The seven Negroes, a woman and six men, several of them barefoot in the cold night, take up their pikes and hesitantly, as if they have no choice in the matter, follow their former masters into the firehouse, while Father straps on George Washington’s scabbard and sword and adds to his pair of old service revolvers the General’s engraved pistol and tooled leather holster. In all his armament, he is a formidable sight, a warrior chieftain, and with his Old Testament beard and fierce gray eyes and his battered straw hat and Yankee farmer’s woolen frock coat and his—to the Negroes, to all people, in fact—peculiar way of speaking, he is a paradoxical one as well: a man out of time, without a shred of vanity or the slightest regard for convention, and though an old man, he is as overflowing as a boy with single-minded purpose and high principles, armed and clothed for no other task in life than this night’s bloody work. The rest of the men, if they put their rifles down, and the ex-slaves, if they put away their pikes, could easily fold back into the general populace and disappear from sight, here or anywhere in America; but not Father: he is Osawatomie Brown of Kansas, and no American, white or black, Northern or Southern, would mistake him for anybody else.
Although they are far fewer than he expected by now and seem somewhat confused and fearful, the arrival of these, the first of the freed slaves, has excited Father, and he orders Cook to drive one of the wagons over to the Maryland side, to the schoolhouse where I and my two men, Barclay Coppoc and Frank Meriam, will have cached the remainder of our arms, one hundred fifty rifles and another hundred pistols and most of the thousand sharpened pikes. Cook is to bring one-third of the pikes back into town, for, surely, by morning there will be mutinous slaves thronging to the armory yard. The remainder of the weapons are for me and my men to distribute first amongst the insurrectionary slaves who come in from Maryland, and then we are to carry the remainder up into the mountains for eventual dispersal there. By daylight, on both sides of the river, we will have hundreds of escaped slaves to arm, Father says, and must be ready for them in both places, or they will not believe that we are serious.
For now, until further orders, the raiders who are inside the town are merely to hold their positions—Kagi and his men, Copeland and now Leary, over at the rifle factory on Hall’s Island, Oliver and Will Thompson posted at the Shenandoah bridge, Watson and Taylor still holding the bridge across the Potomac, and Hazlett and Edwin Coppoc guarding the arsenal; the rest of the men stand at the ready here at the center of town, in and around the armory grounds and the firehouse.
It is close to six A.M. The rain has ceased, and the heavy storm clouds have moved off, and as dawn approaches, the sky turns slowly to a fluttery, gray, silken sheet, with the high, wooded ridges in the east and north silhouetted against it. The brick storefronts and houses and offices of the town and the narrow, cobbled streets glisten wetly from the night’s rain, and when the first light of the rising sun spreads across the eastern horizon, the faces of the buildings here below turn pink and seem almost to bloom, as if in the darkness of the night they existed only in a nascent form, not quite real.
Before long, the first of the armory workers, all unsuspecting, come drifting into the center of town in twos and threes from their small wood-frame houses above the cliffs on Clay Street, and as they walk through the iron gate into the yard, Father and the others grab them and make them hostages in the firehouse, until he has close to forty men crowded into the two large rooms and has to station several of his raiders inside with the freed slaves to help guard them. Then, by daylight, just as Father said it would, word of the raid gets out. Dr. John Starry, a local physician, is the first to raise the alarm. Summoned to the hotel hours earlier to care for the wounded watchman and the dying Hayward Shepherd by a courageous Negro barman who, at risk of his life, slipped out a side door of the hotel and down dark alleyways to the physician’s house, Dr. Starry bandages the watchman’s forehead and is at Shepherd’s side when the poor man dies, after which, accompanied by the barman who brought him there, he succeeds in returning to his home undetected, where at once he rouses his family and neighbors. Then he rides to the home of the Superintendent of the Armory, A. M. Kitzmiller, bringing the scarcely-to-be-believed news. The armory, arsenal, and rifle works and a large group of hostages, including Colonel Lewis Washington, are all in the hands of an army of abolitionist murderers that is led by none other than Osawatomie Brown and aided by a wild gang of escaped, spear-carrying slaves! There is a full-scale insurrection under way! Brown has trained cannon on the square, the doctor reports, and is moving all the arms from the town into the interior!
