In fact, I didn’t sleep that long; there was too much to think about, and this was the first real leisure I’d had to do it. Brown was an odd case; I’d expected a brimstone-breathing fanatic, and instead I’d met a steady, pretty decent, but plainly determined old man with an admirable gift for modest showing off. There was no doubt that he was fixed in his resolve; he’d invade Virginia if it was the last thing he did – which it probably would be, if he ever got round to it. But that was out of the question, for the simplest of reasons: he didn’t have the brains for it. He was a slow thinker, if ever I saw one, and a dreamer; Messervy was right – I doubted if he could have directed a nursery tea. Rampaging into Missouri and grabbing the first niggers and horses he saw was his mark, but planning a military raid … no, I couldn’t credit it. That aside – where were his men? Scattered, visiting supporters, raising funds, working at odd jobs, or just loafing, from what Anderson had told me. And I’d heard about money and weapons … well, I’d believe them when I saw them.
As I lay there, staring up at Sanborn’s skylight, my thoughts kept jumping between hope and dread. One moment I felt my confidence growing that I could keep Brown busy, planning and dreaming and getting nowhere, for as long as need be … and then doubts would creep in, and I’d have to tell myself fiercely that I was in the business now and no turning back; I’d been a helpless cork, borne on the tide, until my meeting with Seward – then, I’d had a plain choice, and made it, and while it had landed me in this ridiculous galley, it had been the right one … and it was too late to run now, anyway, with this black gunslick watching my every move …
I was too hot and clammy to go back to sleep now – it’s wonderful how fears can sprout in the dark, when you’re as naturally windy as I am. As I writhed fretfully on the lumpy mattress, it struck me as damned sinister that Messervy hadn’t arranged some means whereby I could get a message to him – why, I could have let him know that Harper’s Ferry was the certain target, and he could have had the Marines deployed around the place, and word of that would surely have reached Brown, and caused him to give up the business altogether … my God, was it possible that Messervy and his “superiors”, whoever they were, absolutely wanted Brown to raid the Ferry, for some ghastly political reason which I didn’t understand? Never – in that case, why the hell were they employing me to stop him? Well, Flashy, you fool, to kill him, for taking six bits off that infant … for it was plain as print that Lincoln and Palmerston were in the thing, too, and it was all a devilish plot to make the Queen withhold my knighthood, as she certainly would do once Seward had told Prince Albert that I’d pissed in Charity Spring’s flowerbed …
At which point I awoke with a wordless cry, lathered in cold sweat, to discover that it was growing light, and that I was in bursting need of another visit to the window below, so I rolled out, cursing, and clambered miserably down the ladder again – and blow me if Simmons didn’t follow me every step of the way.
Chapter 14
There’s a photograph which may still be kicking about somewhere, showing John Brown enthroned in an armchair, with Joe seated scowling alongside him, while Jerry Anderson and your correspondent stand behind wearing expressions of ruptured nobility, each of us resting a comradely hand on Joe’s shoulders – although, as Jerry observed, from the look on Joe’s face you would think we were trying to hold him down. The reason for the picture was that Brown wanted a new hat, and in those days daguerreotypers used to dispense free headgear to their sitters, with a miniature copy of the plate attached to the inside lining. The hat was rubbish, but Brown reckoned it was a saving; he had no more money sense than my beloved Elspeth, and was always short, and it’s my belief that we only had our “likenesses took” so that he could sit there looking like Elijah, with his faithful followers about him, the darkie being given the other chair to show that all men are equal in the sight of God and daguerreotypers.
It was posed in New York in that strange month of May, 1859, which I still look back on with wonder. I’d been harried halfway round the world, through the strangest series of chances, and now, after one of the most topsy-turvy weeks of my life, I found myself loafing about in the wake of an eccentric revolutionary, with nothing to do but wait to see what might happen next. Most odd, and my recollection of it is fairly incoherent, with one or two episodes standing out in relief.
