book, GEE; James Redpath to John Swinton, 1 Feb. 1886, in John Swinton’s Paper, 2 Feb. 1886, 2.

27. As Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz points out, Mary chose against the wishes of the Philadelphia circle in selecting James Redpath instead of Lydia Child as her husband’s first biographer. Likewise, she disappointed McKim and Spring in sending her daughters to F. B. Sanborn’s school in Concord, Massachusetts, instead of Spring’s own school in Perth Amboy. See Laughlin-Schultz, The Tie that Bound Us, 80–83.

28. Of Brown’s “Secret Six,” Franklin B. Sanborn, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Dr. Samuel G. Howe, George L. Stearns, and the Reverend Thomas W. Higginson were all from the Boston area. Only Gerrit Smith resided in Peterboro, New York. See VILL, chapter eight.

29. Theodore Tilton, “A Personal Interview with Captain Brown’s Wife; Visit of a Lady to the Charlestown Jail,” Independent, 17 Nov., 1; Laughlin-Schultz, The Tie That Bound Us, 72; Mary Brown to John Brown, 13 Nov., in EHF, 427. My emphasis is in italics.

30. Laughlin-Schultz, The Tie that Bound Us, 71. Spring, “How I Brought First Aid to Wounded John Brown,” New York Press, 13 Oct. 1907, 4.

31. See Thomas Musgrave to John Brown, 7 Nov, in HAW, and Musgrave’s recollections in “Reminiscences of John Brown,” Kansas City [MO] Journal, 29 May 1881, trans. in Brown, J. B. Arms and How Obtained/Nat. Kansas Committed folder, Box 3, OGV.

32. “The Arrival of John Brown’s Remains in Philadelphia,” Philadelphia Press, 5 Dec., 2; Susan I. Lesly to Catherine Robbins, 27 Nov., in Life and Letters of Peter and Susan Lesley, 379; Anonymous, undated, newspaper clipping, “John Brown’s Death,” reprinting article by Passmore Williamson in the Philadelphia Press, Christian Cackler folder, Box 7, OGV.

33. John Brown to Amos Lawrence, 11 Mar. 1857, in The Life of Amos A. Lawrence (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1888; rpt. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 126–27; for insight into Brown’s business struggles and his forgotten successes in the business of fine sheep and wool, see DeCaro, John Brown—the Cost of Freedom, chapters 2 and 3.

34. Laughlin-Schultz, The Tie that Bound Us, 71–72; M[ary] H. F[ield], “A Brave Life,” Atlantic Monthly (Oct. 1885), 362–63; James M. McKim to John Brown, 22 Nov. (trans.), in Mrs. John Brown and Family folder, Box 6, OGV.

35. Mary Brown to John Brown, 13 Nov., in James Redpath, EHF, 427.

36. See the testimony of Augustus Wattles, 17 Feb. 1860, in SCHF, Part 2, 215.

37. John Brown to Mary Brown, 21 Nov., in LLJB, 295-96. Also in PLJB, 371, but Redpath mistakenly dated it Nov. 12; “Personal,” NYTr, 21 Dec., 6. Brown likewise instructed his wife in detail to change her cash into small gold portions and to carry it home on her person discreetly, making it last as long as possible. John Brown to Mary Brown, 26 Nov. (trans.), John Brown Letter Book, GEE.

38. John Brown to Rebecca Spring, 24 Nov., in LLJB, 599–601.

39. John Brown to Mary Brown, 16 Nov., in B. F. Gue, “John Brown and His Iowa Friends,” Midland Monthly (Feb. 1897), 108–9. The original letter is in the Charles Aldrich Autograph Collection, the State Historical Society of Iowa, Des Moines. Also see PLJB, 356–57.

40. John Brown to Children, 22 Nov., MS02-0050, BBS; John Brown to Rebecca Spring, 24 Nov., LLJB, 599–601; John Brown to Mary Brown, 26 Nov., GEE.

41. VILL, 511–17; “The Virginia Fright,” NYTr, 26 Nov., 7.

42. Among the many letters withheld by Andrew Hunter, a good portion were reproduced in a series published in “The John Brown Letters,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography in 1902–3. For examples of these disturbing “rescue” letters, see July 1902, 29; Oct. 1902, 165-68, 173; and Jan. 1903, 273.

43. VILL, 518–25; “The Virginia Panic,” NYTr, 21 Nov., 5; untitled report, NYTr, 21 Nov. 6. Also see Richard G. Lowe, “The Republican Party in Antebellum Virginia, 1856–1860,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 81:3 (Jul. 1973), 259–79.

44. Untitled report, NYTr, 21 Nov., 7; House’s correspondence of 17 Nov., under “John Brown’s Invasion; More Tribulation,” NYTr, 21 Nov., 6; See telegram exchanges between Colonel J. Lucius Davis and Governor Henry A. Wise, all dated 19 Nov., HAW.

45. John Brown to Mary Brown, 21 Nov., LLJB, 295–96; John Brown to Andrew Hunter, 22 Nov., in SCHF, 67-68. Also see VILL, note, 548.

46. See chapter 7.

47. The 1831 Nat Turner revolt in Virginia was a bona fide insurrection, resulting in the killing of over fifty whites, including women and a good many children. The resulting counterattack crushed the insurrection, but outraged whites vented their anger by the indiscriminate murder of many enslaved blacks. See Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1987), chapter 12.

48. JBT, 229; SCHF, 62.

49. SCHF, part 2, 62.

50. Jean Libby, who has done extensive work on the black involvement in the Harper’s Ferry raid, is the first to have recognized the problematic nature of the phrase, “the slaves we took about the Ferry.” She suggests that the statement “must be seen as a device to save lives.” However, she sees it as Brown’s concern for the small group of enslaved men who were captured after joining him at Harper’s Ferry. While this is certainly reasonable, it seems to me that Brown was concerned more broadly with the well-being of local blacks, and hoped to defuse any possible explosion of vengeful rage among local slaveholders pertaining to the fires. See Jean Libby, “The Harpers Ferry Slave Insurrection—1859,” an unpublished essay (Palo Alto, CA: ca. 1985), 47.

51. SCHF, 63.

52. “Excitement and Alarm in Virginia; The Alarm at Charlestown [19 Nov.],” NYH, 20 Nov., 1; “John Brown’s Invasion; More Tribulation,” NYTr, 21 Nov., 6; “Our Richmond Correspondence; Alarming Intelligence, NYH, 20 Nov., 1; “The Excitement at Charlestown; The Cause of the Panic—Unknown Incendiaries at Work,” NYH, 19 Nov., 1.

53. For an excellent discussion about Chilton’s petition, see JBT, 244–47. Also see “Brown’s Case—Writ of Error Refused,” NYTr, 21 Nov., 5; “Action of the Virginia Court of Appeals in Brown’s Case—Writ of Error Refused,” NYH, 20 Nov., 1.

54. The source for this undated letter excerpt is Katherine Mayo’s notation from the Joshua Young scrapbook, quoting an undated San Francisco Chronicle article, Jail Letters 1859 folder, Box 5, OGV. The denial of the writ of error reasonably provides context and dating for this letter excerpt.

55. Undated excerpt from Katherine Mayo’s interview with Anne Brown Adams, in Annie Brown Adams folder, Box 1, OGV.

CHAPTER 10

1. See transcription of the Independent Democrat [Charlestown, VA], 22 Nov., in JB First Days in Charlestown Jail folder, Box 4, OGV.

2. For an overall consideration of this theme, see DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You.”

3. John Brown to Wife and Family, 30 Nov., DHSP; S. K. Donavin, “John Brown at Harper’s Ferry and Charlestown,” SDOH, 328.

4. DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You,” 207–9.

5. Independent Democrat, 22 Nov.

6. See Henry Ward Beecher, “The Nation’s Duty to Slavery,” in Patriotic Addresses in America and England, from 1850 to 1885, edited by John R. Howard (New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert, 1887), 203–23; “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, 29 Nov., 6.

7. Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Three Leaves Press/Doubleday, 2006), 316; Katherine Mayo’s interview with Sarah Brown, Sept. 1908, in Miss Sarah Brown folder, Box 6, OGV.

8. Beecher, “The Nation’s Duty to Slavery.”

9. LLJB, 618; DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You,” 24–25, 73–74; DeCaro, John Brown—the Cost of Freedom, 46–47; “History of the Tribe,” Sac and Fox Nation of Missouri in Kansas and Nebraska (Reserve, KS) website. Retrieved on 22 Feb. 2014 from http://goo.gl/yYVHM3; Interview with Jason Brown, 28 Dec 1908, Jason Brown folder, Box 2, OGV.

10. This document has been variously reproduced, although the best published version is Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States; Preface by Boyd B. Stutler (Weston, MA: M & S Press, 1969). The original draft in Brown’s hand (which he called a “Skeleton”) is held in the Yale University’s Beinecke Library, New Haven, CT. Also see Robert L. Tsai, “John Brown’s Constitution,” Boston College Law Review 51:151 (2010).

11. Boyd B. Stutler, John Brown, an unpublished manuscript, 50, GEE; John Brown to Owen Brown, 19 Jan. 1856, trans., in Letters, Jan. 1856–1859, Box 5, OGV. In another example of Brown’s tendency toward optimism, he took a favorable view of Louis Kossuth in 1851, even after the Hungarian liberator disappointingly failed to support the black struggle in the United States. Still, Brown urged Frederick Douglass to mute his criticism and appreciate Kossuth’s devotion to republican principles in general—a position that the black leader probably found unsatisfactory. See DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You,” 197–99.

12. “Beecher on Brown, And Brown on Beecher,” NYH, 23 Nov., 1–2; as to Brown’s involvement with blacks in the North, see DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You,” ch. 12–15.

13. “The Harper’s Ferry Tragedy; The Execution of Capt. Brown,” The Independent, 8 Dec., 1; “Beecher on Brown, And Brown on Beecher,” 2.

14. W. W. B. Gallaher to “Gen. Brown,” 29 Nov., and John Brown to “Mr. Galager,” 30 Nov., in the Michael J. Konowal Archive of Harper’s Ferry Raid Artifacts. I am indebted to Michael Konowal, a collector and researcher, for restoring and sharing this document—a great find that apparently was unknown to Brown scholars until it resurfaced in 2013.

15. See note 13 in this chapter.

16. “The Executions at Charlestown,” NYH, 17 Dec., 1.

17. My emphases. Biographer Richard Hinton likewise presented these signed testimonies, but made his transcription from the original documents. Indeed, his transcription of Stevens’s and Avis’s statements was inspected and approved by the documentary scholar Thomas Featherstonaugh before the book’s publication in 1894. Hinton’s version of the Avis statement reads, “I also certify that I heard Captain Brown deny that his comments were correctly printed in the New York Herald.” Flaws sometimes mark Hinton’s work, but this variance is probably trustworthy in providing Avis’s original statement. As such, it is affirmed by Brown’s letter to Gallaher and further highlights the deceit of the latter in collaboration with the Herald. See JBHM, 433–34, including 433–34n1.

18. In 2013, Brown’s letter to Gallaher surfaced in a Civil War document sale of the RR Auction house (Amherst, NH), at which time I was contacted by Bobby Livingston, vice president of the firm, inquiring about background information for the letter. My initial response was published on the RR Auction website, although I gained a fuller understanding after the letter was purchased by Michael Konowal, a collector and vigorous historical researcher (see note 14 in this chapter). He observed that another letter was vaguely evident on the other side of the document and immediately set about having it professionally restored. As Konowal suspected, here was the complementary document relating to Brown’s letter—the letter from Gallaher to Brown, disingenuously respectful and friendly in tone, and begging for Brown’s assistance. The restoration of Gallaher side of the document provided far more insight into the episode, not only showing the editor’s connection to the New York Herald but also his fundamental deceit. Fortunately, after being forgotten in a private collection for more than a century and a half, Brown’s letter to Gallaher, along with Gallaher’s letter to Brown, finally found their way into the light of history.

19. [George Adams] to John Brown, 5 Nov., in PLJB, 352–53. John Brown to George Adams, MS02-0048, BBS. Also see “Reply of John Brown,” NYTr, 30 Nov., 6.

20. “Items,” Lancaster Intelligencer, 10 Jan. 1860, 3.

21. Naomi Barbour to Jeremiah R. Brown, 21 Nov., Brown/Clark Collection, GEE.

22. Naomi Humphrey Barbour was the younger sister of Rev. Dr. Heman Humphrey and Rev. Luther Humphrey, both of which wrote to Brown in jail. The mother of these three siblings was Hannah Brown Humphrey, a sister of John Brown’s father, Owen. This made them Brown’s first cousins on his father’s side. Also, Brown’s maternal grandmother was from the notable Humphrey family. See H. H. Barbour, My Wife and My Mother (Hartford, CT: Williams, Wiley & Waterman, 1864), 14; Frederick Humphreys, The Humphreys Family in America Vol. 1 (New York: Humphreys Print, 1883), 303.

23. Heman Humphrey to John Brown, 20 Nov., LLJB, 602–3.

24. “Sensational Sermons from New York Parsons,” NYH, 7 Nov., 10.

25. Herbert Aptheker, “John Brown and Heman Humphrey: An Unpublished Letter,” The Journal of Negro History 52:3 (Jul. 1967), 220–27; LLJB, 421.

26. John Brown to Heman Humphrey, 25 Nov., LLJB, 603–5.

27. John Brown to Marian Brown Hand and Martha Brown Davis, 27 Nov., in Chicago History Museum Collection.

28. Luther Humphrey to John Brown, 12 Nov., in MS 1246, B.2, 2.05, KSHS. Also see EHF, 431–32.

29. For many years, the conservative bent of many Mayflower descendants inclined a denial on the part of their association to acknowledge John Brown’s Mayflower ancestry. In the twentieth century, the Reverend Clarence S. Gee and Boyd B. Stutler made serious inquiry and concluded that the Browns had been unfairly treated in the matter. They affirmed that the Brown family’s claim to descent from the Mayflower’s Peter Brown was through the offspring of his second marriage. This is also affirmed in the Humphrey family genealogy. See Stutler to Gee, 15 Apr. 1932, 1, in GEE; Humphreys, The Humphreys Family in America Vol. 1, 301n.

30. “Captain John Brown” (1728–1776), grandfather of the abolitionist, was elected captain of the Eighth Company, Eighteenth Regular Militia of the Connecticut Colony, by commission of the governor, on 23 May 1776. He died of dysentery while in service, on 3 Sept. 1776. See Humphreys, The Humphreys Family in America Vol. 1, 302; the genealogical article from the Cleveland Leader, rpt. in “Personal,” NYTr, 28 Nov., 3; LLJB, 2–3.

31. John Brown to Luther Humphrey, 19 Nov., in Yale University Library Collection.

32. Biographical and Genealogical History of the City of Newark and Essex County, New Jersey (New York: Lewis Publishing Co., 1898), 95.

33. DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You,” 61–63; Herman L. Vaill to Mary Brown, 8 Dec., GEE; Theodore S. Gold, ed. Historical Records of the Town of Cornwall, Litchfield County, Connecticut (Hartford, CT: Case, Lockwood, & Brainard Co. 1904), 29.

34. Leonard W. Bacon to Joseph Richards, 21 Nov., under “A Prisoner of Jesus Christ, “ Independent, 24 Nov., 1; DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You,” 61–64; John Brown’s autobiographical sketch, under Brown to Henry L. Stearns, 15 July 1857, 5, from a photographic copy in GEE; [William H. Hallock], “John Brown’s Early History—Almost a D.D.” [From The Hartford Press, Nov. 11.” 17 Nov., 5. Also see DeCaro, John Brown—the Cost of Freedom, 159n33.

35. Herman L. Vaill to John Brown, 8 Nov., EHF, 388–89.

36. “John Brown’s Invasion; Other Portraits. Captain Avis,” NYTr, 18 Nov., 5.

37. If the line “Cowards prove their courage by their ferocity,” is a direct quotation, it is has thus far eluded me. Brown sometimes uses quotation marks more for emphasis or for making allusions to similar texts. For instance, earlier, he makes a biblical allusion in the phrase, “God in very deed is with me.” See Sir Walter Scott, Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of the French; With a Preliminary View of the French Revolution, Vol. 1 (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1827), 145.

38. John Brown to Herman L. Vaill, 15 Nov. Transcribed from the original manuscript, sold by Sotheby’s on 3 April 2008, N08507, Presidential and Other American Manuscripts from the Dr. Robert Small Trust, Lot 18. Also see transcription by Louis Ruchames in A John Brown Reader (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1959), 135–36.

39. Herman L. Vaill to John Brown, 21 Nov., HWE; Leonard Bacon, “A Prisoner of Jesus Christ,” The Independent [New York], 24 Nov., 1.

40. “Latest from Charlestown,” BACA, 22 Nov., 1; “The Harper’s Ferry Invasion . . . The Excitement in Richmond,” NYH, 22 Nov., 9.