Soon the bell of the Lutheran church atop the hill starts to clang, summoning the citizens to an emergency meeting, and a rider has been sent to Shepherdstown to call out the local militia, and a second has been dispatched to Charles Town for the Jefferson Guards, formed for the express purpose of meeting precisely this circumstance after the Turner rebellion back in ’31.
Father and his men, when they hear the church bell ringing on and on for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, know what is happening. Don’t be frightened, boys, don’t panic. There’s still plenty of time, he assures the men. The hostages and practically every rifle in the town are in our hands. And the Lord is watching over us. We won’t go down, boys, but if the Lord requires it of us, then it will be as Samson went. These people know that, and they don’t want it, so we’re still safe enough here.
It is full daylight, around seven A.M., when Father strides through the gate of the armory yard and approaches the railroad station and calls out for Mr. Phelps, the conductor. Come here, sir! I wish to parley with you! Phelps pokes his head out the door but refuses to come forward. I have decided to let you move the train on to Baltimore, Father declares. But tell your employer, and tell all the civil and military authorities, that this is the last train I will permit in or out of Harpers Ferry, at the extreme peril of those men we have taken prisoner, until we have finished with our business here.
Phelps nods, and he and the engineer and the baggagemaster return to the train, fire it up, and take it slowly towards the covered bridge and across the Potomac into Maryland. From the schoolhouse on the heights opposite, I watch the train far below snake its way out of the bridge and wind along the north bank of the river towards Baltimore and Washington beyond, and I know that within minutes, as soon as the train has reached the station at Monocacy, news of the raid will reach the main offices of the B & O. An hour later, in Richmond, an aide to Governor Henry Wise will disturb the Governor’s breakfast with astonishing news, and shortly afterwards, in Washington, D.C., an adjutant general will burst into the office of the Secretary of War, who will read the wire from Governor Wise requesting federal troops and will at once ask for an emergency meeting with President Buchanan. More in line with Father’s purposes—and I know this, too—by evening, every newspaper in the land will be shouting the news of our raid:
FEARFUL AND EXCITING INTELLIGENCE! NEGRO INSURRECTION
IN HARPERS FERRY, VIRGINIA, LED BY JOHN BROWN OF KANSAS!!
MANY SLAIN, HUNDREDS TAKEN HOSTAGE, FEDERAL ARMS SEIZED!!!
In morning light, a few personal weapons, mostly antiquated muskets and squirrel guns, have been located by the townspeople, and five or six of the more adventurous men among them have taken up firing positions on the hillside above the armory yard. It is not long, however, before they are spotted by the raiders, most of them Kansas veterans and much more experienced than the locals at this sort of action and possessing weapons of surpassing accuracy, so that the townsmen are barely able to open fire, when one of them, a grocer named Boerly, is shot dead by a bullet from a raider rifle, which causes a quick retreat amongst the others. It is mid-morning. The militias from Shepherdstown and Charles Town have not yet arrived, and in Washington, fifty miles to the east, federal troops are only now being mustered for railroad transport to Harpers Ferry. Here in town, their feeble efforts at defense effectively curtailed by the raiders’ deadly accurate Sharps rifles, by their
fear of endangering the hostages, and by their growing certainty that there are many more than Father’s seventeen raiders occupying the town and hundreds more escaped slaves than seven, the citizens are limited to taking occasional, erratic potshots in the general direction of the armory, causing more danger and havoc to themselves than to the raiders.
Even so, over at the rifle works on Hall’s Island, Kagi has grown increasingly anxious about the passage of so much time, for he and his two men, Copeland and Leary, though they have so far held the factory uncontested, are situated far from the hostages in the firehouse, and thus, of Father’s force, they are the most vulnerable to attack from the townsmen. Kagi dispatches Leary to town on foot to request Father to send back a wagon and additional men, so that they can quickly load the seized weapons from the factory and begin their escape into the mountains. It is time. None of the raiders has been killed or even wounded. According to the plan, they should all be departing from Harpers Ferry by now.