This time, you see, was the last tranquil twilight in the remarkable career of John Brown of Ossawatomie, when he was saying his farewells to his Eastern friends, scrounging his final subscriptions, and preparing for the great day which probably he alone believed was coming at last. It was a sort of royal progress in which he addressed meetings, shook hands with legions of admirers, and stoked up the support which he hoped would burst into a great Northern crusade once he’d lit the fire in Dixie; it took us from Boston to New York and various places around, and since I’d decided that my own eventual profit and present safety would be best served by going along quietly, I used the time to study the man and take the measure of his prospects.
An encouraging sign was that his health was none too good; he complained of what he called ague, and I had hopes that he’d be in no shape to start a war that summer. But he was a tough old bird, and wouldn’t pamper himself; he was a great one for Spartan living, and at one place we stayed the maid of the house found him at daybreak fast asleep on the front steps; she made the mistake of shaking him, and found a Colt presented at her head. Even up here, surrounded by a friendly population, he never went unarmed, usually with Jerry as bodyguard, an office which gradually passed to me, for Jerry dressed like an out-of-work scarecrow, and didn’t fit too well in the Boston hotels or the halls where J.B. harangued the faithful.
Messervy was proved right: he wasn’t a good speaker, but he had a presence, and the mere sight of that Covenanter figurehead, with its flashing eyes and rasping voice, was enough to set them stamping and rummaging in their purses. His message was plain: talk was futile, it was time for action – and sure enough, some oratorical gesture would give them a glimpse of the gun-butt under his coat. Once or twice he waxed philosophical, and came adrift: I remember him pouring scorn on those who felt that their strength lay in the greatness of their wrongs, and so neglected action; his point was that the negro had the greatest wrongs of all, and a fat lot of strength that gave him – you could see the folk wondering what he was talking about, and fidgeting, but when he came out thundering that whoever took up arms to defend slavery had “a perfect right to be shot”, they raised the roof. Ringing phrases about striking off the shackles, and troubling Israel, and Hell being stirred from beneath, were received with wild applause, but what moved them to wrath and tears (aye, and excitement) were his accounts of blood and battle in Kansas, and his promise of more to come. It was after one of these addresses, when they were crowding round to bless him and shake his hand, that I heard someone say that his speech had been “like that of Cromwell compared to an ordinary king.”41 That delighted him; Cromwell was one of his heroes, and people were forever likening him to the old warthog.
When he wasn’t speechifying or paying calls, he was writing letters to all and sundry. One I remember him composing at the U.S. Hotel in Boston, reading it aloud with particular care, because it was to his five-year-old daughter; I looked it up in his biography the other day, hoping to edify my own grandlings, who need all the morality they can get. It will give you some notion of his style:
My Dear Daughter Ellen,
I will send you a short letter. I want very much to have you grow good every day. To have you learn to mind your mother very quick; & sit very still at the table; & to mind what all older persons say to you that is right. I hope to see you soon again; and if I should bring some little thing that will please you; it would not be very strange. I want you to be uncommon good-natured. God bless you my child.
Your Affectionate Father,
John Brown
Couldn’t punctuate worth a dam, you see, and used to say he “knew no
more of grammar than the farmer’s calves”, but there ain’t a man of letters in my time who could have put it better. My grandbrats received it in polite silence, and then John said “We-l-l … what was she to do when an older person said something wrong?”, Jemima asked if Ellen was pretty, Alice wanted to know what the promised “little thing” was, and Augustus belched. God help Miss Prentice, I say.
The rest of his time he spent in talk, and since I was a new listener I had to endure a good deal of his prosing in those first weeks. Silly cracker-barrel stuff, mostly, although he had a curious store of half-learned knowledge; Bunyan was a favourite, and he was well up on Napoleon and Caesar and assorted military history. He was thirsty for anything that might be of use in fighting slavery, but had no time for soldiers or soldiering, and had gone to all lengths to avoid service in his youth, the notion of drilling and training to kill being anathema – until the abolitionist bug had bitten, and he’d found an enemy to hate. And when he got onto the subject of his first encounters with slavery – look out. A change would come over him, and from talking in his usual opinionated style he would go into a sort of brooding study, staring ahead and growling as though a steam-kettle was coming to the boil inside him. It was an unnerving sight, I can tell you, and I shan’t forget the first time I saw it, one evening when we were seated alone on some front porch or other.
