Great American Adventure Stories

by Tom McCarthy

  At the regular trial, Brown’s counsel requested a postponement on account of the prisoner’s health. But Dr. Mason, his physician, attested the physical ability of his patient to undergo the strain. The state was spending almost a thousand dollars a day for military guards and other items. When Brown’s counsel presented telegrams from his relatives asking for delay until they could forward proofs of his insanity, Brown said, “I will say, if the court will allow me, that I look on this as a miserable artifice and trick of those who ought to take a different course in regard to me, if they take any at all. I view it with contempt more than otherwise. I am perfectly unconscious of insanity, and I reject, so far as I am capable, any attempts to interfere in my behalf on that score.”

  On the last day of the trial, October 31st, after six hours of argument by Hunter, Chilton, and Griswold, the jury delivered the following verdict: “Guilty of treason and of conspiring and advising with slaves and others to rebel and of murder in the first degree.” On Wednesday, November the 2nd, he was brought into court to receive his sentence. The county clerk, Robert H. Brown, asked, “Have you anything to say why sentence should not be passed on you?” Brown, leaning on a cane, slowly arose from his chair and with plaintive emphasis addressed Judge Parker as follows:

  I have, may it please the court, a few words to say. In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, the design on my part to free the slaves. I certainly intended to have made a clean thing of that matter as I did last winter when I went into Missouri and took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moved them through the country, and finally left them in Canada. I designed to have done the same thing again on a larger scale. That was all I intended. I never did intend murder or treason or the destruction of property or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion or to make insurrection. 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 and which I admit has been fairly proved, for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case—had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, sister, brother, 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. This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here, which I suppose is the Bible or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things, whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even unto them. It teaches me further to “Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.” I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say that 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 admitted freely I have done, in behalf of His despised poor was 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 submit. So let it be done.

  Let me say one word further. I feel entirely satisfied with the treatment I have received on my trial. Considering all the circumstances, it has been more generous than I expected. But I feel no consciousness of guilt. I never had any design against the life of any person nor any disposition to commit treason or excite slaves to rebellion or make any general insurrection. I never encouraged any man to do so but always discouraged any idea of the kind.

  Let me say a word in regard to the statements made by some of those connected with me. I hear it has been stated by some of them that I induced them to join me. But the contrary is true. I do not say this to injure them but as regards their weakness. There is not one of them but joined me of his own accord and the greater part of them at their own expense. A number of them I never saw and never had a word of conversation with till the day they came to me, and that was for the purpose I have stated. Now I am done.

  Brown’s statement was not exactly sustained by the facts. Why had he collected the Sharpe’s rifles, the pikes, the kegs of powder, many thousands of caps, and much warlike material at the Kennedy farm? Why did he and other armed men break into the United States armory and arsenal, make portholes in the engine house, shoot and kill citizens, and surround their own imprisoned persons with prominent men as hostages? But everybody in the courthouse believed the old man when he said that he did everything with a solitary motive, the liberation of the slaves.

  Judge Parker could, under his oath, do nothing else than to sentence him to be hung. He fixed the date for Friday, the 2nd of December. Brown’s counsel appealed to the Supreme Court of Virginia. Its five judges unanimously sustained the action of the Jefferson County court.

  Brown was hung on the bright and beautiful morning of December 2nd at 11:15 o’clock. At his request Andrew Hunter wrote his will. He then visited his fellow prisoners, who were all executed at a later date. He rode to his death between Sheriff Campbell and Captain Avis in a furniture wagon drawn by two white horses. He did not ride seated on his coffin as some of his chief eulogists have affirmed. The wagon was escorted to the scaffold by state military companies. No citizens were allowed near to the jail. Hence he did not kiss any negro baby as he emerged from his prison, as Mr. Whittier has described in a poem on the event and as artists have memorialized in paintings. The utter absurdity of such an incident occurring under such surroundings any Virginian will see. Avis, Campbell, and Hunter publicly denied it. But the story will doubtless have immortality. In one of the companies of soldiers walked the actor John Wilkes Booth, the infamous assassin of Abraham Lincoln. At the head of the Lexington cadets walked Professor Thomas Jefferson Jackson, who became an able Confederate general and is best known to the world as “Stonewall Jackson.” As the party neared the gallows, Brown gazed on the glorious panorama of mountain and landscape scenery. Then he said, “This is a beautiful country.” He wore a black slouch hat with the front tipped up. Reaching the scaffold the numerous state troops formed into a hollow square. Brown mounted the platform without trepidation. Standing on the drop, he said to the sheriff and his assistants, “Gentlemen! I thank you for your kindness to me. I am ready at any time. Do not keep me waiting.” The drop fell, and in ten minutes Dr. Mason pronounced him dead. That evening Mrs. Brown and her friends received the casket at Harpers Ferry and accompanied it to the old home at North Elba, New York. His funeral, as reported by the metropolitan papers, took place there six days after his execution. An immense concourse was in attendance. The conspicuous and brilliant orator Wendell Phillips delivered the address. He closed it with these words: “In this cottage he girded himself and went forth to battle. Fuller success than his heart ever dreamed of God had granted him. He sleeps in the blessings of the crushed and the poor. Men believe more firmly in virtue now that such a man has lived.” Personally I remained in Virginia.