CHAPTER 11

1. “Latest from Charlestown,” BACA, 22 Nov., 1; Angela Smythe, “John Wilkes Booth and the Richmond Grays: The Journey to Charlestown 1859” (10 May 2012), 40–41, 44, 47. Retrieved from Bound for Glory website on 14 Mar. 2014, at http://goo.gl/r8NpWS.

2. “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, 24 Nov., 6; Morrow B. Lowry, “Visit to John Brown by an Old Neighbor” [from the Erie True American], Philadelphia Press, 30 Nov., 1; “The Harper’s Ferry Invasion; Affairs at Charlestown,” NYH, 23 Nov., 1; Smythe, “John Wilkes Booth and the Richmond Grays,” 30–32, 36, 55–56, 59–60; “New Alarms . . . Old Brown Repentant, &c.,” BACA, 26 Nov, 1.

3. “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, 19 Nov., 5, and an untitled article, same issue, 4, col. 2.

4. “John Brown’s Invasion . . . Col. J. Lucius Davis,” NYTr, 19 Nov., 5; Smythe, “John Wilkes Booth and the Richmond Grays,” 53; “The Charlestown Fright,” NYTr, 24 Nov., 5; “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, 28 Nov., 6.

5. “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, 28 Nov., 6; “The Charlestown Fright . . . a Sentinel Challenges a Cow. She Refuses to Halt. Another Scare,” NYTr, 24 Nov., 5. The woodcut can be found under “The Excitement at Charlston [sic]!” Huntingdon Journal, 30 Nov., 2.

6. “The New-York Tribune,” NYTr, 19 Nov., 1; “Brown and the Virginians,” NYTr, 19 Nov., 4.

7. “Nigger Capacity for Self-Government,” NYH, 21 Nov., 4; “Prefers Slavery to Freedom,” NYH, 18 Nov., 2; “The Panic in Virginia,” NYH, 22 Nov., 6.

8. Herman Vaill to Mary Brown, 8 Dec., 2, GEE; “Undisguised, Outspoken Abolitionism” [Douglass’ Paper, 11 Nov.], NYH, 21 Nov., 2.

9. “The Virginia Panic,” NYTr, 22 Nov., 6. Reprinted from The Baltimore American, 19 Nov.; “The Excitement in Virginia,” NYH, 27 Nov., 1; “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, 24 Nov., 6; “Affairs at Charlestown,” NYTr, 23 Nov., 4; “Charlestown Intelligence,” BACA, 23 Nov., 1; “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, 25 Nov., 5.

10. “Affairs at Charlestown,” NYTr, 23 Nov., 4; description of Brown from “Facts, Incidents, Rumors, &c. Correspondence of The Herald,” National Antislavery Standard, 18 Nov., 1; “Charlestown Intelligence,” BACA, 23 Nov., 1.

11. The Triangle was composed of the northwestern tip of Pennsylvania, comprising Erie and part of Crawford counties, which was purchased in 1792 in order to provide the state greater access to Lake Erie. See Gordon Mitchell, “History Corner: The Erie Triangle,” The Professional Surveyor (May 2008). Retrieved on 5 Mar. 2014 from http://goo.gl/h4BM7o; Beth Simmons, “The Lowry Clan” (2003), Erie County (PA) Genealogy, Rootsweb.com. Retrieved on 4 July 2005 from http://goo.gl/1wEULt.

12. See R. Nelson Hale, “The Pennsylvania Population Company,” Pennsylvania History 16:2 (Apr. 1949), 123–25; Simmons, “The Lowry Clan.”

13. The basis of this episode is found in a letter from the former PPC agent, Judah Colt, who had nothing good to say about “a man by the name of John Brown, traveling about in this County, encouraging the former actual settlers, that they will ultimately recover back all their Claims and that the Companies Title is of no value. . . .” See Judah Colt to Thomas Astley, 1 Feb. 1826, MS06-0038, 1–2, BBS. Boyd Stutler, the venerable authority on John Brown, recognized the possibility that Colt was complaining about another John Brown, but after careful study of Colt’s papers, he concluded that in 1826 there was no other Brown active in the area other than the abolitionist. If not likely, it is certainly reasonable, given Brown’s inclination, to conclude that Brown threw himself into this hopeless conflict to no avail. As Stutler humorously put it, “this letter, I believe, is the first reference to Uncle John’s fine Italian hand in agitation. . . .” Boyd B. Stutler to Howard Wolf, 25 Nov. 1938, 1, RP13-0169, BBS.

14. See DeCaro, John Brown—the Cost of Freedom, 14–15.

15. It is unclear how Lowry obtained these letters from politicians, since his rise to political success in state politics was yet before him. Perhaps his profile as a leading citizen in Erie allowed him sufficient prestige to obtain such support. Lowry became a delegate to Republican National Convention in 1860 and served two terms in the Pennsylvania state senate from 1862 to 1870.

16. There are only two documents regarding Lowry’s visit, and both are contemporary to the period. Lowry wrote an extended account dated 25 November, and Wise wrote something of a rejoinder that was also published on 10 December, just over a week after Brown’s hanging. Lowry’s piece was first published under the title “To the Old Friends of John Brown” in the True American [Erie, PA], about 26 Nov. and was immediately picked up by other Pennsylvania newspapers, notably “A Visit to John Brown,” Crawford Journal [Meadville, PA], 29 Nov., 1; and “Visit to John Brown by an Old Neighbor,” Philadelphia Press, 30 Nov., 1. Wise’s targeted response is found in a letter to B. F. Sloan, 10 Dec., published under “Letter from Gov. Wise,” Erie Observer, 25 Dec., 2.

17. Regarding the deaths of Brown’s first wife and children, see DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You,” 78–80. Chapters 7 and 8 explore his years in Pennsylvania and pursuit of financial success in the early years; [Lowry], “Visit to John Brown by an Old Neighbor.”

18. “Visit to John Brown by an Old Neighbor”; “Another Blast from Mr. Lowry’s Bugle,” Erie Observer, 27 Jun. 1863, 3.

19. John Elmer Reed, History of Erie County, Pennsylvania (Topeka, IN: Historical Publishing Co., 1925), quoted in History of Newspapers and Periodicals in Erie County, PA, website. Retrieved on 21 Mar. 2014 from http://goo.gl/SJmSRv; “Visit to John Brown by an Old Neighbor”; “Letter from Gov. Wise.” Regarding Wise’s friend Hawks, see “Major Wells J. Hawks,” Antietam on the Web. Retrieved on 21 Mar. 2014 from http://goo.gl/GVHtNZ; and Boyd B. Stutler to Forest H. Sweet, 6 Apr. 1938, RP06-0122, BBS.

20. “Charlestown Intelligence . . . Interview With Capt. Brown,” BACA, 23 Nov., 1; Reynolds, John Brown Abolitionist, 118; Edward R. Crowther, “Religion Has Something . . . to Do with Politics,” in Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery, edited by John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 334; Ohio repealed its antimiscegenation law in 1887. See “Miscegenation; Anti-Miscegenation Laws, State by State,” Tennessee Secretary of State website. Retrieved on 24 Mar. 2014 from http://goo.gl/DXGe2k.

21. When blacks did advocate for the removal of bans on interracial marriage, it was more so because such bans were essentially racist and contemptuous toward black people. See “The Intermarriage Law,” Anti-Slavery Standard, 16 Mar. 1843. Cited in Kyle G. Volk, Majority Rule, Minority Rights, Vol. 1 (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2008), 235.

22. Du Bois; John Brown, 54; DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You,” 40–42; David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1830), 11. Electronic version retrieved on 24 Mar. 2014 from Documenting the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina) at http://goo.gl/GU6UP.

23. Abraham Lincoln, First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858. Quoted in John G. Nicolay and John Hay, eds., The Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln Vol. 3 (New York: Francis D. Tandy Company, 1894), 230; [John Brown], Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States (1858), 13. Retrieved on 24 Mar. 2014 from http://goo.gl/sV4umq.

24. See Katherine Mayo’s interview segment with Henry Thompson and daughter [ca. Sept. 1908], in J. B. Early Days/Vow Against Slavery-Views folder, Box 3, OGV. Mayo’s note reiterates what she was told by Brown’s granddaughter: “She says that it was a part of the family creed, inherited from J.B., that one of the ugliest features of slavery was the mingling of the races; but J.B. had regarded it as a monstrosity based on the coercion of slavery. He did not contemplate the possibility in a state of liberty.”

25. John Brown to Mary Brown, 21 Nov., in LLJB, 295–96. Also in PLJB, 371, but mistakenly dated as 12 Nov.; John Brown to “Dear Children All,” 22 Nov., PLJB, 372; John Brown to “Dear Children,” 22 Nov. Based on two original transcriptions, MS02-0050, BBS, and PLJB, 358.

26. “John Brown’s Invasion . . . What Brown Has Accomplished,” NYTr, 25 Nov., 5; “The Virginia Fright,” NYTr, 25 Nov., 5; William B. Taliaferro to “My Darling Wife,” 24 Nov., GLC 7638.02, GLC; Mayor Thomas C. Green’s proclamation of 23 Nov. (trans.), in JB Execution folder, Box 3, OGV.

27. “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, 19 Nov., 5; untitled, NYTr, 24 Nov., 4; untitled report relayed from the Baltimore American, NYTr, 29 Nov., 6.

28. “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, 24 Nov., 6. Description of opened jail-cell door in Fellows, “Saw John Brown Hanged,” New York Sun, 13 Feb. 1898, 2.

29. “The Virginia Fright,” BACA, 23 Nov., 5; Harold W. Hurst, Alexandria on the Potomac: The Portrait of an Antebellum Community (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991), 55. Also see “History of Trinity,” on the Trinity United Methodist Church website: http://www.trinityalexandria.org.

30. “The Virginia Fright.” I have contextualized Brown’s religious upbringing and Calvinist beliefs in DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You.” Recent attempts to render Brown’s theology as revivalistic, novel, or influenced by later trends in New England theology tend to be speculative and unreliable. Brown was a theologically learned layman, not a theologian, and his early training in traditional English Reformed confessions shaped his views. Every description of Brown’s theology by his associates places him close to the Puritans, which is no surprise given his early immersion in the Westminster Catechism. As for the ongoing argument between “Calvinists” and “Arminians,” an interesting debate is found in the readable set, Against Calvinism by Roger E. Olson, and For Calvinism by Michael Horton, both by Zondervan Publishers, 2011.

31. For insight into Brown’s wool commission business, see chapter 3, DeCaro, John Brown—the Cost of Freedom; also see chapters 11 and 12, DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You”; John Brown to Thomas Musgrave, 3 Feb. 1847, MS03-0138, BBS.

32. “Thomas B. Musgrave,” Find-A-Grave website. Retrieved on 25 Mar. 2014 from http://goo.gl/1M9xEp; “Meeting to Sympathize with John Brown,” Liberator, 23 Dec., 140.

33. John Pierpont, “Warren’s Address,” in The American National Song Book (Philadelphia: William McCarty, 1842).

34. Thomas B. Musgrave Jr. to John Brown, 7 Nov., HWE.

35. John Brown to Thomas B. Musgrave Jr., 17 Nov., #7638.01, GLC.

36. Brown’s letter to Musgrave was published prior to his hanging. See “Letters from John Brown,” NYTr, 25 Nov., 5.

37. Musgrave reveals his business involvement with Marcus Spring in his letter to Brown on 7 November.

38. Brown was undoubtedly correct about the fabric and origin of the osnaburg sacks, since “osnaburg made from the cotton plant became prevalent by the early 19th century, spurred by developments in ginning and spinning that made cotton goods faster and more economical to produce.” See Linda Baumgarten, “Linen,” in World of a Slave: Encyclopedia of the Material Life of Slaves in the United States (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood/ABC-CLIO, 2011), 316. Given New York City’s strong commercial links to cotton production the South, it is even more likely that the osnaburg products sold by Musgrave’s firm were produced by slave-produced cotton. Brown was already quite conscious of these matters a decade before as a fervent antislavery businessman in Springfield and would not have used cotton sacks, so it is far more likely that the sacks that he regularly purchased from the elder Musgrave’s Northhampton factory were made of wool or some other rough linen produced by free labor. “We are in want of more sacks to store the remainder of the wool which we are to send you; please send them soon.” Perkins & Brown to Thomas Musgrave Sr., 18 Aug.1846, MS03-0044, BBS.

39. “Reminiscences of John Brown” [trans.], Kansas City Journal [MO], 29 May 1881, J. B. Arms and How Obtained/Nat. Kansas Committed folder, Box 3, OGV. The accuracy of some details of Musgrave’s reminiscence is open to question. If Brown’s visit to his company was “in the summer of 1859” as he claimed, it is possible that the episode of the osnaburg sacks took place between June 4–6, the last time Brown visited New York before going into the South. However, Musgrave says Brown was soliciting monies to buy rifles for Kansas, which seems less likely at this date unless the abolitionist was telling a blunt lie. More likely, Musgrave conflated this June 1859 visit with Brown’s previous visit to New York City in late January 1857, when he met with the National Kansas Committee. At that time, Brown was quite solicitous of procuring weapons and support for the Kansas effort, and it makes sense that he would have also sought support from antislavery merchants. Musgrave also claimed to have been the one who obtained a plain suit for Brown’s burial and that the kind deed ruined his business position. However, it is more likely that he had only procured the suit on behalf of Marcus and Rebecca Spring and that the company was afterward hurt when this became known.

CHAPTER 12

1. One of his guards later recalled, Brown “never displayed the least temper, although he certainly had occasion to get angry every day, for he was hated and disliked everywhere in that locality.” William Fellows, “Saw John Brown Hanged.”

2. William E. Connelley, John Brown (Topeka, KS: Crane & Company, 1900), 255–56; VILL, 201; Charles Clarke, “Henry Clay Pate,” Kansas Bogus Legislature website. This website presents a documented discussion about Brown. See http://kansasboguslegislature.org/mo/pate_h_c.html. Pate identified himself as a slaveholder in Henry Clay Pate to [James G. Bennett], 8 Nov., under “Comparison between Himself and John Brown—More Kansas Reminiscences. To the Editor of the Herald,” NYH, 12 Nov., 1.

3. “H. Clay Pate, and Old Brown,” New York Sun, 25 Oct., 1; Pate to [Bennett], 8 Nov., under “Comparison between Himself and John Brown,” NYH, 12 Nov., 1; See Clay Pate, John Brown, as Viewed by H. Clay Pate (New York: published by the author, 1859).

4. “George Washington Brown,” Kansapedia [Topeka: Kansas Historical Society]. Retrieved on 21 May 2014 from http://goo.gl/h3ZowY; VILL, 142.

5. William Elsey Connelley, John Brown (Topeka, KS: Crane & Company, 1900), 144–46n12.

6. “In regard to Old John Brown I have written nor published nothing only what I believed to be strictly true,” G. W. Brown wrote in defense of his polemics. “Through his instrumentality and that of Redpath, Realf, Cook, and other men of that character, with whom I might include James H. Lane, our troubles have been protracted at least one year, and an amount of suffering and wretchedness has been entailed upon the people of this Territory which is almost incalulatable [sic].” “G.W. Brown in Reply to James Redpath,” NYTr, 30 Nov. 6.

7. Connelley, John Brown, 145; John Brown to Franklin B. Sanborn, 20 July–6 Aug. 1858, in LLJB, 476. Also see VILL, 354; See Richard Realf, “Notice!! to the Public!” 14 July 1857, No. 100165, Port Vault K 978.1 R229n 1857, KSHS; James Redpath, “G. W. Brown vs. John Brown [undated letter to the editor], NYTr, 7 Nov., 7.

8. Boyd B. Stutler to Joseph A. Johnston, 22 Feb. 1926, RP06-0042, BBS.

9. In the summer of 1854 Brown wrote, “If you or any of my family are disposed to go to Kansas or Nebraska, with a view to help defeat Satan and his legions in that direction, I have not a word to say; but I feel committed to operate in another part of the field.” John Brown to John Brown Jr., 21 Aug. 1854 (trans.), LLJB, 191.

10. Brown’s son-in-law Henry Thompson recalled that the old man and his sons went into Missouri at least twice during the winter of 1855–1856, and never had any incident with proslavery people. Interview with Henry Thompson, 7 Sept. 1908, in Henry Thompson folder, Box 17, OGV.

11. See my discussions on Brown in Kansas in “Fire from the Midst of You,” chaps. 17–18; and John Brown—the Cost of Freedom, chap. 5.

12. “Strong Kansas Testimony against Brown,” NYH, 5 Nov., 1; “G.W. Brown vs. John Brown,” NYTr, 7 Nov., 7; “Old John Brown and the Pottawatomie Massacre,” NYH, 11 Nov., 5; “G.W. Brown in Reply to James Redpath,” NYTr, 30 Nov., 6.