“I was twelve years old,” says he, gritting his teeth, “and had druv some cattle a long way to the house of a gentleman with whom I had to stay for a spell. He was a good man, kindly and feared God, and made a great pet of me, and showed me off to his folks, saying what a smart brave little chap I was, to come a hundred miles alone. Well, that was fine. But you know, he had a young black slave boy, just my age, and bright as a brass button – and I tell you, the way he tret that child would ha’ broke your heart! Oh, it was the best vittles for me, and a seat at table nearest the fire, but for that little coloured lad – why, he barely fed him but scraps, and beat him like a dog, with a stick, or a shovel, or any old thing at hand! He didn’t have pity on him at all!”
He choked on that, and sat with his great hands working on his knees; when he turned on me, there were tears in the blazing eyes, and his voice was hoarse as though he were on the brink of a seizure. That was the moment when I first understood how the man who wrote that letter to his daughter could also be the man who’d massacred the pro-slavers at Pottawatomie; he was a man possessed, no other word for it.
“I didn’t see how God could let such things be!” cries he. “Or could put such fell cruelty into the heart of that good, kindly man – why, he was a U.S. marshal – yes, he was! He heard my prayers at night, and gave me a spinning top, the first I ever had! I asked him, if God was my Father, wasn’t he Father to the little black boy, too, and he told me not to trouble my head about such things! Not to trouble!”
It wasn’t canny, those eyes, and the huge hawk nose and heaving beard, all directed at me as though I was the bloody U.S. marshal; he seemed to be inviting comment, but all I could think to say was that it was pretty rotten, and had the fellow been tight, perhaps?
He didn’t seem to hear me, luckily, so I let it be, and after a while he sighed and launched into a tale about a runaway nigger whom he’d hidden from the slave-catchers a few years later. The darkie had crawled into a wood, and when the alarm was over, he’d gone to look for him.
“Can you guess how I found him?” says he, and the fit seemed to have passed, for while he gripped my arm in his talons, he spoke quite calmly. “He was lying deep in the bushes, in terror of his life … and I located him by the sound of his heart beating! Yes, and it’s a sound that has stayed in my ears these many years, that awful drumming of a human heart, in agony and fear!”42
Well, I didn’t believe it for a minute; if a beating heart could give you away when you’re cowering in cover, I’d have been dead meat before I was twenty. But I said that was an astonishing thing, the poor chap must have been in a dreadful funk, but he’d got over it, had he?
“I vowed in that moment that I would never rest until the last slave had been set free,” says he solemnly. I said hear, hear, and he asked me what had been my moment of revelation. Since I hadn’t had one, I had to choose at random, and said it had been when I’d first watched blacks being packed aboard on the Dahomey coast, bucks to starboard, wenches to port – with the shapeliest females nearest the hatches, for convenience, but I didn’t mention that.
He shook his head and murmured something about the waters of Babylon, but a moment later he was telling me about a dinner to which he’d been bidden the next night, and would I care to accompany him, and when he bade me good-night he was absolutely cheerful again. It left me quite shaken, though; for a moment he’d looked as though he was ready to foam at the mouth, and I concluded that if he wasn’t barmy, as Messervy claimed, there was still a screw loose somewhere.
Mostly, though, he was as calm and measured as you could wish, going about his business of paying calls and spouting claptrap, writing letters, gassing to Joe and Jerry and me – but never a word of substance about the great stroke we were meant to be preparing; no talk of planning or gathering men and arms, or any of the work that should have been going ahead. Of one thing I became surer by the day: if he was bent on taking Harper’s Ferry, it wouldn’t be by the Fourth of July. Reflecting on that, it seemed a pity that I’d no way of conveying the glad news to Messervy – and then by a sheer fluke I was presented with the perfect opportunity.
I mentioned a moment ago a dinner to which J.B. had invited me; it was at one of the big Boston hotels, full of quality and local bigwigs, and the two of us were guests of Dr Howe. We’d barely stepped into the lobby when he cried to J.B. that here was someone he must meet – and who should it be but the podgy Senator who’d tried to dragoon me into this business in the first place, and whom I’d last seen outside Seward’s cabin.