And I, up on the Maryland Heights, should also have left by now. That is the plan, Father’s plan, his vision of how it would go at Harpers Ferry on the night of October 16 and the morning of October 17, and everything up to now has gone accordingly. Except for the one thing: that the hundreds of escaping slaves whom we expected to come rushing to our side have not yet appeared, and the few who have are turning fearful and hesitant and may themselves have to be put under guard and made into hostages.
But that does not matter, I decide, as I watch from my perch above the town. Father’s plan can accommodate that, too. We have seized at least three wagonloads of weapons, we have terrorized the entire South into believing that an insurrection has begun, and in the North we have raised fresh huzzahs and enthusiastic promises of material support and a coming flood of volunteer fighters—we have, indeed, begun an insurrection, which surely, thanks to the presence of Frederick Douglass, will catch and burst into flame in a matter of mere days, and if Father leads his men out of Harpers Ferry now and makes his appointed rendez-vous in the Alleghenies with Mr. Douglass, we will still be able to feed those flames and follow them into the deeper South, just as Father wished. It is not too late.
The slaves will come in, Father insists. They will soon start to arrive. We must give them every moment up to the last possible moment to learn of our raid and our intentions and to overcome their natural fears and flee their masters’ farms and plantations for the town, which is still under our control. The second we abandon the town, the escaping slaves will have no place to go where they are not in terrible danger. For their sake, we shall continue to hold the town, he declares. Even as the Jefferson Guards ride in on the Charles Town Pike from the west and the Shepherdstown militia comes in along the Potomac road from the north and the troop train from Washington slowly approaches from the east.
V
Chapter 23
But surely, Miss Mayo, surely you, of all people, must already know the part of my account that I am leaving out, and that it turns all I have been relating to you these many months into a fantasy, an old man’s wishful dream, and makes of Father’s exquisitely detailed plan a deadly chimera. For you, like the rest of America, have read and believed Frederick Douglass’s eloquent narrative of his life and are familiar with his version of his final meeting with Father and me in Chambersburg. I have no quarrel with it—what Mr. Douglass says there is true: that for an entire day he and Father wrestled like angels, as the one struggled to keep the other from martyrdom, and the other fought to convince the one to save him from martyrdom by joining him there. And that both men lost the fight.
It was a curious, paradoxical situation, for the two loved and admired one another past all reasoning, and each, to complete his work, needed the other alive and at his side. Thanks to the peculiarities of the disease of racialism and that all Americans, although differently, suffer from it, Negro as much as white, the War Against Slavery could never be won by white or Negro people alone. More thoroughly than almost anyone else in the movement, Father and Mr. Douglass knew this, which caused them both frequently to be criticized by their racial brethren, the whites disdainful of Father’s close, ongoing alliances with Negroes and the blacks suspicious of Mr. Douglass’s apparent, privileged ease of movement amongst white gentility. Then, as much as now, men like Father and Frederick Douglass made people of both races, regardless of their politics and principles regarding racial matters, anxious and mistrustful. They were, therefore, each other’s main comfort.
I cannot be exact as to the date, for while the details of everything that happened in those days are as vivid and sharply outlined in my memory as in a stained-glass window, more so than what transpired here in my cabin this very morning, the abstractions of duration and chronology are somewhat vague to me and are often lost altogether from my mind. But one Saturday morning a few weeks before the raid, Father came to me at breakfast and, taking me aside, said to hitch the wagon and come up to Chambersburg with him. “I have arranged for a meeting there tomorrow morning with Mister Douglass,” he explained.
“Wonderful news,” I answered, genuinely excited at the prospect, although my habitual laconic manner probably did not show it. I was often thought in those days to be sarcastic or sour, when I was instead merely frightened by the intensity of my feeling and wished no more than to protect myself and others from it.