13. “Old Brown a Common Thief. Statement of a Virginia Senator,” NYH, 22 Nov., 9; “A Slander Upon John Brown Refuted,” NYTr, 30 Nov., 6.

14. “Visit to John Brown by an Old Neighbor” (The Erie True American), rpt. Philadephia Press, 30 Nov., 1.

15. Mahala Doyle to John Brown, 20 Nov., #0631, in Folder 4, Intercepted Letters, Box 23, HWE. Also see W. W. Scott, ed., “The John Brown Letters,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 10:1 (July 1902), 31–32; “From Charlestown: A Woman’s Hate” [29 Nov.], NYTr, 2 Dec., 5.

16. Documentary scholar Boyd B. Stutler was the first to confirm that this claim was a fake. See his notes on “Questionnaire filled out by John C. Doyle,” RP10-0137, BBS. The myth of John Doyle’s invitation to participate in Brown’s execution is still being circulated, as in Robert Jenkins, “Civil War Anniversary: John Brown and ‘The Rest of the Story,’” Daily Citizen [Dalton, GA], 15 Jan. 2011. Retrieved on 15 Jan. 2011 from http://goo.gl/KGFgqu.

17. “A Woman’s Letter to John Brown” [undated report from the Baltimore Sun], The Liberator, 16 Dec. 1859, 1; “John Brown’s Invasion. Intelligence from Charlestown,” BACA, 2 Dec., 1.

18. For retrospective accounts of Brown explaining his reasons for the Pottawatomie attacks, see the testimony of settler E. A. Coleman in LLJB, 258–59; and Governor Samuel J. Crawford to Eli Thayer, 4 Aug. 1879 (trans.), in JB in Kansas 1855-59 folder, Box 4, OGV.

19. “The Truth of History—the Pottawatomie Massacre” [from the Herald of Freedom, 12 Nov.], NYH, 21 Nov., 1.

20. There are two copies of this letter, one in the Library of Virginia’s Wise Papers (see note 15 in this chapter), and the other in the Gilder Lehrman Collection, GLC #079590 (http://goo.gl/sHUQTt). In the 1902 publication of this letter in The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the editor W. W. Scott referred to the version in the Wise Papers as a “copy.” This would imply that the one held in the Gilder Lehrman Collection is the original, although the handwriting of the latter is much nicer than the former, which perhaps signifies that Doyle did not write the letter in her own hand. See note 21 in this chapter.

21. Doyle stated that she had “to get some one to do my writing.” Doyle to Utter, 18 June 1883; Richard Hinton to editor (Boston Traveler), 3 Dec., rpt. “A Defense of the Memory of John Brown, The Liberator, 16 Dec., 1. Also rpt. NYTr, 8 Dec., 3.

22. PLJB, 67–68; “A Woman’s Letter to John Brown” [rpt. from the Baltimore Sun, no date], The Liberator, 16 Dec. 1859, 1; Hinton, “A Defense of the Memory of John Brown.”

23. Mahala Doyle to David Utter, 18 June 1883 (trans.), RP10-0138C, BBS; Hinton, “A Defense of the Memory of John Brown”; Mahala Doyle Affidavit, 7 Jun. 1856, in Report of the Special Committee Appointed to Investigate the Troubles in Kansas (34th Congress, 1st Session, Report No. 200, Washington, DC, 1856), 1193 (trans.), RP10-0139, BBS.

24. I have partially emended Salmon’s writing, which actually reads: “. . . they would get there pay for there develment.” Salmon Brown to Franklin B. Sanborn, 17 Nov. 1911 (trans.), MS05-0034, BBS.

25. In both the Doyle and Wilkinson affidavits, it is mentioned that Brown and his men referred to themselves as “the army” or “the northern army.” See “The Pottawatomie Creek Massacre. Affidavits Implicating Old John Brown as the Leader of the Band” (Westport [MO] Border Star), NYH, 1 Dec., 10.

26. It is worth noting that the racist usage of “law and order” reappeared in opposition to civil rights activism in the twentieth century. Brown to Sanborn, 17 Nov. 1911, and Salmon Brown to William E. Connelley, 28 May 1913 (trans.), MS05-0039, BBS; John Doyle Affidavit, 7 June. 1856, in Report of the Special Committee Appointed to Investigate the Troubles in Kansas (trans.), RP10-0139, BBS.

27. Nicole Etcheson, “John Brown, Terrorist?” American Nineteenth Century History 10:1 (Mar. 2009), 43; Notes from O. C. Brown, “Osa-wat-o-mie” (1895), O. C. Brown folder, Box 6, OGV.

28. Paul Finkelman, “John Brown: America’s First Terrorist?” Prologue 43:1 (Spring 2011), 27. Also see DeCaro, John Brown—the Cost of Freedom, 47–48.

29. Finkelman, “John Brown: American’s First Terrorist?” Also see Nicole Etcheson, “John Brown, Terrorist?”

30. Robert E. McGlone, John Brown’s War against Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 131–32.

31. I have endeavored to fairly address the Pottawatomie incident in this work, mainly because the themes of G. W. Brown and Henry Clay Pate interpose on the narrative of Brown’s final days. However, it is neither possible nor needful to provide an expansive discussion on the Kansas episode here. While I disagree with some of his conclusions, the most complete analysis of the Pottawatomie incident to date is found in McGlone, John Brown’s War against Slavery, 114–42. Similarly, Paul Finkelman effectively dismantles the flawed notion of Brown’s terrorism in “John Brown: America’s First Terrorist?” See note 28 in this chapter.

32. “John Brown’s Invasion. Intelligence from Charlestown,” BACA, 2 Dec., 1.

33. Pate mistakenly set the date of his meeting with Brown as November 21. Compare “Charlestown Intelligence,” BACA, 26 Nov., 1, and Pate, John Brown, as Viewed by H. Clay Pate, 60.

34. He is mistakenly identified as “Simon Perham” in the Daily Telegraph [Harrisburg, PA], 15 Nov., 26. Also see “Excursion to See Old Brown Hung,” NYH 13 Nov., 1, and “Return of Richmond Military . . . [BA, 28 Nov.], NYH, 29 Nov., 1.

35. See DeCaro, John Brown—the Cost of Freedom, 28–37. It is unclear whether Josiah Perham was directly related to the future governor of Maine, Sidney Perham. The latter was a highly successful sheep farmer and doubtless would have known of Brown or even dealt with him in the 1840s. If the two Perhams were closely related, it is possible that Josiah first came to know Brown through his home connections in Maine. See “Sidney Perham” in The National Cyclopedia of American Biography (New York: J. T. White, 1896), 315.

36. Aaron Morton Sakolski, The Great American Land Bubble (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932), 242 and 295. Also see BBS, which contains the letter books of the Perkins & Brown operation, including a good many letters to Josiah Perham. For example, see http://goo.gl/XwPKo5.

37. M. John Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble: The Northern Pacific Railroad, the Sioux, and the Panic of 1873 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 32–33.

38. Unfortunately, this effort lacked finance despite generous federal land grants, and Perham was so weighed down by debt that he lost control of the project, dying penniless a few years after the Civil War. Despite coming close to great success, both Perham and John Brown became footnotes in the business history of the United States—one having prematurely sought to unify and empower the nation’s woolgrowers over against industrialists, and the other almost having “opened the storied Northwest Passage that had been sought for five hundred years.” Jack Harpster, The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago: A Biography of William B. Ogden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 210; People’s Pacific Railroad Company Charter, Organization, Address of the President, Josiah Perham (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1860), 5; Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble, 33.

39. Perhaps it is no surprise that Perham’s political strategy was largely premised on the profit motive. He called for a specific force of occupation to seize all secessionist lands as booty, resettle all blacks in a few of the “cotton states” as their own, and essentially turn the occupying Union army into land barons and capitalist investors within a radically transformed South. To achieve this further, Perham wanted to flood the rebel states with emigrants from free states, transported southward by the railroads at excursion prices. In so doing, they would effectively outnumber the rebel sympathizers who remained. Perham declared that if the occupying Union forces had no salary, but rather took possession of rebel holdings in the South, they would “become rich.” Josiah Perham, Gen. Perham’s Platform. Most Feasible Plan Yet Offered for Suppressing the Rebellion (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1862), 11.

40. Ibid, 2.

41. Account of their words of greeting recounted by Thomas S. Taliaferro, 20 April 1909, in Henry Clay Pate folder, Box 14, OGV; “John Brown’s Invasion. Further Interesting Incidents of the Execution,” NYTr, 6 Dec., 6.

42. Frank P. Stearns, “John Brown and His Eastern Friends,” New England Magazine (July 1910), 590; Frank H. Hodder, “The John Brown Pikes,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 2:4 (Nov. 1933), 386–90.

43. Pate, John Brown, As Viewed by H. Clay Pate, 4 and 38; “John Brown’s Bowie Knife,” Daily News [Batavia, NY], 31 Jan. 1900, 5.

44. William Connelley’s scrapbook, anonymous notes, Salmon Brown folder, Box 6, OGV; Pate’s words according to Horace Day and recounted in Jason Brown to Francis G. Adams, 2 April 1884, in Jason Brown folder, Box 2, OGV; Katherine Mayo’s interview with Salmon Brown, 11–13 Oct. 1908, Salmon Brown folder, Box 6, OGV.

45. Brown’s firsthand account of taking Pate prisoner is found in “John Brown to editor,” NYTr, 1 July 1856, 6. Also see VILL, 204–6.

46. “Three years ago, I thrashed one coward who said I surrendered, and when he was called on for satisfaction, would not accept a challenge.” See letter from Pate, 21 Oct., under “Comparison between Himself and John Brown—More Kansas Reminiscences. “To the Editor of the Herald,” NYH, 12 Nov., 1.

47. Pate lied about the number of Brown’s men and likewise claimed that he had been tricked under a flag of truce. See John Brown, as Viewed by H. Clay Pate, 5; “The Excitement in Virginia. Affairs at Charlestown,” BACA, 26 Nov., 1; Boyd B. Stutler to Lewis W. Bridgman, 12 April 1959, RP02-0036, and Boyd B. Stutler to Joseph A. Johnston, 22 Feb. 1926, RP06-0042, BBS.

48. Taliaferro reminiscence, 20 April 1909; “The Excitement in Virginia. Affairs at Charlestown”; Gerald Pait to A. J. Pait, 24 May 2010, in “Pate-L Archives,” Rootsweb.com. Retrieved on 13 April 2014 from http://goo.gl/bCSYUZ.

49. “John Brown’s Invasion. Further Interesting Incidents of the Execution,” NYTr, 6 Dec., 6; “Letter from New York,” Philadelphia Press, 12 Dec., 1.

50. Pate, John Brown, as Viewed by H. Clay Pate, 60–61.

51. Ibid., 4, 14, 21, 29, and 30.

52. “Sketch of Captain John Brown, the Leader of the Insurrection,” Independent Republican [Montrose, PA], 27 Oct., 1. One exception seems to have been the Chicago Press and Tribune, whose editor both acknowledged Brown’s involvement and unapologetically defended his actions. See Chicago Press and Tribune (8 Nov.), quoted in “Old John Brown and the Pottawatomie Massacre,” NYH, 11 Nov., 5.

53. LLJB, 261, including n. 1; John R. McKivigan, Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 54.

54. Reverend Young initially wrote to Mary Brown, and Salmon responded on behalf of his mother on 27 Dec. See Salmon Brown to Joshua Young (trans.), Salmon Brown folder, Box 6, OGV. Sanborn presents an edited version of the letter without identifying the recipient. See LLJB, 261–62. In 1908–1909, Katherine Mayo was conducting extensive field research as the assistant to Oswald Villard, whose biography of Brown was published in 1910. Villard’s papers at Columbia University contain transcripts and note portions from her interviews (and other interviews) with the surviving associates of Brown, including sons Jason and Salmon, and son-in-law Henry Thompson, the latter two being among the Pottawatomie killers.

55. John Brown and all of his sons except Oliver spent Christmas in Hudson and were hosted at the home of Jeremiah Brown. See Wealthy Brown to Henry & Ruth Thompson, 1 Jan. 1857, Brown Family Letters Collection, Box 3, GEE; “A Slander upon John Brown Refuted.”

56. LLJB, 258; Thomas Russell to Charles A. Foster, Jan. [July?] 1860 (trans.), Thomas Russell folder, Box 15, OGV. The original is noted as being in KSHS.

57. “G.W. Brown vs. John Brown”; “A Defense of the Memory of John Brown.”

58. Based on one unreliable source, some have claimed that Brown actually killed the elder Doyle, by shooting him in the head. However, this flies in the face of both evidence and testimony, and the most intensive scholarly investigations find to the contrary. Indeed, this unlikely claim seems to be intended to worsen the implications of the killings at Brown’s expense. That he actually shot the head of Doyle’s corpse is undoubted, but the motivation for the act and its meaning to Brown even eluded his men. The best discussion on this point is McGlone, John Brown’s War against Slavery, 139–41. Even Oswald Villard, who was absolutely critical of Brown’s actions at Pottawatomie, concluded that the old man shot Doyle’s corpse. See VILL, 159–60.

59. “Our Charlestown Correspondence . . . Charlestown, Va., Dec. 1, 1859,” NYH, 4 Dec., 2.

60. Interview with Wealthy Hotchkiss Brown, 30 Nov.–3 Dec. 1908, in Mr. & Mrs. John Brown Jr. file, Box 6, OGV; Finkelman, “John Brown: America’s First Terrorist?,” 27.

61. It bears note that those who label Brown a “terrorist” almost never give equal attention to the incidents of proslavery “terrorism” that happened before and after the Pottawatomie killings and tend to isolate the Pottawatomie incident as if it were an unprecedented action that took place in a context of political stability. It is also worth noting that Jesse James, a proslavery thug and career criminal, has enjoyed the “halo effect” in US history despite his participation in the massacre at Lawrence, Kansas, led by William Quantrill and “Bloody Bill” Anderson in 1863. Why are many people so sentimental if not forgiving toward Jesse James but cannot sympathetically consider the circumstances faced by John Brown, an antislavery figure, in 1856?

62. See John Brown to Mary Brown, 24 June 1856, in DeCaro, John Brown—the Cost of Freedom, 51–53, 140–43. LLJB, 258, 261. Sanborn recalled Mary Brown telling him in 1882 that she had no knowledge of her husband’s role in the killings at the time, and it is likely that she did not find out until many years later.

63. Mary Brown to the editor, 17 Jan. 1860, under “A Letter from the Widow of John Brown, Mary Ann Brown,” NYTr, 25 Jan. 1860, 7. Reprinted in NYT, 26 Jan. 1860.

64. Charles S. Adair to Oswald Villard, 23 June 1909, Pottawatomie folder, Box 14, OGV.

CHAPTER 13

1. “Old Brown,” The Spectator [Staunton, VA], 1 Nov., 2; Ainslie Smith, One Hundred Famous Americans, 447; Peter F. Drucker, “Beyond the Information Revolution,” The Atlantic Monthly (Oct. 1999), 50. The notion of Brown’s “rage at the modern” is one of the most inane and baseless characterizations of the abolitionist. See Allen C. Guelzo, “Terrorist or Madman? A Review of John Brown: The Legend Revisited, by Merrill D. Peterson,” The Claremont Review of Books (Fall 2003).

2. “Card of the Illustrated News. To the Editor,” NYTr, 6 Dec., 6; Albert B. Paine, Th. Nast: His Period and His Pictures (New York: Macmillan, 1904), 21.

3. “Bogus Illustrations,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 12 Nov., 1. Also see Leslie’s ad in NYTr, 12 Nov., 1; compare Leslie’s ad on p. 1 and Campbell’s response, “Enterprise and Truth versus Laziness and Lying,” and “The New-York Illustrated News versus Frank Leslie’s Newspaper” on p. 8, both in NYH, 19 Dec.

4. The Richmond Whig, quoted in The Commonwealth [Frankfurt, KY], 11 Nov., and “The Plan of Insurrection,” Mercury [Charleston, S.C.], 1 Nov., both transcribed under “John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry,” Secession Era Editorials Project (Furman University, Greenville, SC). Retrieved on 9 June 2014 from http://goo.gl/TDtXHF.

5. “The New Era of the Anti-Slavery Agitation,” NYH, 25 Nov., 4; Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (New York: Burdick Brothers, 1857), 23; See “Abolition Revolutionary Scheme. Incitement to Treason and Civil War . . . the Republican Party Abolitionized,” and Bennett’s editorial, “Revolutionary Designs of the Abolitionists—New York Names Endorsing Treason,” NYH, 26 Nov., 1 & 4.

6. “Who Taught John Brown?” and “Whose Ox Is Gored?,” both in NYTr, 12 Nov., 4.

7. Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1850–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938, 1970), 367–69; “The Preachers of Brooklyn, Number Two” (trans.), Brooklyn Eagle [Brooklyn, NY], 13 Jan. 1869. Retrieved on 9 June 2014 from http://goo.gl/AYs3DI; See also “Biographical Note” under “Joseph Parrish Thompson and Leonard Bacon Papers, 1845–1928,” Columbia University Libraries, Rare Book & Manuscript Library (http://goo.gl/G7dTN2); “John Brown As A Hero,” Independent [New York], 10 Nov., 4.

8. John Brown to Thomas W. Higginson, 22 Nov., in John Brown Papers, Ms. 895, Boston Public Library Collection, Boston, MA, transcribed in A John Brown Reader, edited by Louis Ruchames (New York: Abelard and Schuman, 1959), 145.

9. John Brown to James W. McFarland, 23 Nov. (trans.), in John Brown Letterbook, GEE. Gee transcribed it from The Free Church Portfolio [New Castle, PA], January 1860. Brown alludes to the biblical texts, Acts 4:19 and Hebrews 13:3.

10. Ibid. Brown quotes Job 3:17. “Divine origin,” see Brown to Wife and family, 30 Nov., DHSP. Although a Congregationalist, Brown came of age and received his early religious training under Presbyterian clergy using the Westminster Confession and Shorter Catechism. Article V:10 of the Confession reads in part “The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all . . . doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.” See DeCaro,“Fire from the Midst of You,” 33–34, 65; Joel R. Beeke and Sinclair B. Ferguson, eds., Reformed Confessions Harmonized (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999), 17.

11. Clarence S. Gee, See “John Brown of Osawatomie: His Soul Has Been Marching On for One Full Century,” United Presbyterian—Synod of Ohio Historical Bulletin 12 (May 1959), 1–2.

12. Redpath’s ad, under “John Brown’s Correspondence,” NYTr, 30 Nov., 6. By my count, Redpath published nearly twenty of Brown’s letters between his two 1860 books. His publications remained the prominent source until Franklin B. Sanborn’s 1885 “biography” of Brown, which is really a letter collection with a framing narrative.

13. John Brown to Mary Brown, 26 Nov. (trans.). In the middle of the twentieth century, Clarence S. Gee and Louis Ruchames both made precise transcriptions from a “copy” of this letter when it was available in OGV, although subsequently it seems to have disappeared from that collection. See Ruchames, A John Brown Reader, 151–52. A segment of this letter is also quoted in PLJB, 361.

14. “Thanksgiving Day,” NYH, 24 Nov., 1; “Thanksgiving Day. Sermons of Dr. Cheever and Dr. Osgood on Brown and His Sympathizers,” NYH, 25 Nov., 1; Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1676 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 299; George I. Rockwood, “George Barrell Cheever: Protagonist of Abolition,” American Antiquarian Society (April 1936), 110.

15. “Thanksgiving Day. Sermons”; We Called Him Rabbi Abraham: Lincoln and American Jewry, a Documentary History, edited by Gary Phillip Zola (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), 79–87; Max James Kohler, Phases of Jewish Life in New York before 1800 (New York: American Jewish Society [No. 2], 1894), 84 (http://goo.gl/PKQ8F3). Also see Emilio Guerra, “Congregation Shearith Israel,” which is based on The 1974 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report (http://goo.gl/feVgZq).

16. “Telegram Office,” VFP, 24 Nov., 2; “The Harper’s Ferry Outbreak . . . Telegraph Office Closed,” NYH, 10 Nov., 5.

17. John Brown to Rebecca Spring, 24 Nov., in LLJB, 599–601; Brown to E.B., 1 Nov., PLJB, 348–49; Brown to Vaill, 15 Nov.; John Brown to Dear Children, 22 Nov., MS02-0050, BBS.

18. See “Hymn XIV. The Lord’s Day: or, Delight in Ordinances,” in The Works of Rev. Isaac Watts D.D. in Nine Volumes, Vol. 9 (London: Longman et al., 1813), 163–64.

19. Susan I. Lesley to Catherine Robbins, 27 Nov., in Life and Letters of Peter and Susan Lesley, Vol. 2, 377.

20. When I use the term post-Protestant, I mean that the United States in Brown’s era was culturally and religiously closer to the Puritans and their pilgrim counterparts, whose worldview was in turn premised on the foundational beliefs of the Protestant Reformation. Familiarity with the church, hymns, biblical texts, and traditional Protestant values were still largely normative. Two examples to illustrate this observation is that most educational institutions were founded by clergymen up until the late nineteenth century and that politicians and orators commonly used biblical language and references in their speeches. How many people today would know, for instance, that Lincoln’s “house divided” speech was an appropriation of the words of Jesus?

21. “John Brown’s Fanaticism,” BACA, 7 Dec., 2.

22. This is no exaggeration. Consider the writings of two darlings of the Reformed Presbyterian church in the South, James Thornwell and Robert Dabney, who supported the slave masters’ rebellion and developed a finely honed biblical defense of their enslavement of black people. The latter theologian even continued arguing for the biblical basis of slavery and the justification of the Confederate cause after the Civil War. See James H. Thornwell, The Rights and Duties of Masters: A Sermon Preached at the Dedication of a Church Erected in Charlestown, South Carolina (Charleston, SC: Walker & James, 1850); and Robert L. Dabney, A Defence of the South (New York: E. J. Hale & Son, 1867).

23. Homer B. Sprague, “Thirteenth Regiment, C.V.,” The Soldiers’ Record, 27 Feb. 1869, 270.

24. “John Brown’s Invasion. Correspondence of the N.Y. Tribune. About Brown,” NYTr, 9 Nov., 5; “The Trials at Charlestown. Correspondence of the N.Y. Tribune,” NYTr, 12 Nov., 6.

25. According to SS1860, Avis held no slaves as jailer, and none were part of his household during Brown’s incarceration.

26. “Fifty Young Negroes of Both Sexes Wanted,” VFP, 10 Nov., 4; Whether these marketed enslaved people were jailed during Brown’s incarceration is not known, although one enslaved woman was placed in a cell at some point before the Harper’s Ferry raiders were hanged, the tragic scene of which is mentioned in ABR, 169.

27. See ads “Cash for Negroes” and “Boot and Shoe Manufactory,” Spirit of Jefferson, 15 Sept. 1860, 4.

28. “John Brown’s Invasion. Correspondence of the N.Y. Tribune. About Brown,” NYTr, 9 Nov., 5. “After all was over Avis wrote to Mr. Spring to say that he had lost his place, and must seek other means of support for his family. He had been too kind.” ABR, 149. It should be noted that two of Brown’s raiders attempted to escape prior to their execution, breaking through the jailhouse wall and nearly making it over the backyard wall before being apprehended. Avis, who had imputed the same qualities of Brown to his men, surely felt betrayed by their effort, while the escape attempt doubtless left him vulnerable to his critics. See Lubet, John Brown’s Spy, 239; “The Prisoners Yesterday—the Religious Services, Etc.,” NYH, 17 Dec., 1, and “Letter from Cook and Coppie on the Their Attempted Escape,” NYH, 19 Dec., 2.

29. “Poor Old John Brown; People Who Witnessed His Brave Raid and Execution,” Press, 27 Jan. 1884, in John Brown clipping file, NYHS; Fellows, “Saw John Brown Hanged.”

30. SDOH, 327 and 347. From available issues of the paper, S. K. Donavin was co-owner and proprietor of The Spirit of Jefferson from 19 Sept. 1854, along with William Lucas Jr., until mid-1855, when he is presented as co-owner and proprietor with Jackson Douglas. Sometime in the first half of 1856, Donavin and Douglas apparently sold the paper to Lucas, who became sole proprietor and publisher. It is unclear when Donavin joined the reporting staff of the Baltimore Daily Exchange. See West Virginia GeoExplorer Project [Jefferson County, WV], “Newspapers,” at http://goo.gl/lvkNkQ.

31. David Turner, “Historical Reminiscences,” Elizabethtown Post [NY], 2 Mar. 1899, 1.

32. John Brown Jr. to [Clifton Tayleure] ca. June 1879, quoted in Frank A. Burr, “Old John Brown’s Boy: The Son of Liberty’s Martyr a Grape Grower on a Lake Erie Island,” The Press, November [ca. 1883], in Mr. & Mrs. John Brown Jr. folder, Box 6, OGV. Also see John Brown Jr. to H. E. Young, 22 Feb. 1887, quoted in “John Brown’s Son Sends A Gift to Charleston,” NYT, 6 Mar. 1887, 14; Ruth’s account relayed in an interview with Mary Thompson, 22 Aug.–1 Sept. 1908, Henry & Ruth Thompson folder, Box 17, OGV; John Brown to “Beloved Sisters Mary A. & Martha,” 27 Nov. (trans.) in John Brown Letter Book, GEE.

33. Letter of Sgt. George J. Sager, Bolivar Heights, Va., 7 Dec. 1862, Lot No. 0362, Raynor’s Historical Collectible Auctions (Burlington, NC). Retrieved on 6 Feb. 2006 from http://www.hcaauctions.com; Frederick Douglass’s words at the Clinton Street Baptist Church, in “Singing ‘John Brown’s Body,’” NYT, 18 May 1886, 2.

34. SDOH, 329; William A. Phillips, “Three Interviews with John Brown,” The Atlantic Monthly (Dec. 1879), 743.

35. Samuel C. Pomeroy, “My Last Sight of John Brown,” Christian Cynosure XIX:28 (31 Mar. 1887), 1; Pomeroy’s statement on the Pottawatomie killings is found under “Opinions on the Killings,” Pottawatomie folder, Box 14, OGV. See “Samuel Clarke Pomeroy,” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (Washington, DC: United States Congress). Retrieved on 16 June 2014 from http://goo.gl/xjX5hB. Also see “Samuel Clarke Pomeroy,” Territorial Kansas Online (Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society). Retrieved on 16 June 2014 from http://goo.gl/UFprM9.

36. “James Mitchell Ashley,” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (Washington, DC: United States Congress). Retrieved on 16 June 2014 from http://goo.gl/StNRgB; Pomeroy, “My Last Sight of John Brown.”

37. Pomeroy, “My Last Sight of John Brown.” Brown quoted Matthew 25:36.

38. “Scenes in Charlestown . . . an Interview with Old Brown,” NYH, 3 Dec., 1 & 8.

39. John Brown to Mary Brown, 26 Nov.; Marian Brown Hand to John Brown, 23 Nov., in EHF, 429–30; John Brown to “My Dearly Beloved Sisters Mary A. & Martha,” 27 Nov., in the John Brown Papers, Chicago History Museum.

40. [Mary Stearns] to John Brown 18 Nov., EHF, 416–17; “Marie” Stearns to Henry A. Wise, 19 Nov. (trans.), in W. W. Scott, ed., “John Brown Letters,” The Virginia Historical Magazine 10:4 (Apr. 1903), 385.

41. John Brown to “My Dear Miss Sterns,” ALs, 27 Nov. 1859, AMs 370/29, Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia. A somewhat flawed transcription was published three days after Brown’s hanging. See “John Brown, the Martyr,” Springfield Republican, 5 Dec. Also see PLJB, 362–63.

42. Report dated 28 Nov. under “Further from Charlestown,” NYTr, 29 Nov., 5; “Extracts from Several Papers. Charlestown Incidents,” NYTr, 1 Dec., 6; “John Brown’s Invasion” (correspondence of 27 Nov.), NYTr, 30 Nov., 6.

43. “Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Old Man,” NYTr, 30 Nov., 7.

CHAPTER 14

1. “The Harper’s Ferry Trouble . . . Return of Richmond Military [report of 26 Nov. from the Baltimore American], NYH, 29 Nov., 1; DHSL, 47; “John Brown’s Invasion [from the Baltimore American], NYH, 28 Nov., 1. See Virginia Groark, “Slave Policies,” NYT, 5 May 2002. Retrieved on 20 June 2014 from http://goo.gl/n1wz71.

2. “John Brown’s Invasion,” BACA; “Extracts from Several Papers”; “John Brown’s Invasion,” 30 Nov., 6.

3. “John Brown’s Invasion,” 30 Nov., 6; “Scenes in Charlestown . . . an Interview with Old Brown” [report of 30 Nov.], NYH, 3 Dec., 8; “Extracts From Several Papers. Charlestown Incidents,” NYTr, 1 Dec., 6; “From Charlestown. A Visit to the Prisoners,” NYTr, 30 Nov., 5.

4. DHSL, 48; “A Virginian” [report of 26 Nov.], NYT, 29 Nov., 1.

5. “The Harper’s Ferry Trouble . . . Return of Richmond Military”; “A Virginian.”

6. Gallaher’s erroneous report is found in “The Harper’s Ferry Invasion. Affairs at Charlestown,” NYH, 24 Nov., 1. While Pennsylvania’s governor Packer did not offer Wise ten thousand men, he did respond to a missive from Wise in a telegraph on 1 Dec., declaring that he would cooperate in turning over any of Brown’s men found to be in his state. However, Packer’s response to Wise was as dutiful as it was curt and defensive. See Wm. F. Packer to Henry A. Wise, 1 Dec. (trans.), in Doc. No. I, Governor’s Message and Reports of the Public Officers of the State, of the Boards of Directors, and of the Visitors, Superintendents, and other Agents of Public Institutions or Interests of Virginia (Richmond, VA: William F. Ritchie, 1859), online version of West Virginia Archives & History (Charleston, WV). Retrieved on 28 June 2014 from http://goo.gl/gVemJN.

7. “John Brown’s Invasion [correspondence of 27 Nov.],” NYTr, 30 Nov., 6; “The Excitement in Virginia,” NYH, 27 Nov., 1; “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, 30 Nov., 6; “The Charlestown Panic. Reenforcements Moving,” NYTr, 28 Nov., 5.

8. “John Brown’s Invasion [correspondence of 27 Nov.].”

9. “John Brown’s Invasion [correspondence of 25 Nov.]”; “Cook’s Confession,” NYH, 27 Nov., 4; “The Execution of Friday Last” [correspondence of 3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec., 5; Henry S. Olcott, “How We Hung John Brown,” Lotus Leaves: Original Stories, Essays, and Poems (Boston: William F. Gill and Co., 1875), 235.

10. Associated Press report of 28 Nov., NYTr, 29 Nov., 5; “The Military Force at Charlestown,” NYH, 29 Nov., 1; “John Brown’s Invasion,” NYTr, 24 Nov., 6; “From Charlestown: A Visit to the Prisoners” [report of 28 Nov.], NYTr, 30 Nov., 6; “John Brown’s Invasion . . . the Place of Execution,” [report of 28 Nov.], NYTr, 1 Dec., 6.

11. “From Charlestown. A Visit to the Prisoners.” The signing of the check by Brown is mentioned in “The Execution of Friday Last,” NYTr, 5 Dec., 5. See the cover page of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 10 Dec., which shows the Berghaus portrait of Mary Brown and a reproduction of Brown’s autograph endorsement of the fifty-dollar payment. See also Augustus Rawlings to Frank Leslie, 8 Dec., under “The Portrait of Mrs. Brown,” NYTr, 9 Dec., 1. A point of curiosity for me is Ned House’s additional remark that he was happy that the correspondent was refused, because his “odious caricatures of Brown’s person should have satisfied his hatred.” House probably was referring to Frank Leslie himself, since Berghaus had not made any previous sketches of the old man. Clearly, House disapproved of Brown’s “caricatures” overall in Leslie’s, although to one separated by historical distance, it seems that the greater villainy among newspaper illustrators was actually David H. Strother’s work in Harper’s. Yet there is no reason to think that House was speaking of Strother, and no sketch of Mary Brown appeared in Harper’s Weekly.

12. “The Harper’s Ferry Trouble,” NYH, 29 Nov., 1.

13. “John Brown’s Invasion” [correspondence of 28 Nov.], NYTr, 1 Dec., 6; Richard Baxter, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1650). There are probably a good number of antebellum editions of this book, particularly the abridged version by Benjamin Fawcett dating from the 1750s. I have quoted from Fawcett’s abridged version published circa 1850 for the Evangelical Family Library (Vol. V) by the American Tract Society (New York), 12 and 22. To be sure, House does not name the book that Brown was reading, but there is strong reason to believe it was his beloved Saints’ Rest. See DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You,” 74.

14. “John Brown’s Invasion” [correspondence of 28 Nov.]; House later made note of Brown’s conflict with Waugh. See “From Charlestown. A Pro-Slavery Clergyman. Brown Repudiates Him” (correspondence of 30 Nov.), 1 Dec., 5. Bishop Beverly Waugh is described as an antislavery clergyman in J. Gordon Melton, A Will to Choose: The Origins of African American Methodism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 142. Also see “Bishop Beverly E. Waugh (1789–1858),” The National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Vol. 11 (New York: James T. White Co., 1901), 119.