  On the day that Brown was hung, martyr services, as they were called, were held in many Northern localities. At Concord, Dr. Edmund Sears read a poem in which are these stanzas:

  Not any spot, six feet by two

  Will hold a man like thee

  John Brown will tramp the shaking earth

  From Blue Ridge to the sea

  Till the strong angel comes at length

  And opes each dungeon door:

  And God’s Great Charter holds and waves

  O’er all the humble poor.

  And then the humble poor may come

  In that far distant day,

  And from the felon’s nameless grave

  Will brush the leaves away:

  And gray old men will point the spot

  Beneath the pine tree’s
shade,

  As children ask with streaming eyes

  Where old John Brown was laid.

  6

  Deluge

  Heroics in the Johnstown Flood

  From Reports by the Police Gazette

  The gentle Conemaugh River flowed unnoticed for the most part through the rolling hills around Johnstown, Pennsylvania. A poorly maintained dam and a powerful storm changed all that in a few moments of horror for thousands of unsuspecting residents.

  There is not one chance in a million that the Conemaugh River would ever have been heard of in history had it not been for its action on Friday evening, May 31.

  The Conemaugh River is, or rather was, a simple little stream that meandered through northwestern Pennsylvania and made glad by its peaceful murmurings those who dwelt by its bankside or bore tokens of affection in the way of pleasure-seeking picnickers, moonlight parties, or across-stream excursionists upon its placid bosom. It was one of those inoffensive creeks, termed by courtesy a river, that the Hudson River of the East, the Mississippi of the Middle, or the Red River of the West might call a stripling.

  There are times when even the still, small voice arises in its might and asserts its supremacy, and the wee small river of Conemaugh did that self-same thing on Friday evening, May 31. All along the banks of the listless yet ever flowing, little alleged river, the farmers were preparing for their anticipated harvests; the fishermen of the section—amateur fishermen indeed, for they were only equal to the fish—small and incomplete as was the Conemaugh, such as you and I, reader, who took pleasure in flinging their worm-crowded hooks into the stomach of a log and then going home for more bait; bonny fairies; brisk young tillers of the soil; toilers; and seeming-tired miners; these and all other human concomitants that go to make up such a quiet, thriving bailiwick dwelt in the locality.

  And so went on the listless life of the denizens of the Conemaugh Valley, nestling at the foot of the Allegheny range. Snuggling in the coziest nook, right where no prying reporter or trout-fishing president ever bent his way, was Johnstown. The word was is used advisedly; Johnstown is no more. At four o’clock on the fateful day, all was serene. At six o’clock, all was desolation and destruction.

  The “big dam” had broken, and the little brooklet had burst its sides for very glee at being dubbed a creek and was making itself known in history. The Brooklyn Theatre holocaust, with its dead three hundred, paled into insignificance. The Mud Run and Reading disasters had to take a backseat.

  “Let me alone for horror,” murmured the Conemaugh, “and I’ll get there!”

  It did get there.

  Right above Johnstown on the self-same Conemaugh, or rather where the North Fork glides into that erstwhile inoffensive stream, was a reservoir. The reservoir is on the site of the old lake, which was one of the feeders of the Pennsylvania Canal. It is the property of a number of wealthy gentlemen in Pittsburgh, who formed themselves into the corporation, the title of which is the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. This sheet of water was formerly known as Conemaugh Lake. It is from two hundred to three hundred feet above the level of Johnstown, being in the mountains. It is about three and one-half miles long and from a mile to one and one-fourth miles in width, and in some places it is one hundred feet in depth. It holds more water than any other reservoir, natural or artificial, in the United States. The lake has been quadrupled in size by artificial means and was held in check by a dam from seven hundred to one thousand feet wide. It was 90 feet in thickness at the base, and the height was 110 feet. The top has a breadth of over twenty feet.

  From what could be ascertained by the writer, the reservoir banks had not been considered absolutely safe by the people of the big and growing town. The reservoir was an artificial rather than a natural lake. The art came in when the South Fork Club, a corporation of gentlemen, took charge of the reservoir and dammed it. The South Fork Club had the dam inspected once a month by the Pennsylvania Railroad engineers, and their investigation showed that nothing less than some convulsion of nature would tear the barrier away and loosen the weapon of death. The steady rains of the past forty-eight hours had increased the volume of water in all the small mountain streams, which had already been swelled by the lesser rains earlier in the week. At this time it was evident that something in the nature of a cloudburst must have occurred just before the waters broke through the embankment.