“Oh, just do as I say, Owen. He has come all the way from Rochester for this. He writes that he wants to hear the details of my plan, but I can only reveal them to him in person. And so he has come.”
Shortly, we were making our way in late summer sunshine through the rolling, blond, recently mown pastures and the peaceful farm villages of western Maryland into Pennsylvania, arriving by evening at our Quaker safe house, where we spent the night talking abolition and religion with the good, pacificistic, prayerful keepers of the house, friends and strong supporters of abolitionism generally and of Father in particular, people who believed that their friendship and support were being used by us to help establish a more formidable and effective Underground Railroad, a belief which Father took care not to disabuse them of or threaten.
Mostly, I listened, eventually stretching myself out on my blanket by the fire and finally falling asleep to the sound of Father’s voice droning on into the night, as he explicated the true meaning in the Book of Matthew of Christ’s ninth-hour cry on the cross, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? “You must remember, friends, that since the sixth hour there had been darkness all over the land,” he explained. “And the priests had reviled and mocked Him, saying, If thou be the son of God, then come down from the cross; and with the scribes and elders, they had all declared, Jesus saved others, but himself he cannot save. And then they said to Him, If you be the king of Israel, the true Son of God, then come down from the cross, and we will believe you. Whereupon Christ cried out, My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me? and yielded up the ghost, so as to provide for all those who had mocked and reviled Him, even those who had crucified Him, both the question and the answer. For when He had yielded up the ghost, as all men must, the veil of the temple was rent, and the earth quaked and split, and the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints that slept therein arose, and when the people saw that, all of them, even the Roman centurions who stood amongst the priests and scribes and elders, were struck with fear, and they said, Truly, this was the Son of God! Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani’. Out of the pitch darkness came that most human cry of Him who believes in God, of Him who knows that He is the most beloved of God, of Him who is yet subject utterly to God’s will. And thus, in asking His final question—which is not a self-serving plea such as we ourselves, like the priests and the scribes and the elders, might make, but a question that is asked by a child of its parent, by a son of his father, by one who does not doubt the existence of the other and does not question the power of the other—in asking that question, Why hast Thou forsaken me? Christ in His final act amongst men is truly exemplary
. Which is exactly and most particularly how the Lord intended Him to be for us, as a gift, His greatest gift, a gift exceeding even life itself, a gift that defines for us the possibility of eternal life, and in the way that it is revealed to us, we are shown the sole means for obtaining it. Belief in the Lord, not special pleading, but belief, simple belief, as the child believes in the parent . . .”
Thus, as so often, was my descent into sleep contaminated and controlled by my father’s words and my dreams shaped by them, so that, to the degree that one’s waking mind is sculpted by the artistry of one’s dreams, I was, the following day, when we rode out to the quarry where Father had arranged to meet with Mr. Douglass, locked into considerations, not of the question of the efficacy of martyrdom, but of its ultimate meaning, of its use as proof of belief. For I had come to see that it need have no practical purpose, that it required no particular objective or goal in this world, to be justified or desired. Its purpose was to strengthen belief, the martyr’s belief in God the Father, in the Hereafter, in eternal life, in resurrection—in something, anything, other than the meaning and purpose here and now of the mortal life of the martyr himself.
By mid-morning, after much careful reconnoitering, we had taken up our position like watchful ravens at the quarry where Mr. Douglass in his narrative says that he finally found us—upon a cut-stone platform walled in and set high amongst slabs of gray rock from which we could obtain a good view of anyone approaching us without being seen ourselves. Father was still a fugitive then, with a federal price on his head, and I imagine that I was, too, although, so far from Kansas and with no one any longer actively pursuing us, it was easy to forget. But it was also true that, this early in the game and this late, it would be reckless for the Old Man to be seen meeting with Frederick Douglass so close to the border of a slave state. And, of course, Father enjoyed the accoutrements of clandestinity for their own sake. Thus we hid ourselves up amongst the rocks from Mr. Douglass and made him find us.
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