15. Waugh is identified as “J. Hoffman Waugh of the Methodist Episcopal Church” in “The Virginia Panic,” NYTr, 22 Nov., 6; “Jacob Waugh” is listed in SS1860 as a slaveholder in Charlestown, who owned a sixty-four-year-old female and a fourteen-year-old female; “Scenes in Charlestown on Wednesday. . . . [correspondence of the Baltimore American],” NYTr, 2 Dec., 1; “Brown and the Rev. Mr. Waugh,” NYIN, 10 Dec., 52.

16. “The Virginia Trouble; Charlestown Intelligence,” BACA, 6 Dec., 1; See “Elisha Otis,” The National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Vol. 11 (New York: James T. White Co., 1901), 119–20. According to Otis family history, the inventor was indeed a devout Methodist and his father had died earlier in 1859. See William A. Otis, Genealogical and Historical Memoir of the Otis Family in America (Chicago: Wm. A. Otis, 1924), 155, 237.

17. Jason Brown’s petition to Edgerton is mentioned under “Owen Brown Safe” [from the Cleveland Herald, Nov. 19.], NYH, 24 Nov., 1; “John Brown’s Invasion” [correspondence of 30 Nov.], BACA, 1 Dec., 1; “Scenes in Charlestown on Wednesday” [via Baltimore American, correspondence from Charlestown, 30 Nov.], NYH, 2 Dec., 1; “From Charlestown” [special dispatch, 30 Nov.], NYH, 1 Dec., 5; “The News,” NYH, 1 Dec., 6; “The Harper’s Ferry Trouble” [correspondence from Washington, DC, 30 Nov.], NYH, 1 Dec., 10; Frederick Allen, A Decent Orderly Lynching: The Montana Vigilantes (Tulsa: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 124–26.

18. “Served Him Right,” NYH, 20 Nov., 5; untitled article about Danenburg in NYTr, 12 Nov., 7; “Extracts from Several Papers,” NYTr, 1 Dec., 6. There were doubtless many similar cases of arrest and harassment in Virginia and throughout the South. For instance, also see the arrest of John Fletcher in Norfolk, Virginia, and the arrest of an unnamed man in Rockville, Maryland, for expressed sympathy for Brown. “Return of Richmond Military” [correspondence of the Baltimore American, Nov. 28.], NYH, 29 Nov., 1.

19. “Letter from a Virginian,” NYTr, 1 Dec., 6; “John Brown’s Invasion [Petersburg correspondence of 27 Nov.],” NYTr, 29 Nov., 6.

20. “Our Charlestown Correspondence” [29 Nov.], NYH, 2 Dec., 1.

21. “Where is the Blame?” NYTr, 25 Nov., 4.

22. “John Brown’s Invasion” [correspondence of 28 Nov.], NYTr, 1 Dec., 6.

23. “The Harper’s Ferry Trouble. Affairs at Charlestown” [Charlestown correspondence of 28 Nov.], NYH, 30 Nov., 4.

24. “Our Charlestown Correspondence” [29 Nov.]”; “From Charlestown” [correspondence of Tues. evening, 29 Nov.], NYTr, 2 Dec., 5.

25. “To-day he is engaged in writing a long letter to one of his friends, which he desires to have published after his execution, and in which he endeavors to set right certain errors which he says have appeared in the newspaper accounts of his conversations with Gov. Wise.” “John Brown’s Invasion” (27 Nov.), NYTr, 30 Nov., 6; “When the clergyman was not with him, Brown employed his time in writing various letters, and completing the statement which he desires to have published after his death.” “John Brown’s Invasion” (28 Nov.), NYTr, 1 Dec., 6; “Brown is engaged in preparing a long letter, to be published after his death, explaining his course, and correcting certain newspaper misstatements.” “Further From Charlestown” (28 Nov.), NYTr, 29 Nov., 5; “Brown has also been much occupied with writing his explanatory letters.” “Very Latest” (correspondence of 29 Nov.), NYTr, 30 Nov., 5.

26. The New York Times reporter observed that with two thousand soldiers surrounding the gallows, Brown would have to address the public in writing if he wished to speak at all before his death. “A Virginian” (correspondence of 26 Nov.), NYT, 29 Nov., 1.

27. John Brown to Jeremiah Brown, 28 Nov., MS02-0055, BBS; Lubet, John Brown’s Spy, 150–51.

28. See John Brown and John Brown Jr. to Owen Brown, 5 Feb. 1849, MS01-0026, BBS.

29. Owen Brown to Watson[?] Brown, circa 1856 (trans.), Owen Brown to John Brown and John Brown Jr., 28 Feb. 1858 (trans.), both in Owen Brown 2nd folder, and Jerome B. Noxon interview notes, Jan. 1909, in Mr. & Mrs. John Brown Jr. folder, all in Box 6, OGV.

30. See Reynolds, John Brown Abolitionist, 215–38.

31. See Frank Preston Stearns, The Life and Public Services of George Luther Stearns (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1907).

32. See DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You,” 51–56.

33. See EHF, 413–14. Redpath published the Stearns letter using only her initials.

34. Charles Mackay, “Eternal Justice,” in Voices from the Mountains and from the Crowd (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1853), 22–23.

35. LLJB, 611.

36. A number of archives hold lithographic reproductions of Brown’s letter to Stearns, which suggests how popular it had become following his death. However, the original is in GLC, No. 5925.01. Also see a facsimile copy in LLJB, at 610–11.

37. Charles C. Fulton to James McKim, 12 Dec., #4601 Box 13F 13.103, Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY.

38. Before Brown’s men were hanged, one of them informed Rebecca Spring that Avis had one such enslaved woman incarcerated prior to sending her south. See ABR, 169.

39. “Our Charlestown Correspondence” (29 Nov.), NYH, 2 Dec., 1; “The Execution of John Brown” (correspondence of 30 Nov.), NYTr, 3 Dec., 7.

40. “The Day of Execution,” The Independent, 24 Nov., 4.

CHAPTER 15

1. “He declined writing his signature for many visitors, and his mail was loaded with requests for his autograph. These, according to Jailer Avis, he burned—but not all.” Boyd B. Stutler to Clarence S. Gee, 31 Jan. 1949, 1, GEE.

2. See Anna E. Dickenson to John Brown 27 Nov., in MS 1246, B.2, 2.05, KSHS.

3. Charles Partridge to John Brown, 21 Nov., in EHF, 393–94.

4. The “little trunk,” as Brown called it, was sent to him in mid-November by Mary Brown, while she was staying with the Springs in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. See John Brown to Mary Brown, 21 Nov., LLJB, 295–96. The trunk’s contents are described in Theodore Tilton, “A Personal Interview with Captain Brown’s Wife,” The Independent, 17 Nov., 1. The trunk is also mentioned by Rebecca Spring in “A Visit to John Brown by a Lady,” NYTr, 2 Dec., 6.

5. David Strother wrote that Brown had “a bundle of letters carefully filed.” DHSL, 51; “I received all his prison letters that he had when I was with him.” Mary Brown to Herman Vaill, 29 Dec. Transcribed from the original on sale by Sotheby’s, 3 April 2008, Lot 19, Presidential and Other American Manuscripts from the Dr. Robert Small Trust N08507, NY. Also see (trans.) Greenbox Letters & Deeds #12, GEE.

6. See the biographical sketch by Joseph W. Snell under “Thaddeus Hyatt Papers 1843–1898,” Kansas Historical Society (Topeka), http://goo.gl/qAz9y3; Letter of Thaddeus Hyatt, 14 Nov., under “Aid for the Family of John Brown,” NYTr, 15 Nov, 6.

7. “The John Brown Fund,” NYTr, 16 Nov., 4.

8. Jean Libby, John Brown Photo Chronology: Catalog of the Exhibition at Harpers Ferry 2009 (Palo Alto, CA: Allies for Freedom Publishers, 2009), 52–55. According to photo documentary expert Libby, the famous daguerreotype of a bearded John Brown was made sometime between May and June 1858, but the location of the original is unknown. Two negatives were made from the original in 1859, but the negative made by James W. Black became widely known and subsequently was copied for other versions of the image. Libby has firmly established the dating of the original daguerreotype as 1858, although previously it was supposed the image was made the year of the raid. Besides Libby’s strong documentary evidence for 1858, including the old man’s ill health in the spring of 1859, he had very likely cropped his beard by May–June 1859, so the famous image is clearly from 1858.

9. “The John Brown Fund”; Letter of Thaddeus Hyatt, 19 Nov., in “The John Brown Fund. What the Country Thinks of It—Response of the Northern Heart,” NYTr, 21 Nov., 7.

10. Thaddeus Hyatt to John Brown, 14 Nov., in EHF, 389–90; Boyd B. Stutler to Helen B. Clark, 13 June 1946, RP01-0030, BBS. Stutler had a good many copies of the Hyatt picture in his collection and distinguished it from another mass distribution of the same picture by F. B. Sanborn, decades afterward. Sanborn’s issue had Brown’s pasted greeting, “Your Friend, John Brown.”

11. For Brown as “gentleman farmer,” see DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You,” 132; Libby, John Brown Photo Chronology, 54; Hyatt to Brown, 14 Nov.

12. “The John Brown Fund. What the Country Thinks of It”; Letter of Thaddeus Hyatt, 25 Nov., in “The John Brown Fund,” NYTr, 28 Nov., 6.

13. “The Latest Modern Improvement,” NYH, 10 Apr. 1860, SC02-0033A, BBS; “The Abolition Conspiracy in the North against the South—Testimony for the Investigating Committee,” NYH, 21 Dec., 4.

14. “The Latest Modern Improvement”; Edgar Langsdorf, “Thaddeus Hyatt in Washington Jail,” Kansas Historical Quarterly IX:3 (Aug. 1940): 230, 236. In an interesting side note, Hyatt’s tactic of turning his jail cell into an apartment was done previously by the abolitionist Passmore Williamson in 1855. Williamson was imprisoned in Philadelphia for refusing testimony in cooperation with the Fugitive Slave Law and spent one hundred days in a jail cell, complete with a guest book. Perhaps Hyatt was aware of Williamson’s tactic and certainly had the means to appropriate the same strategy. See Laurie A. Rofini, “History’s People: Chester County’s Passmore Williamson Famed Abolitionist,” Daily Local News [West Chester, PA], 24 Sept. 2013. Retrieved on 5 July 2014 from http://goo.gl/rEWsz2.

15. Hyatt to Brown, 14 Nov.

16. John Brown to Thaddeus Hyatt, 28 Nov. A copy of the original is found in MS 1246, B.2, 2.05, KSHS. According to Boyd Stutler, Hyatt had initially agreed with Thomas Webb, the secretary of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, to publish a lithograph of the 1858 daguerreotype, picturing a map of Kansas behind Brown. For some reason, Hyatt went his own way, instead choosing to publish the 1858 image with Brown’s signature. Webb was very disturbed about this change, and even complained to the old man in a letter on 26 Nov. Brown answered him briefly on 30 Nov., stating that he lacked sufficient time to assist him. See LLJB, 612; Boyd B. Stutler to Thaddeus P. Hyatt, 7 Mar. 1927, RP04-0060F, BBS.

17. See my blog entry “Rich Man, Poor Man: The Surviving Sons of John Brown and Abraham Lincoln in 1914,” John Brown the Abolitionist: A Biographer’s Blog, 20 Oct. 2010, http://goo.gl/b4bxRJ. This entry is based on “Son of Lincoln, Rich; John Brown’s Son, Poor,” Topeka Capital, 12 Apr. 1914.

18. Report by Thaddeus Hyatt and letter from Mary Brown and family to Thaddeus Hyatt, 14 July 1860, under “Distribution of the John Brown Fund,” NYTr, 27 July 1860, 7; Mary Brown to Thaddeus Hyatt, 14 Jan. 1860 (trans.), in Mrs. John Brown folder, Mrs. John Brown and family folder, Box 6, OGV.

19. See two articles by William J. Edgar, “A History of the Reformed Presbyterian Church,” The Ottawa Reformed Presbyterian Church (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada). Retrieved on 25 June 2014 from http://goo.gl/lhFH9d; and “Why Did the Reformed Presbyterian Church Oppose Slavery?” Broomal (PA) Reformed Presbyterian Church website. Retrieved on 2 Dec. 2012 from http://goo.gl/2sSFGa. Also see an online version of Negro Slavery Unjustifiable at http://www.covenanter.org/McLeod/negro.htm.

20. Gideon T. Ridlon, History of the Families Millingas and Millanges of Saxony and Normandy, comprising Genealogies and Biographies of Their Posterity (Lewiston, ME: published by the author, 1907), 160–61.

21. “A[lexander] M. M[illigan] to John Brown, 23 Nov., in EHF, 395–97.

22. John Brown to Alexander M. Milligan, 29 Nov., in the McCartney Library Collection, Geneva College, Beaver Falls, PA. Also see an edited version in LLJB, 610.

23. Tilton, “A Personal Interview with Captain Brown’s Wife”; Susan I. Lesley to Catharine Robbins, 27 Nov., in Life and Letters of Peter and Susan Lesley, Vol. 2, 379; Mary Brown to “Dear Children,” Folder 32, Box 1, John Brown Collection #299, KSHS.

24. James M. McKim to John Brown 22 Nov. (trans.), in William J. Maloney and Margaret McKim Maloney Collection of McKim-Garrison Papers; Papers of James Miller McKim, Box 2, Correspondence 1857–1865 (MGF 14), NYPL; [James M. McKim], “Mrs. Brown and Her Family” [correspondence of 28 Nov.], National Anti-Slavery Standard, 3 Dec., 4.

25. [McKim], “Mrs. Brown and Her Family”; McKim to Brown, 22 Nov.; John Brown to James M. McKim, 25 Nov., Boston Public Library Collection, M895. Also see trans., Jail Letters 1859 file, Box 5, OGV.

26. Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society: For the Year Ending May 1, 1860 (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1861), 194; Richard D. Webb, The Life and Letters of Captain John Brown (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1861), 247n; “The Day of Execution,” Independent, 24 Nov., 4. Also see the helpful biographical essay by Susan M. Swasta under the “Finding Aid for the Richard Cary Morse Papers, 1852–1886” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan). Retrieved on 9 July 2014 from http://goo.gl/IlWozn.

27. “The Religious Press on Old Brown,” NYH, 11 Nov., 5; Tilton, “A Personal Interview with Captain Brown’s Wife.”

28. Tilton, “A Personal Interview with Captain Brown’s Wife.” Tilton’s interview with Mary Brown was quickly reprinted under the title “John Brown and His Wife; An Interview with Mrs. Brown,” NYTr, 18 Nov., 3, and “Mr. Tilton’s Interview with John Brown’s Wife,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, 26 Nov., 4. It was later published in Webb, The Life and Letters of Captain John Brown, 239–44.

29. Mary Brown to John Brown, 29 Nov., in EHF, 428.

30. Tilton, “A Personal Interview with Captain Brown’s Wife”; [McKim], “Mrs. Brown and Her Family.”

31. Mary A. Brown to Henry A. Wise, 21 Nov., DHSP.

32. Henry A. Wise to Mary A. Brown, 26 Nov., DHSP. See Katherine Mayo transcription of Wise’s edited draft in Mrs. John Brown and Family folder, Box 6, OGV.

33. [McKim], “Mrs. Brown and Her Family”; Mary A. Brown to “Dear Family,” 28 Nov., in Box 1, Folder 32, John Brown Collection #299, KSHS; Thomas Featherstonaugh, “The Final Burial of the Followers of John Brown,” New England Magazine (April 1901), 128–34.

34. Anne Brown to Thomas W. Higginson, 29 Nov. (trans.), Anne Brown Adams folder, Box 1, OGV.

35. See Daniel 12:3.

36. John Brown to Mary Brown and family, 30 Nov., DHSP. I have made many emendations to Brown’s peculiar punctuation and spelling errors. An unedited transcription of this letter is found in A John Brown Reader, edited by Louis Ruchames (New York: Abelard & Schuman, 1959), 156–58.

37. Nicholas Spicer [Alban S. Payne], “John Brown and His Companions,” The Spirit of the Times [New York], 14 Jan. 1860, and “John Brown and His Coadjutors,” idem, 21 Jan. 1860, 592; VILL, 455.

38. Spicer [Payne], “John Brown and His Coadjutors.”

39. Payne and others bought The Spirit of the Times in 1861. See “Change in Sportsmen’s Paper,” NYT, 3 Jan. 1899. The writer “Nicholas Spicer” is revealed as Alban S. Payne in Fred Pond, Life and Adventures of ‘Ned Buntline’ (New York: Cadmus Book Shop, 1919), 34. This bound volume was republished as a serial under the same name, published in Pond’s Wildwood Magazine [New York] (June 1888), 23.

CHAPTER 16

1. See Amos Lawrence to Henry Wise, 25 Oct., Box 21, Folder 5, and Lawrence to Wise, 26 Oct., Box 21, Folder 4, and Lewis Tappan to Wise, 6 Nov., Box 21, Folder 7, all in HWE; “A Petition in Favor of John Brown,” Philadelphia Press, 30 Nov., 2. The names of the signers are not provided.