We bore up short at the sight of each other, but he kept his countenance, paying me no heed beyond the usual courtesies of presentation, and fixing on J.B., who seemed to know who he was but took no joy of the knowledge, for he drew himself up tall, looked down his nose, and says, pretty cool:
“I have heard, Senator, that you don’t approve of my course of action.”
I could have told him that our fat friend wasn’t the sort to take any damn-you-me-lad airs. He stuck out his jowls and came straight back.
“If you refer to your recent rash foray into Missouri – no, sir, I do not!”
J.B.’s beard went up a couple of notches. “Indeed, sir. My friends tell me also that you have spoken in condemnation of it.”
“That I have!” snaps the Senator. “I regard every illegal act as doing very great injury to the anti-slavery cause.”
“Freeing slaves injures the cause – is that so?” growls J.B., and the Senator started to swell and go crimson.
“Let me tell you, sir,” says he, “it was an imprudence that might have cost countless lives! There was a time, sir, not long ago, when such a thing might have led to the invasion of Kansas by … by a great number of excited people, sir!”
J.B. made a rumbling noise, his hand twitched at his coat, and for an awful second I thought he was going for his gun, but he just hooked his thumbs into his weskit.
“Well, I think differently, sir!” says he. “I acted right, and it will have a good influence, you’ll see. Good-night to you, Senator!”
“Good-night to you, Mr John Brown!” cries the Senator, and they bowed and stalked off opposite ways, leaving me wondering how I might seize this unexpected chance. I daren’t go after the Senator, but within ten seconds I was in the deserted lavatory, scribbling frantically: “Tell Messervy – Harper’s Ferry for certain. July 4”. I daren’t go out for a waiter, not knowing who might be spying on me, so I sent the black attendant to fetch one. He brought another darkie, in a liveried coat, on whom I pressed the note, telling him to deliver it to the fat, ugly Senator with the yellow flower in his buttonhole, a
nd he cried: “Sho’ nuff, suh!” and bowled off, chortling. But whether the note ever reached the Senator, I never found out; if it did, he must have ignored it, or else Messervy did – and you may make of that what you will. Anyway, I’d done my best.43
It was in early June that I started to earn my corn as a military adviser, when J.B. took me into Connecticut to see the pikes which he’d commissioned two years earlier; he was full of misunderstood nonsense about Swiss infantry and Greek phalanxes and Scottish schiltrouns, and plainly had visions of niggers forming squares to repulse cavalry charges. I couldn’t believe my eyes when the blacksmith hauled out half a dozen which he’d got up as samples, amazing instruments six feet long with bowie blades clamped to their ends, but asked my opinion, I said they were capital weapons – the more money J.B. spent on trash, the less he’d have for serious equipment. He ordered a thousand on the spot, and the smith said admiringly that he hadn’t realised that Richard the Lionheart was operating in Kansas, but a thousand would cost $450, and he couldn’t deliver until August. Farewell July 4th, thinks I, this is splendid. J.B. was well pleased, though; you could see he was itching to fight Bannockburn o’er again in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
A few days after this we said adieu to New England, J.B. going north to visit his family, while Jerry, Joe and I were packed off to Ohio to join two of his sons who were supposed to be recruiting in that state. They were the first of his celebrated brood that I’d met, and I found them vastly reassuring: Owen Brown, J.B.’s right-hand man, was big, tough, genial, and fat-headed, and John junior, the oldest son, was a poor critter in low spirits, plainly bound for Bedlam. Like all the Brown boys they were strapping, fine-looking fellows, but you’d not have trusted either of them to light the fire. Owen would have made a fairish corporal, given no work more taxing than lifting heavy weights and advancing into the cannon’s mouth, but Junior had always been slightly wanting, Jerry told me, and the Kansas fighting had sent him off the rails altogether. He’d never got over his father’s butchery at Pottawatomie, and soon after had fallen into the hands of Border Ruffians who had chained him and flogged him sixty miles over hard going, which had reduced him to raving idiocy. He was better now, Jerry opined, but J.B. would never have him in the field again, so he’d been made quartermaster and chief of recruiting, at which he was making no headway at all.
The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection Page 317