  Then the water came. It came with a rush that astonished the natives. There was a low murmuring at first and then a rushing, hissing noise; then crevices appeared in the dam side. Then the embankment gave away, and onward rushed the torrent. It meant death and destruction to the fairest country on God’s footstool. Johnstown became a City of the Dead, and the once-pleasant valley was the Valley of Death.

  Only those who were on the spot at the time can or could tell of the terrible scenes that ensued, and even they could not depict them in their real colors. It would take the pen of a mightier than human hand to write the story and a brush of a heaven-inspired artist to delineate the action. All was desolation, death, and destruction. Men, women, and children, animals, houses, furniture were swept on the hell-bent waters!

  All through Cambria came the flood. Then on to Cooperdale. Frantic mothers with children born and unborn were compelled to flee and then had to succumb to the deluge. The cruel, onrushing tide had nothing in its instincts humanitarian. The death-tide rolled onward, and suckling babes were swept from their mother’s breasts, even as if the King of Old had proclaimed.

  So on to St. Florence in Fairfield—well-named. The people at Ninevah and the quiet, easygoing folk of the cruel-river towns counted their losses by hundreds.

  “Ten thousand dead,” was the announcement that came over the wires.

  The effect can never be told. Centuries may come and go, but no century can make its mark in the history of time like that of the nineteenth, with its aide, the Conemaugh. Hundreds upon hundreds of lives were lost. The number cannot even be approximated, for in such regions there are always innumerable people—what the careless world calls its floating population—who would not be missed or accounted for until the Judgment roll is called.

  Even on Monday, three days after the horror, mothers meandered about frantically, begging that their children might be returned to them, and men with hearts brushed tears from their eyes and endeavored to make them believe that their dear ones had been rescued. Children pleadingly prayed that they might be saved, but the cruel, ever-onward-rushing flood gathered them in and swept them onward.

  To add to the horror, the Johnstown Bridge, as if to add terror to terror and to make confusion worse confounded, swept from its approaches and precipitated the horror-stricken multitude into the torrent. An overturned stove in a dwelling inaugurated a conflagration. Nearly a hundred people were literally burned to death, thus adding holocaust to the far more preferable death by drowning.

  Scarcely had the news of the terrible disaster been sent abroad than the alert newspapers had their commissioners speedily on their way to the scene. Only the most meager accounts had been given to the public for the reason that every mode of communication via telegraph or train had been cut off. When the newspaper representatives reached Johnstown, the scene was a pitiable one. The former town was a swamp. Debris was piled here, there, and everywhere, and the pestilential stench from the dead bodies was next to unbearable.

  The scene beggars description. Even the trained newspaper men turned their eyes aside and held their nostrils. Corpses everywhere. Dank corpses at that, with glazed, fishy eyes and sloppy, wet hair that made the onlooker feel aweary and not overanxious to handle.

  In a single hole, after the waters had passed by, 150 bodies were found. Just imagine it! Two hours before, these 150 souls were alive, but there they were, huddled together as if they had been congregated for the purpose which had asserted itself.

  East Conemaugh was almost depopulated, a
nd Franklinborough, on the north of Johnstown, was entirely swept away. Mineral Point, between Johnstown and the viaduct, was blotted out of existence. If any of the six hundred souls that formerly resided there are alive, the reporters could not find them. Ninevah, just below the Conemaugh furnace, is a city of corpses. Indeed, from South Fork to Bolivar and for a distance of a dozen miles or so, the banks of the old-time river are literally strewn with corpses. After the death-dealing current had gone on, the work of tallying began. It will never be ended.

  Then the fiends in human shape began their ghoulish work of robbing the dead. Summary punishment was dealt out to some of them. A vigilance committee, hastily organized, ran a score of them into the river, and that was the end of them.

  At five o’clock on Monday evening, hundreds upon hundreds of citizens are arriving upon the scene. Coffins are coming in by the carload, and the result of philanthropic and necessary aid began to pour in. More relief is needed.

  The best story of the horror can be gathered from the tale of an eyewitness, C. W. Linthicum. Said he,

  My train left Pittsburgh Friday morning for Johnstown. The train was due at Sang Hollow at 4:02 but was five minutes late.

  At Sang Hollow, just as we were about to pull out, we heard that the flood was coming. Looking ahead up the valley, we saw an immense wall of water thirty feet high, raging, roaring, rushing toward us.

  The engineer reversed his engine and rushed back to the hills at full speed, and we barely escaped the waters. We ran back three hundred yards, and the flood swept by, tearing up tracks, telegraph poles, houses, and trees.