2. See the petition from “Citizens of the State of New York,” Box 22, Folder 1, HWE; anonymous newspaper article, “Tilton as He Is Now,” in JB funeral & burial folder, Box 3, OGV.

3. DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You,” 165–73; Katherine Butler Jones, “They Called it Timbucto,” Orion (Winter 1998): 27–33; Willis Augustus Hodges, Free Man of Color: The Autobiography of Willis Augustus Hodges, edited by Willard B. Gatewood Jr. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), xxxix–xlviii.

4. DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You”; Hodges, Free Man of Color, xliv–xlviii; John Brown to Willis Hodges, 22 Jan. 1849, #6615, GLC.

5. “Mrs. Brown’s Interview with Her Husband” [Charlestown, 2 Dec. report], NYTr, 3 Dec., 7.

6. William Still, Still’s Underground Rail Road Records, Revised (Philadelphia: William Still, 1886), xxii; Hodges, Free Man of Color, li–lii. I have observed elsewhere that Frederick Douglass not only knew about Brown’s Harper’s Ferry plan much earlier than he later acknowledged but that his lack of support, and perhaps even his well-intended opposition, took its toll on the old man’s efforts at recruiting free blacks. See DeCaro, John Brown—the Cost of Freedom, 64–69; W. E. B. Du Bois, John Brown (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs Co., 1909), 297.

7. Hodges, Free Man of Color, li–lii.

8. Nicholas Spicer [Alban S. Payne], “John Brown and His Companions,” The Spirit of the Times, 14 Jan. 1860, 584; “The Execution of John Brown,” NYIN, 10 Dec., 52; “John Brown’s Invasion. Further Interesting Incidents of the Execution. From Our Special Correspondent” [3 Dec.], NYTr, 6 Dec., 6; Robert E. Lee to his wife, 1 Dec., in Fitzhugh Lee, General Lee (New York: Appleton & Co., 1894), 75–76.

9. “The Execution of John Brown; Further Interesting Incidents of the Execution”; “John Brown’s Invasion. Intelligence From Charlestown” [1 Dec.], BA, 2 Dec., 1; “Scenes in Charlestown” [1 Dec.], NYH, 3 Dec., 1; George Mauzy to James H. Barton, 3 Dec., under “The Mauzy Letters,” The National Park Service website on Harper’s Ferry (Washington, DC: Department of the Interior). Retrieved on 19 July 2014 from http://goo.gl/yqeaAD; “The Execution of John Brown” [30 Nov.], NYTr, 3 Dec., 7.

10. Lewis Sayre to Henry Wise (trans.), 30 Nov., in Tatham Papers folder, Box 17, OGV; “John Brown’s Invasion. Further Interesting Incidents of the Execution,” NYTr, 6 Dec.

11. See Ira V. Brown, “Miller McKim and Pennsylvania Abolitionism,” Pennsylvania History 30:1 (Jan. 1963), 56–72; A Memoir of Hector Tyndale, edited by John McLaughlin (Philadelphia, 1882), 6–7, 9; “The Hanging of John Brown . . . Our Charlestown Correspondence” [1 Dec.], NYH, 5 Dec., 9.

12. Lee, General Lee, 75–76; [James Ashley], “How the Chivalry Treated Mrs. Brown” [from the Cleveland Leader], Western Reserve Chronicle, 21 Dec., 1.

13. Sarah Belle Dougherty, “Remembering H. S. Olcott,” Sunrise (Pasadena, CA: The Theosophical Society), Feb.–Mar. 1997. Retrieved 10 April 2004 from http://goo.gl/NVUVfV; Henry S. Olcott, “How We Hung John Brown,” in Lotus Leaves, 234–35; “Incidents Connected with the Execution. From Another Correspondent” [Harper’s Ferry, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec., 5.

14. [Ashley], “How the Chivalry Treated Mrs. Brown”; Telegrams: William B. Taliaferro to Henry A. Wise, early morning of 1 Dec. (trans.), in Mrs. John Brown and Family folder, Box 6, OGV, and Taliaferro to Wise, later morning of 1 Dec., HAW; Telegram from Wise to Taliaferro (trans.), 1 Dec., Mrs. John Brown and Family folder, Box 6, OGV; “Incidents Connected with the Execution. From another Correspondent,” NYTr, 5 Dec.; “The Execution of John Brown,” NYTr, 3 Dec., 7.

15. “The Hanging of John Brown . . . Our Charlestown Correspondence” [1 Dec.], NYH, 5 Dec., 9; “Mrs. Brown’s Interview with Her Husband” [2 Dec. Associated Press], 3 Dec., 7.

16. “The Execution of Friday Last” [3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec., 5; [Ashley], “How the Chivalry Treated Mrs. Brown”; “The Hanging of John Brown . . . Our Charlestown Correspondence,” NYH, 5 Dec.; “Incidents Connected with the Execution. from Another Correspondent,” NYTr, 5 Dec.

17. [Ashley], “How the Chivalry Treated Mrs. Brown”; “The Execution of Friday Last,” NYTr, 5 Dec.; “The Hanging of John Brown . . . Our Charlestown Correspondence,” NYH, 5 Dec.; “Incidents Connected with the Execution. From Another Correspondent,” NYTr, 5 Dec.; Nicholas Spicer [Alban Payne], “John Brown and His Companions,” The Spirit of the Times, 14 Jan. 1860, 584; “Old Brown’s Execution. Excitement at Harper’s Ferry” [1 Dec.], BDE, 2 Dec., 1; SDOH, 320.

18. “Scenes of the Night before the Execution. Our Charlestown Correspondence” [2 Dec.], NYH, 5 Dec., 9; SDOH, 320.

19. “The Hanging of John Brown . . . Our Charlestown Correspondence,” NYH, 5 Dec.; [Ashley], “How the Chivalry Treated Mrs. Brown”; “The Execution of Friday Last,” NYTr, 5 Dec.; “Mrs. Brown’s Interview with Her Husband” [2 Dec.], NYTr, 3 Dec.

20. A German-born jail guard named George Paul was on duty at the time and afterward ate the Browns’ food, which was untouched. See “Death of Mr. Paul,” Richmond Times, 26 Apr. 1901, 3.

21. “The Execution of Friday Last,” NYTr, 5 Dec.; VILL, 535–36; Reynolds, John Brown Abolitionist, 429–31.

22. “Incidents Connected with the Execution. From Another Correspondent,” NYTr, 5 Dec.; Boyd Stutler wrote that Brown found the stone discarded and set aside at the cemetery in Canton Center in March 1857 and determined to salvage it. However, the stone seems to have been laid aside for many years, so Brown may have known about it for years, only deciding to “recycle” it after the murder of his son, which he saw as a sequel to the death of his patriot forebear. Stutler to Clarence S. Gee, Stutler to Gee, 10 Apr. 1952, 1, GEE; John Brown to Mary Brown 15 Apr. 1857, MS02-0006, BBS; Brown’s handwritten instructions for inscription, 1 Dec., in DHSP; also see excellent photos of the gravestone, grave markers, and information markers at Joyce Ranieri’s website, “The John Brown Farm Cemetery,” Northern New York Tombstone Transcription Project at http://goo.gl/7YdLYY; Humphreys, The Humphreys Family in America Vol. 1, 302.

23. “Mrs. Brown’s Interview with Her Husband” [2 Dec.], NYTr, 3 Dec.; “Incidents Connected with the Execution. From Another Correspondent,” NYTr, 5 Dec., Laughlin-Schultz, The Tie that Bound Us, 80–83.

24. The bloodied pillowcase and silk handkerchief is mentioned in an 1884 letter from Sarah Brown to John Brown Jr., quoted in excerpt in John Brown Jr. to Franklin B. Sanborn, 27 Dec. 1884. I am indebted to Mick Konowal, owner of the letter, for sharing this information with me, happily, just in time for publication.

25. “Mrs. Brown’s Interview with Her Husband” [2 Dec.], NYTr, 3 Dec.; “The Execution of Friday Last” [3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec.; “Incidents Connected with the Execution. From Another Correspondent,” NYTr, 5 Dec.

I have attempted to reconstruct the last meeting of John and Mary Brown from the few available newspaper sources, all of which were based on interviews with John Avis and other witnesses in the jail. Ned House and the newly arrived Henry Olcott, both incognito correspondents, did the two Tribune reports published on December 5. The earlier published report, written on December 2 and published in the Tribune on the following day, seems to have originated from a Southern source and perhaps was made available to the Tribune through the Associated Press. A very similar version of this report appeared in the New York Herald on the same day (see “The Execution of Brown . . . Our Charlestown Despatch. Brown’s Interview with His wife—His Last Words to His Wife and Children,” 3 Dec., 1). Unlike the report in the Tribune, however, the Herald version includes some self-serving interpolations, including the dubious portrayal of Mary Brown speaking “in the highest terms” of how she was treated in Virginia.

26. “Our Charlestown Correspondence . . . Charlestown, Va., Dec. 1, 1859,” NYH, 4 Dec., 2; “Cadets at the Execution of John Brown: Documents, November 1859 - January 1860,” Virginia Military Institute website [Lexington, VA]. Retrieved on 24 Aug. 2014 from http://goo.gl/E3CLea.

27. All the documents relating to Brown’s last will are held by DHSP. Interestingly, even these materials were shortly published in newspapers following his death. For example, see “The Last Will and Testament of John Brown,” Philadelphia Press, 6 Dec., 1. For a complete trans., see VILL, 668–70.

28. “Our Charlestown Correspondence . . . Charlestown, Va., Dec. 1, 1859,” NYH, 4 Dec.; John Brown to [Richard J. Hinton], 1 Dec., Henry Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

29. “Edward Harris,” The Evening Call [Woosocket, RI], 13 Mar. 1899; Edward Harris to John Brown, 20 Nov., EHF, 392; John Brown to Edward Harris, 1 Dec., privately owned by a Harris descendant.

30. Brown’s Pennsylvania years are profiled in my book “Fire from the Midst of You,” chap. 6–7; James Foreman to John Brown [excerpt], 26 Nov., EHF, 398; John Brown to James Foreman, 1 Dec., PLJB, 368–69.

31. John Brown to Jeremiah Brown, 1 Dec., MS02-0057, BBS.

32. Harriet [Oviatt] Randall to John Brown, 28 Nov., in EHF, 424–25; Evelyn Rich, “Obituary” under “Notes on the Pemberton Family, Ancestors of Emilius Oviatt Randall,” The Old Northwest Quarterly 1 (Jul. 1898): 113–18; John Brown to Harriet Randall, 1 Dec., Chicago History Museum; DeCaro, John Brown—the Cost of Freedom, 14–15.

CHAPTER 17

1. Gravestone inscriptions, letter of John Brown to Mary Brown, 2 Dec., and further estate remarks are in DHSP. Also see VILL, 553–54.

2. See “John Brown’s Will & Codicil,” VILL, 669; Boyd B. Stutler, “An Eyewitness Describes the Hanging of John Brown,” American Heritage (Feb. 1955), 7.

3. SCHF, 67.

4. “John Brown’s Raid. Recollections of Prosecuting Attorney Andrew Hunter,” Times Democrat [New Orleans], 5 Sept. 1887, in A. Hunter folder, Box 10, OGV; SS1860, 167–68; JBT, 272–87.

5. McGinty, John Brown’s Trial, 273; “Our Charlestown Correspondence . . . Charlestown, Va., Dec. 1, 1859,” NYH, 4 Dec.

6. “John Brown’s Invasion. Intelligence from Charlestown,” BA, 2 Dec., 1; “Affairs at Charlestown” [29 Nov.], Daily Dispatch [Richmond, VA], 2 Dec., 1; Brown’s Bible is in the Chicago Historical Museum; See “facsimile” of Brown’s inscription to Blessing and most of the bracketed texts in NYIN, 10 Dec., 52, 64. Also see VILL, 653n122.

7. Account relayed from the Baltimore American in “Personal,” NYTr, 14 Dec., 8; O’Bannon’s profession is mentioned by Jim Surkamp, “Jefferson County 1860: A Profile of Prosperity” (8 Jun. 2011), Civil War Scholar.com. Retrieved on 30 Aug. 2014 from: http://goo.gl/h22vBS; also see “An Echo from Harper’s Ferry,” Historia [Oklahoma City], 1 July 1916, 92.

8. John Brown’s “prophecy” of 2 Dec. is in the Chicago History Museum collection.

9. See note 7 in this chapter. Before he died, O’Bannon passed the “prophecy” into the hands of former jailer, John Avis, the only other Charlestown associate who might otherwise appreciate it. Avis later gave it to the Canadian abolitionist, Alexander M. Ross, a fraudulent “friend of John Brown” who had managed to wile his way into the confidences of the Brown family in the 1870s. John Avis to Alexander Ross, 13 Oct. 1876, Chicago History Museum. See my essay “‘Cheating at Solitaire’: The Self-Made Myth of Alexander Ross, the Canadian Friend of John Brown,” in Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., John Brown: The Man Who Lived: Essays in Honor of the Harper’s Ferry Raid Sesquicentennial 1859–2009 (New York: Lulu, 2009), 67–94. Also see Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 332n257b.

10. “John Brown’s Invasion. Further Interesting Incidents of the Execution” [3 Dec.], NYTr, 6 Dec. 6; “Scenes in Charlestown. Our Charlestown Correspondence [30 Nov.],” NYH, 3 Dec., 1.

11. VILL, 554; Fellows, “Saw John Brown Hanged.”

12. Aaron D. Stevens to Annie Brown, 5 Jan. 1860 (trans.), Box 2, John Brown Family Histories & Biographies, Annie Brown Letters folder, GEE; Aaron D. Stevens to “Doc Gill,” 10 Dec., in “An Epoch in History,” Richmond Dispatch, 22 Dec. 1901, 20; “Mrs. Brown’s Interview with Her Husband” [2 Dec.], NYTr, 3 Dec., 7; Thomas J. Jackson to Mary A. Jackson, 28 Nov.–2 Dec., in Memoir of Stonewall Jackson, by His Widow, Mary Anna Jackson (Louisville, KY: Prentice Press, 1895), 64.

13. Lora Case, Hudson of Long Ago; Reminiscences (1897; Hudson, OH: Hudson Library and Historical Society, 1963), 52–53; L[ora] C[ase] to John Brown, 28 Nov., EHF, 423–24. Also see RP07-0012A, BBS; Obviously, Case had an unusual given name for a man, and thus, Redpath mistook “Lora,” including his letter in the section devoted to Northern women.

14. John Brown to Lora Case, 2 Dec., in the Berg Collection, NYPL.

15. Clarence S. Gee, “John Brown’s Last Letter,” Ohio Historical Quarterly 40 (April 1931), 185–89; The jail official is unidentified, but most likely was either Sheriff Campbell or his deputy, Jailer Avis. “Our Charlestown Correspondence . . . Charlestown, Va., Dec. 1, 1859,” NYH, 4 Dec.; Boyd B. Stutler to Clarence S. Gee, 31 Jan. 1949, 1, GEE.

16. “He has written . . . a short note to a gentleman across the street, stating that his commentaries on Beecher’s sermon were not published as he gave them. Some of his commentaries, he said, were omitted, while others were materially altered.” “Our Charlestown Correspondence. . . Charlestown, Va., Dec. 1, 1859,” NYH, 4 Dec.

17. “The Execution of Friday Last” [3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec., 5; “John Brown’s Invasion. Further Interesting Incidents of the Execution. From Our Special Correspondent” [3 Dec.], NYTr, 6 Dec., 6.

18. “John Brown’s Invasion. Further Interesting Incidents of the Execution. From Our Special Correspondent [Olcott’s second report, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 6 Dec., 6.

19. “The Execution of Friday Last. Correspondence of the N.Y. Tribune,” 5 Dec.; “Execution of Brown at Charlestown. Full Particulars. Closing Scenes and Incidents,” Washington Evening Star, 3 Dec., 2.

20. “The Execution of John Brown,” NYIN, 10 Dec., 59–60.

21. As Steven Lubet observes, the text of the confession initially was only shared in part with the Southern press, and completely denied to the Northern papers. However, Ned House provided a substantial overview of Cook’s confession as early as November 9, although he believed that it presented nothing of great consequence. Evidently, when it was published, House smuggled a copy to Horace Greeley, who promptly supplied the entire text for his readership on November 26. Lubet provides the fullest discussion on the subject but unnecessarily projects complaint into House’s reportage over the withholding of the document. See Lubet, John Brown’s Spy, 178–81; “Confession of Cook,” NYTr, 9 Nov., 4; “John Brown’s Invasion. Cook’s Confession,” NYTr, 26 Nov., 7.

22. Lubet, John Browns Spy, 228; “Execution of Brown at Charlestown. Full Particulars . . .,” Washington Evening Star, 3 Dec. 1859; “The Execution of John Brown,” NYIN, 10 Dec.

23. Ned House also observed that “[Brown’s] remarks have not been correctly reported in the Baltimore and New-York papers.” “The Execution of Capt. Brown. From Our Special Correspondent,” NYTr, 5 Dec., 5.

24. The report bearing these false interpolations is “Mrs. Brown’s Interview with Her Husband . . . To-Day’s Report” [Charlestown, 2 Dec. report], NYTr, 3 Dec., 7. Unfortunately, this unreliable report has been most recently reiterated in Lubet, John Brown’s Spy, 229. Crosby Noyes of the Washington Star, Augustus Rawlings of the New York Illustrated News, or any other journalist, including Ned House, did not convey this fallacious claim about Cook misleading Brown over slave support.

25. These final words are interesting because they probably also marked the end of a cordial disagreement between the evangelical John Brown and the Spiritualist Aaron Stevens. Brown believed the Bible was the inspired word of God, whereas Stevens thought it mere human writing and untrustworthy, compared to the individual’s spiritual experience. “If you are not chained up to the Bible by Bigotry, and have a wish to seek truth,” he wrote to his brother afterward, “I will cite you to a work on Spiritualism.” Aaron Stevens to “Dear Brother,” 30 Jan. 1860, GLC7231.11, GLC.

26. John Brown to Aaron Stephens [sic], 2 Dec., GLD7230.01, GLC. Brown quotes Proverbs 16:21, traditionally attributed to King Solomon of Israel.

27. “Execution of Brown at Charlestown. Full Particulars . . .,” Washington Evening Star, 3 Dec. 1859; “The Execution of John Brown,” NYIN, 10 Dec. Stevens and Hazlett were the last two raiders to stand trial, both going to the gallows in March 1860.

28. Boyd B. Stutler, “An Eyewitness Describes the Hanging of John Brown,” American Heritage (Feb. 1955), 7. Emendation of “dress”; “Execution of Brown at Charlestown. Full Particulars . . .,” Washington Evening Star, 3 Dec. 1859. The man who prepared Brown’s body for burial dressed him in a modest suit and kept the old man’s worn black suit for many years, describing it as looking like it had been cut with bayonets. See “John Brown’s Clothes,” Brooklyn Eagle, 6 Apr. 1890, 19.

29. In the 1850 census, John Avis’s wife is listed as Imogene, apparently the twenty-two-year-old mother of James, John, and Braxton. I presume Imogene died, although it is not clear when she died or when Avis remarried. Mary Avis thus appears in the 1860 census not only with the three older boys but also with Edward and little Mary. See John Avis, 1850 Census, Charlestown, Jefferson County, Va., Reel 953, 596; and 1860 Census, Charlestown, Va., Jefferson County, Va., Reel 1355, 170 (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Service).

30. Charles C. Fulton to James M. McKim, 12 Dec., #4601 Box 13F 13.103, Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY.

31. Rebecca Spring recalled that Avis informed her husband that he had lost his job as deputy sheriff and had to “seek other means of support for his family” because his kindness to Brown and the other prisoners was thought to have been excessive. ABR, 149. It is probably true that Avis was greatly resented, but his critics found a basis for the dismissal after the nearly successful attempt by raiders Cook and Coppic to break out of the jail the night before they were hanged. Lubet, John Brown’s Spy, 237–40.

32. “Nothing of this sort occurred. . . . He was between Sheriff Campbell and me, and a guard of soldiers surrounded him, and allowed no person to come between them and the prisoner, from the jail to the scaffold, except his escorts.” Notarized affidavit of John Avis, 25 Apr. 1882, VILL, 671; Cecil D. Eby, “John Brown’s Kiss,” Virginia Cavalcade [Richmond] (Autumn 1961): 47.

33. “To All the Friends of the Anti-Slavery Cause; John Brown Kissing the Negro Child,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, 24 Dec., 3. Also see untitled notice in the Liberator, 6 Jan. 1860, 3.

34. See my explanation for the actual black-baby kiss in chapter 5, 19–80.

35. “John Brown’s Invasion. Further Interesting Incidents of the Execution” [Olcott’s second report, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 6 Dec.

36. This is a far more reasonable conclusion than the notion either that the black-baby-kiss incident was a complete fabrication without any basis in fact or that it was a creative adaptation of the kissing of the Avis baby. This tends to impute deceit to Ned House’s reportage, when it is more reasonable to assume that he was recycling an incident that had actually taken place—one quite consistent with Brown’s sentiments and his behavior.

37. See “Incidents Connected with the Execution. From another Correspondent” [3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec., 5.

38. Boyd Stutler believed Olcott was the author of the black-baby kiss because House had left Charlestown, and because the account appears within the first of his two reports on Dec. 3. But Stutler’s conclusions are not satisfying. House was known to have claimed authorship of the baby-kiss episode, and he had far more information as well as opportunity to place the vignette within Olcott’s narrative. Stutler seems not to have suitably examined the entire interpolation, which clearly breaks from Olcott’s style. Finally, Olcott was yet a moderate Whig with little interest in the antislavery cause, and he would hardly have penned such a warm and familiar assessment of Brown on the second day of his presence in Charlestown. See Boyd B. Stutler to Cecil D. Eby, Jr., 10 Mar. 1960, 2–3, RP07-0032, BBS.

39. “Mr. House has since been cross-questioned on the subject and has verbally confirmed from memory the accuracy of his memorandum.” J. V. S., “A Historic Picture; Where and How a Great Work Was Produced,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 May 1884, 9. Also see “How History Is Sometimes Made,” New York Sun, 27 Sept. 1885, 8.

40. “Mrs. Brown’s Interview with Her Husband” [2 Dec.], NYTr, 3 Dec.; “Incidents Connected with the Execution. From Another Correspondent” [3 Dec.], 5 Dec., 5; “The Execution of Capt. Brown. From Our Special Correspondent” [3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec., 5; “The Execution of John Brown,” NYIN, 10 Dec., 59–60. Journalist Crosby Noyes described Brown’s prison pallor as he appeared on the gallows: “It was noticed that his neck and breast were as white as a woman’s.” See “Execution of Brown at Charlestown. Full Particulars . . .,” Washington Evening Star, 3 Dec. 1859.

41. SDOH, 331; Hawks was “for many years a resident of Virginia.” Thomas Drew, The John Brown Invasion: An Authentic History of the Harper’s Ferry Tragedy (Boston: James Campbell, 1860), 69; See abstract, “Guide to the Stonewall Jackson Papers, 1855–1906,” Duke University Libraries [Durham, NC]. Retrieved on 2 Sept. from http://goo.gl/SqEWS0; Millard Kessler Bushong, A History of Jefferson County, West Virginia 1719–1940 (1941; rpt. Westminster, MD: Heritage Books, 2007), 404.

42. “Incidents Connected with the Execution. From another Correspondent” [3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec., 5; Boyd B. Stutler to Frank Ronemus, 26 Aug. 1959, RP06-0117, BBS. Stutler failed to place Hawks in the wagon despite newspaper reportage and mistakenly places W. W. B. Gallaher on the seat in the wagon, which I believe is incorrect.

43. “The Execution of John Brown,” NYIN, 10 Dec.; “Incidents Connected with the Execution. From another Correspondent” [3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec.; “Proclamation,” 28 Nov. (trans.), Gray Box 6, folder 1, GEE; Katherine Mayo’s interview with Annie Brown Adams, 2–3 Oct. 1908, Annie Brown Adams folder, Box 1, OGV; Laughlin-Schultz, The Tie That Bound Us, 94–96.

44. “Pickpockets at Harper’s Ferry,” BACA, 3 Dec., 2; “Incidents Connected with the Execution. From Another Correspondent” [3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec.; “Scenes in Charlestown” [1 Dec.], NYH, 3 Dec., 1; See telegram from Charles C. Fulton to Gov. Henry Wise, 1 Dec., and response on verso, HAW; “Execution of John Brown. The Law Vindicated [Received by Telegraph],” BACA, 3 Dec., 1; “Execution of Brown at Charlestown . . .,” Washington Evening Star, 3 Dec. 1859.

45. Based on a contemporary newspaper report, Boyd Stutler compiled a working list of the correspondents present at Brown’s hanging, to which I’ve added only a few names: Hitchcock of the New York Illustrated News, Rawlings of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Strother of Harper’s Weekly, House and Olcott of the New-York Daily Tribune, Donavin of the Baltimore Daily Exchange, Hays of the New York Herald, Fulton and [Henry] Beall of the Baltimore American, Senseney of the Winchester Republican, Palmer of the Virginian, Sheets of the Leesburg Mirror, Smith of the Alexandria Sentinel, Flanagan of the Baltimore Republican, Wingate of the Baltimore Sun, Sultzer of the Baltimore Clipper, Scruggs and Payne of the Warrenton Whig, J’Anson of the St. Louis Republican, Wilson of the Raleigh Standard, Haltstead of the Cincinnati Commercial, Noyes of the Washington Star, and Flood of the Cleveland National Democrat. Also present were three local pressmen: Gallaher of the Virginia Free Press, [Benjamin] Beall of the Spirit of Jefferson, and Eichelberger of the Independent Democrat. See Alexandria Sentinel, 5 Dec., 2 (trans.), RP11-0008. Also see Stutler’s list, RP11-0010, BBS.

46. Katherine Mayo’s interview with Cleon Moore, 20 Mar. 1908, in J.B. Execution folder, Box 3, OGV; “The Execution of Capt. Brown. From Our Special Correspondent” [3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec. Ned House made the observation of Brown patting his knees, and mentioned that he did so during his trial.

47. “The Execution of Capt. Brown. From Our Special Correspondent” [House’s second report of 3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec.; “The Execution,” NYH, 3 Dec., 1; “Execution of Brown at Charlestown. Full Particulars . . .,” Washington Evening Star, 3 Dec. 1859; Stutler, “An Eyewitness Describes the Hanging of John Brown,” 8; “Interview with Andrew Hunter” (trans.), St. Louis Globe-Democrat [Spring 1888?], in Andrew Hunter folder, Box 10, OGV.

48. “The Execution of Capt. Brown. From Our Special Correspondent” [House’s second report of 3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec., 5; J. T. L. Preston, “The Execution of John Brown,” The Southern Bivouac II:3 (Aug. 1886), 188; Stutler, “An Eyewitness Describes the Hanging of John Brown,” 8.

49. Stutler, “An Eyewitness Describes the Hanging of John Brown,” 9; Murat Halstead, “The Tragedy of John Brown,” Independent, 1 Dec. 1898, 1547.

50. “The Execution of Friday Last. Correspondence of The N.Y. Tribune” [House’s first report, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec., 5; “The Execution of Capt. Brown. From Our Special Correspondent” [House’s second report, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec., 5; “John Brown’s Invasion. Further Interesting Incidents of the Execution. From Our Special Correspondent” [Olcott’s second report, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 6 Dec.

51. There were many “John Brown meetings” and services throughout the North on December 2, although I have chosen not to make specific mention of them here. References to these meetings are replete in Northern newspapers, especially the Herald and Tribune. See “John Brown Meetings,” NYTr, 2 Dec., 5; “Public Expressions,” NYTr, 3 Dec., 7; and “Sympathy for John Brown in the North,” NYH, 3 Dec., 1.

52. James M. McKim to Mary Brown, 2 Dec. 1860? (trans.), in JB First Days in Charlestown Jail folder, Box 4, OGV; “The Execution of Capt. Brown. From Our Special Correspondent” [House, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec.; “John Brown’s Invasion. Further Interesting Incidents of the Execution. From Our Special Correspondent” [Olcott’s second report, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 6 Dec.

53. “The Execution of Friday Last. Correspondence of The N.Y. Tribune” [House, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec.; Olcott, “How We Hung John Brown,” 248; Preston, “The Execution of John Brown,” 188; Joseph Jackson to Mary Anna Jackson, 28 Nov./2 Dec., in Memoir of Stonewall Jackson (Louisville, KY: The Prentice Press, 1895), 64. It may only be a legend, but a nineteenth-century writer claimed that Brown’s executioner, who had recently died in Charlestown, was haunted by Brown on his dying bed, expiring “in great agony of mind.” H. W. C., in the Chicago Journal, quoted in “Old John Brown” How His Soul Has Been Marching On,” Daily Evening Bulletin [Philadelphia], 20 Feb. 1869, 8.

54. “The Execution of Capt. Brown. From Our Special Correspondent” [House’s second report, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec.; Nicholas Spicer [Alban Payne], “John Brown and His Companions” [Warrenton Whig, 8 Dec.], Spirit of the Times, 14 Jan. 1860, 584; “The Execution,” NYH, 3 Dec., 1; “The Execution of Friday Last. Correspondence of The N.Y. Tribune [House’s first report, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec.

55. “The Execution of Capt. Brown. From Our Special Correspondent” [House’s second report, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec.; Memoir of Stonewall Jackson, 64; Preston, “The Execution of John Brown,” 188; “Execution of Brown at Charlestown. Full Particulars . . .,” Washington Evening Star, 3 Dec. 1859.

56. “The Execution of Capt. Brown. From Our Special Correspondent” [House’s second report, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec.; Stutler, “An Eyewitness Describes the Hanging of John Brown,” 9; “John Brown’s Invasion. Further Interesting Incidents of the Execution. From Our Special Correspondent” [Olcott’s second report, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 6 Dec.

57. Preston, “The Execution of John Brown,” 189.

58. “Execution of Brown at Charlestown. Full Particulars . . .,” Washington Evening Star, 3 Dec. 1859; “John Brown’s Raid. Recollections of Prosecuting Attorney Andrew Hunter,” Times Democrat [New Orleans] (5 Sept. 1887), 6; typewritten notes, RP11-0014, BBS.

CHAPTER 18

1. “The Execution of John Brown. Our Charlestown Correspondence” [2 Dec.], NYH, 6 Dec., 8; “Incidents Connected with the Execution. From another Correspondent” [Olcott’s first report, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec.; “John Brown’s Invasion. Further Interesting Incidents of the Execution” [Olcott’s second report, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 6 Dec.; “The Body of John Brown in This City. Its Appearance as Seen by Our Reporter,” NYH, 5 Dec., 9. Also see “Methods of Execution,” International Justice Project [UK] website. Retrieved on 27 July 2014 from http://goo.gl/QUCZTH; and Forensic Medicine: Clinical and Pathological Aspects, edited by Jason Payne-James et al. (San Francisco: Greenwich Medical Media Ltd., 2003), 267.

2. “The Execution of John Brown. Our Charlestown Correspondence” [2 Dec.], NYH, 6 Dec.; “John Brown’s Invasion. Further Interesting Incidents of the Execution” [Olcott’s second report, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 6 Dec.; DHS, 55–56. Ruffin is not identified by name, but given the old fanatic’s enthusiasm, profile, and presence in Charlestown, it is most likely that he was the “venerable & well known Southern Rights gentleman” mentioned by Strother. The identification of Ruffin is made by Hillary Attfield, in her award-winning digital doctoral dissertation The Future of Electronic Editing: Theory and Practice (Morgantown: West Virginia University, 2004).

3. “John Brown’s Invasion. Further Interesting Incidents of the Execution” [Olcott’s second report, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 6 Dec.; “The Execution of Capt. Brown. From Our Special Correspondent” [House’s second report, 3 Dec.], 5 Dec.; “The Execution,” NYH, 3 Dec., 1; “John Brown’s Invasion. Further Interesting Incidents of the Execution” [Olcott’s second report, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 6 Dec.; Jean Libby et al., John Brown Mysteries (Missoula, MT: Pictorial Histories Publishing Co., 1999), 25.

4. A Memoir of Hector Tyndale, edited by John McLaughlin (Philadelphia, 1882), 8; Katherine Mayo’s note regarding Sarah McKim’s recollection of the shot; Justice James T. Mitchell to Oswald Villard, 27 Nov. 1907; and Mayo’s notes from Dr. Abner Hopkins’s scrapbook, all in JB funeral & burial folder, Box 3, OGV.

5. “Mrs. Brown’s Return from Charlestown to Harper’s Ferry. Our Harper’s Ferry Correspondence” [2 Dec.], NYH, 6 Dec., 8. During the Civil War, a Union Army doctor found Watson’s remains and had them removed and embalmed for posterity. In 1882, the remains were finally returned to the family and interred alongside Brown’s grave at North Elba. Most of the raiders’ remains, including those of Oliver Brown, were once more exhumed and reinterred next to John Brown’s grave in 1899. See Thomas Featherstonaugh, “The Final Burial of the Followers of John Brown,” New England Magazine XXIV:2 (April 1901), 128–34; “‘Osawattomie’ Brown’s Son,” Washington Post, 11 Sept. 1882, 1.

6. “Mrs. Brown’s Return from Charlestown to Harper’s Ferry. Our Harper’s Ferry Correspondence” [3 Dec.], NYH, 6 Dec.; See Rebecca Hemphill (Tyndale’s niece) to Oswald Villard, 26 Feb. 1908, in JB funeral & burial folder, Box 3, OGV; A Memoir of Hector Tyndale, 8.

7. “The Virginia Trouble; Charlestown Intelligence,” BACA, 6 Dec., 1.

8. “House, Edward Howard,” The Vault at Pfaff’s: An Archive of Art and Literature by New York City’s Nineteenth-Century Bohemians (Lehigh University). Retrieved from http://goo.gl/X5vl2M; James L. Huffman, A Yankee in Meiji Japan, 27; “Personal Items,” Boston Evening Transcript, 25 May 1861, 2.

9. Another interpolation emanating from initial Southern reportage relayed to the Associated Press was a comment from one of the men on the wagon, “Capt. Brown, you are a game man.” To this, Brown supposedly answered: “Yes, I was so trained up; it was one of the lessons of my mother.” As House well knew, the report was false. See “Mrs. Brown’s Interview with Her Husband,” NYTr, 3 Dec., and “The Execution,” NYH, 3 Dec.

10. “The Execution of Friday Last. Correspondence of the N.Y. Tribune” [House’s first report, 3 Dec.], NYTr, 5 Dec.

11. “The Arrival of John Brown’s Remains in Philadelphia” and “The Doings of Pickpockets,” Philadelphia Press, 5 Dec. 2;

12. “The Arrival of John Brown’s Remains in Philadelphia”; “Arrival of the Remains in Philadelphia. From the Philadelphia Bulletin, Dec. 3.],” NYH, 5 Dec., 9; “John Brown’s Body in Philadelphia. From the Philadelphia Sunday Transcript,” NYTr, 6 Dec, 6.

13. Historical Address Delivered in Connection with the Installation of The Reverend Charles E. St. John As Minister of The First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, 12th of January, 1908, by Horace Howard Furness, in JB funeral & burial folder, Box 3, OGV; A Memoir of Hector Tyndale, 10–11.

14. The Reverend Furness had held a prayer meeting in his church at the hour of Brown’s hanging, and it was broken up by a gang of Southern medical school students, “with whom,” Furness’s son later recalled, “I am sorry to say, the public sympathized.” Historical Address Delivered in Connection with the Installation of The Reverend Charles E. St. John.

15. “The Sawbones Exodus,” NYTr, 23 Dec, 4; “John Brown’s Execution . . . Exciting Meeting in Philadelphia—Hisses, Cheers and Groans,” Republican Compiler [Philadelphia, PA], 12 Dec., 1. The New York Herald fairly chronicled the dissent and departure of Southern medical students in the following articles: “The Progress of Disunion; Meeting of the Southern Students of the New York Medical College,” 22 Dec., 3; “The Stampede in Philadelphia,” 22 Dec., 3; and “Departure of the Medical Students,” 23 Dec., 1. See James O. Breeden, “Rehearsal for Secession: The Return Home of Southern Medical Students from Philadelphia in 1859,” in His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harper’s Ferry Raid, edited by Paul Finkelman (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1995), 174–210.

16. Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller, The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower Class Life 1790–1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 159–60; Still, The Underground Railroad, 663.

17. “The Arrival of John Brown’s Remains in Philadelphia.” The Philadelphia segment is based on my address, “John Brown: The Empty Coffin and Philadelphia,” presented at The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, on 2 Dec. 2009.

18. “John Brown’s Invasion. John Brown’s Remains,” NYTr, 5 Dec., 5; “The Burial of John Brown,” NYTr, 6 Dec., 6; undated newspaper clipping, “Tilton as He Is Now,” in JB funeral & burial folder, Box 3, OGV; “The Body of John Brown in This City. Its Appearance As Seen by Our Reporter,” NYH, 5 Dec., 9. The latter describes Brown’s new coffin as “solid rosewood.”

19. “John Brown’s Clothes,” Brooklyn Eagle, 6 Apr. 1890, 19.

20. It had cost a total of $45 to prepare John Brown’s body, which according to one inflation calculator would be about $1,200 in today’s US currency. “Tilton as He Is Now”; Clarence Gee’s notes in folder 2, Box 9, GEE. The original undertaker bill and employee’s letter are, respectively, MS12-0054 and MS10-0050, in BBS. The New York segment is partially based on my book, John Brown—the Cost of Freedom, 96–98.

21. See “The Body of John Brown in This City. Its Appearance As Seen by Our Reporter,” NYH, 5 Dec.; “The Burial of John Brown,” NYTr, 6 Dec., 6; “The Body of John Brown,” NYTr, 6 Dec., 5; “[By Telegraph.] Old Brown’s Body. Special Dispatch to the N.Y. Tribune,” NYTr, 7 Dec., 3; “The Burial of John Brown. The Passage of the Body to North Elba. The Funeral. . . . From Our Special Reporter” [dated at Troy, NY, 10 Dec.], NYTr, 12 Dec., 6.

22. “The Burial of John Brown. The Passage of the Body to North Elba. The Funeral. . . . From Our Special Reporter” [dated at Troy, NY, 10 Dec.], NYTr, 12 Dec.; Paula Dennis et al., On the Trail of John Brown: What Mary Brown Saw: A Self-Guided Tour (Elizabethtown, NY: Essex County Historical Society and Adirondack Architectural Heritage, n.d.), 6. Also visit http://goo.gl/AjuiZS.

23. “The Burial of John Brown. The Passage of the Body to North Elba. The Funeral. . . . From Our Special Reporter” [dated at Troy, NY, 10 Dec.], NYTr, 12 Dec.; Interview with Byron Brewster, Lake Placid News, 27 Jan. 1911 (trans.), GEE.

24. “The Burial of John Brown. The Passage of the Body to North Elba. The Funeral. . . . From Our Special Reporter” [dated at Troy, NY, 10 Dec.], NYTr, 12 Dec.; Joshua Young, Man Better than a Sheep: A Sermon Preached Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 24, 1859 (Burlington, VT: E.A. Fuller, 1860?), 20–21; “Triple Anniversary; Notable Occasion in the Life of the Rev. Dr. Joshua Young of Groton,” Boston Herald, 15 Feb. 1899, in JB funeral & burial folder, Box 3, OGV; The New York Times journalist is quoted in “John Brown’s Grave,” The Independent, 22 Aug. 1867, 4.

CHAPTER 19

1. “Benefit of the Family of John Brown,” NYTr, 14 Dec, 8; “Sympathy with Brown’s Family. Meeting at the Cooper Institute,” NYTr, 16 Dec., 5.

2. “Meeting of Sympathizers with John Brown,” NYH, 13 Dec., 4.

3. See “Anti-Slavery Meeting in Philadelphia,” NYH, 16 Dec., 8, and “The ‘Conflict in Philadelphia,” NYH 17 Dec., 2.

4. “Sympathy With Brown’s Family. Meeting at the Cooper Institute,” NYTr, 16 Dec., 5; “The John Brownites in Council,” NYH, Dec. 16, 1 and 8.

5. “The John Brown Meeting at the Cooper Institute,” NYH, 16 Dec., 4; untitled editorial, NYTr, 16 Dec, 4.

6. “The Conservative Movement,” NYH, 8 Dec., 5.

7. “Grand Union Mass Meeting at Philadelphia,” NYH, 8 Dec., 5; Great Union Meeting, Philadelphia, December 7, 1859 (Philadelphia, no date). Retrieved from http://goo.gl/3avHBE.

8. “The Conservative Movement. The Great Union Demonstration at Boston,” NYH, 9 Dec. 3 and 10; Boston Courier Report of the Union Meeting in Faneuil Hall, Thursday, December 8, 1859 (Boston: Clark, Fellows, & Company, 1859). Retrieved from http://goo.gl/FUDXOS.

9. Robert C. Kennedy, “Cartoon of the Day: ‘Ye Grand Ducal Ball at the Academy of Music,’ 16 Dec. 1871, Complete HarpWeek Explanation,” HarpWeek.com. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/0pdwu9; “Academy of Music.” Theater Print (New York). Retrieved from http://goo.gl/DKGd2a.

10. “E Pluribus Unum; Immense Conservative Demonstration at the Academy of Music,” NYH, 20 Dec, 3 and 4; Official Report of the Great Union Meeting, Held at the Academy of Music, New York, December 19th, 1859 (New York: Order of the Committee of Arrangements, 1859). Retrieved from http://goo.gl/JpCvWn; “Outside Scenes and Meetings” and “The Letters,” NYH, 20 Dec., 5; John Brown to Frederick Douglass, 18 Aug. 1853, in Frederick Douglass’ Paper (26 Aug. 1853), 3.

11. “A Word of Warning,” NYTr, 16 Dec, 4; “The Union Meeting,” NYTr, 20 Dec., 4.

12. Bennett considered General Winfield Scott a “tried and conservative man” and the “right leader around whom to rally the country to meet the dangers, North and South.” He editorialized his hopes that the business community in New York should promote Scott’s candidacy, and promoted the idea of “Scott Union meetings.” See Herald editorials “The Great Union Meeting at the Academy of Music,” 16 Dec., 4. “The Union Meeting—Is it to Be a Failure or a Triumph?” 17 Dec., 4; “The Great Crisis—What Is the Remedy?” 18 Dec., 4; “The Great Union Meeting—Nomination of General Scott for the Presidency,” 20 Dec., 6; and “The Effect of the Late Union Meeting,” 22 Dec., 4. Also see Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald, 78.

13. “The Great Crisis—What Is the Remedy?” NYH, 18 Dec., 4; “The Great Union Meeting—Nomination of General Scott for the Presidency,” NYH, 18 Dec., 6; Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald, 77.

14. The Mercury and Patriot quoted in “South Carolina’s Opinion of Northern Union Savers,” NYTr, 14 Dec, 6.

15. J. W. Morgan, “The Conservative Men, and the Union Meetings of the North,” DeBow’s Review 5:28 (May 1860), 522–23.

EPILOGUE

1. “John Brown’s Funeral,” NYTr, 10 Dec., 5; “John Brown Dead,” NYTr, 3 Dec., 6; “Brown His Own Interpreter,” NYTr, 10 Dec., 4; Katherine Mayo’s notes from the Springfield Republican, 3 Dec., in JB funeral & burial folder, Box 3, OGV.

2. “Virginia Arming for Civil War,” NYH, 20 Nov., 1; “Mass Meeting at Martinsburg,” NYH, 22 Nov., 9.

3. Leah Rawls Atkins, “Andrew B. Moore,” Encyclopedia of Alabama (Birmingham: Alabama Humanities Foundation). Retrieved from http://goo.gl/t4BKAB; “The Harper’s Ferry Affair in Alabama” (from the Montgomery Advertiser, 2 Dec.), NYH, 7 Dec., 8.

4. James L. Abrahamson, The Men of Secession and Civil War, 1859–1861 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000), 84–85; “South Carolina Governor William Henry Gist,” National Governors’ Association (Washington, DC: National Governors’ Association, 2011). Retrieved from http://goo.gl/LTxqNO.

5. “Important from South Carolina,” NYH, 2 Dec., 4.

6. VILL, 567; “A Southern Confederacy,” BACA, 2 Dec., 1; Henry D. Capers, The Life and Times of C.G. Memminger (Richmond, VA: Everett Waddey Co., 1893), 241–42, 245.

7. Christopher G. Memminger, The Mission of South Carolina to Virginia (Baltimore: James Lucas and Son, 1861), 4–11. Originally appeared as “The South Carolina Mission to Virginia,” DeBow’s (Dec. 1860), 751–71. Also see The Tribunal: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid, edited by John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard/Belknap Press, 2013), 320–24.

8. Ibid., 25-33. See William Cullen Bryant, “The Antiquity of Freedom,” in The Poets and Poetry of America, To the Middle of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Rufus Wilmot Griswold (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1852), 162. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/hu7wzU.

9. Capers, The Life and Times of C.G. Memminger, 279–80.

10. DHSL, 56-57. Emendations of “phrenzied,” “cavilled,” and “favourite.”

11. Peter Wallenstein, “Incendiaries All: Southern Politics and the Harper’s Ferry Raid,” in His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harper’s Ferry Raid (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 167; Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1865, Vol. 3, edited by Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick: NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 502–3, 538, 553, and Vol. 4, 7, 12, 23–24.

12. Wallenstein, “Incendiaries All: Southern Politics and the Harper’s Ferry Raid,” 167; VILL, 587. Villard quotes Alexander Stephens on 30 Nov. 1860.

13. Joseph F. Newton, Lincoln and Herndon (Cedar Rapids, IA: The Torch Press, 1910), 264–65; Correspondence between J. A. Spencer and Abraham Lincoln in “Abraham Lincoln on the John Brown Raid and Dred Scott Decision,” Charleston Mercury [SC], 30 Jan. 1861, 1.

14. Lincoln’s speech in Troy, Kansas, 2 Dec., in Newton, Lincoln and Herndon, 263; Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 492–93; “Frederick Douglass autograph quotation signed,” Washington, DC, 20 Oct. 1883. No. 25726, Profiles in History.com. Retrieved on 28 Nov. 2009.

15. “Wendell Phillips on the Amnesty Proclamation,” Pittsburgh Gazette, 25 Dec. 1863, 2. Emendation of “phial.”

16. Quoted from the English Standard Version of the Bible.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Osborne P. A Voice from Harper’s Ferry: A Narrative of Events at Harper’s Ferry. Boston, 1861.

Brown, John. Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States. Edited by Boyd Stutler. Weston, MA: M&S Press, 1969.

Carton, Evan. Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America. New York: Free Press, 2006.

Case, Lora. Hudson of Long Ago: Progress of Hudson during the Past Century Personal Reminiscences of an Aged Pioneer (1897). The Hudson Library and Historical Society, Hudson, Ohio, 1963.

Connelley, William E. John Brown. Topeka, KS: Crane & Company, 1900.

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

———. John Brown—the Cost of Freedom. New York: International Publishers, 2007.

Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. Hartford, CT: Park Publishing, 1881; facsimile edition, Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1983.

Du Bois, W. E. B. John Brown. New York: International Publishers, 1909, 1962.

Featherstonaugh, Thomas. John Brown’s Men: The Lives of Those Killed at Harper’s Ferry. Harrisburg, PA: Harrisburg Publishing Company, 1899.

Finkelman, Paul (ed.). His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.

Fried, Albert. John Brown’s Journey: Notes & Reflections on His America & Mine. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978.

Hinton, Richard J. John Brown and His Men. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1894.

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

Laughlin-Schultz, Bonnie. The Tie that Bound Us: The Women of John Brown’s Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.

Libby, Jean. Black Voices from Harpers Ferry. Palo Alto, CA: published by author, 1979.

———. John Brown Mysteries. Missoula, MT: Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, Inc., 1999.

———. John Brown Photo Chronology: Catalog of the Exhibition at Harpers Ferry 2009. Palo Alto, CA: Allies for Freedom, 2009.

Lubet, Steven. John Brown’s Spy: The Adventurous Life and Tragic Confession of John E. Cook. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.

McGinty, Brian. John Brown’s Trial. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

McGlone, Robert E. John Brown’s War against Slavery. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

McKivigan, John R. Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.

Oates, Stephen B. To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1970.

Quarles, Benjamin. Allies for Freedom: Blacks and John Brown. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Redpath, James. The Public Life of John Brown. Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860.

———. Echoes of Harper’s Ferry. Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860.

Reynolds, David S. John Brown Abolitionist. New York: Knopf, 2005.

Ruchames, Louis (ed.). A John Brown Reader. New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1959.

Sanborn, Franklin B. The Life and Letters of John Brown, Liberator of Kansas, and Martyr of Virginia. Boston, 1885; rpt. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.

———. Recollections of Seventy Years, Vol. 1. Boston: The Gorham Press, 1909.

Stauffer, John, and Zoe Trodd. The Tribunal: Responses to John Brown and the Harper’s Ferry Raid. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012.

Stavis, Barrie. John Brown: The Sword and the Word. New York: A. S. Barnes & Company, 1970.

Still, William. The Underground Railroad. Philadelphia: William Still, 1886.

Taylor, Andrew, and Eldrid Herringon, eds. The Afterlife of John Brown. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Louis A. DeCaro Jr., PhD is the son and grandson of Italian Pentecostal ministers, and holds graduate degrees from Westminster Theological Seminary and New York University. Having also served in two urban pastorates, he currently is associate professor at the New York City campus of Alliance Theological Seminary, where he is an instructor in history and theology. Lou has devoted nearly two decades to the study of John Brown and published the first complete biography of the abolitionist in the twenty-first century, Fire from the Midst of You: A Religious Life of John Brown (2002). Along with his interim study, John Brown—The Cost of Freedom (2007), he has privately published a number of works on the abolitionist, and has maintained an online forum, “John Brown the Abolitionist—A Biographer’s Blog,” since 2005. Lou lives in New York City with his wife, Michele Sweeting, a college instructor and gospel recording artist, and their son, Louis Michael.

Table of Contents

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