The Insurrectionist

by Herb Karl

  Brown was walking down the porch steps as Owen brought up the one-horse covered wagon. A few words passed between them as the old man hoisted himself onto the seat. He surveyed his soldiers, saw the wisps of vapor from their breathing. He took up the reins and gave the order to move out.

  Cook and Tidd went first, Brown next in the wagon, the rest following in pairs in accordance with the sequence prescribed earlier.

  The five-mile march to Harpers Ferry was a slow, muddy, mostly downhill slog from the Maryland Heights—a plateau some thirteen hundred feet above a macadam road that ran alongside the Potomac. As the procession neared the entrance to the covered railroad bridge, the moon broke through the clouds, disappearing just as quickly, but not before the men got a glimpse of the village. It rose up a steep hill in terraces.

  The moon also revealed a thin layer of mist suspended over the river like a shroud.

  Occupy the musket factory, the arsenal, and the rifle works. Capture high-profile hostages. Wait to be joined by the runaways and others who learn of the invasion. Seize whatever arms can be carried off easily. Retreat to the mountains before having to deal with organized resistance.

  That was the plan.

  14

  Minutes Later

  October 16, 1859

  Harpers Ferry, Virginia

  Even though the march down the steep, rain-sodden road from the Kennedy farm had taken longer than expected, Brown and his eighteen soldiers saw no one. They arrived at the covered railroad bridge a little after ten o’clock. John Cook and Charlie Tidd moved ahead of the company in accordance with Brown’s instructions. By the time the rest of the men caught up, Cook had snuffed out the lamp mounted over the bridge’s entrance. Tidd, meanwhile, had removed his poncho and cartridge belt and was clambering up the side of the bridge with a pair of wire-cutting pliers.

  While Tidd severed the telegraph line connecting Harpers Ferry to Baltimore and Washington, DC, the men formed a semicircle around the wagon. Brown told them to transfer their carbines and belts to the outside of their ponchos. He wanted his men to enter the village like legitimate soldiers—their weapons in plain sight.

  They resumed the march across the bridge—a span of about three hundred yards. Aaron Stevens and John Kagi had taken the lead. Their task to intercept the watchman on duty was accomplished successfully a few minutes later. Bill Williams surrendered without resistance, thinking at first he was the victim of a hoax.

  When the men neared the junction—where the tracks split to accommodate the two railroad lines that used the bridge—Stewart Taylor and Brown’s son Watson assumed their posts as sentries. Brown and the remaining soldiers, with the watchman under guard, exited the bridge and waited as Tidd cut the wire running to the telegraph key inside the office of the village’s stationmaster.

  Moments later they reached Potomac Street—a strip of cobbled pavement lined with shops and lodging establishments and bracketed by the Galt saloon and the US armory’s musket factory. At the factory’s main gate, the road veered to the left and merged into Shenandoah Street. Parallel to Potomac Street were the tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad line; they ran behind the Wager House, a hotel whose parlor also served as a waiting room for passengers traveling to Baltimore and Washington, DC. Though the street was deserted, Brown made note of the light coming from the windows of the Galt saloon. He surmised that some late-night patrons were fortifying themselves for another week of work in the armory’s machine shops. The clatter of his wagon as it moved over the rough cobbles went unnoticed. Brown and his men arrived at the musket factory’s front gate without incident.

  Constructed of eight-foot-tall wrought iron pickets, the factory’s double-swinging gate was hinged between stone columns. The columns and pickets were repeated at intervals on either side of the gate and formed part of the fence that protected the facility from undesirables—undesirables such as Brown’s armed men, which must have been how they were perceived by the night watchman Daniel Whelan, who heard the wagon approaching. He stood inside the gate with his lantern, peering through the iron pickets.

  When Brown demanded that he unlock the gate, Whelan refused. Stevens viewed the watchman’s loyalty to the government as a temporary nuisance. He reached between the pickets and grabbed Whelan’s coat while Tidd boosted Cook to the top of the nearest stone column. From his perch Cook kept his pistol trained on Whelan as more than a dozen carbines were aimed at the watchman’s head.

  Stevens’s words sent a chilling message to Whelan: “Be very still and make no noise, else you will be put to eternity.”

  Kagi, meanwhile, removed the crowbar from the wagon and inserted it between one of the links in the chain securing the padlocked gate. The link snapped and Brown and his men passed through the gate, having accomplished their initial objective: the occupation of the musket factory.

  The old man guided the wagon to the brick firehouse. The building’s three double doors faced a spacious yard, from which Brown would be able to observe activity within the compound of workshops and mills. From the gate he would have a straight-line view of the short strip of Potomac Street—including the Wager House and Galt saloon. Diagonally across the street from the gate stood the arsenal, the second of his objectives.

  Though the rifle works—the last facility Brown intended to occupy—was several hundred yards away, the firehouse’s proximity to both the covered railroad bridge and the bridge across the Shenandoah made it a logical choice for his headquarters. And as he’d mentioned when outlining his plan, the firehouse’s watch room, warmed by an iron stove, would be an agreeable place in which to confine the prominent citizens he intended to use as hostages. What he hadn’t told his men was that capturing someone like the great-grandnephew of George Washington was likely to elevate the curiosity of newspaper editors. After Brown freed the hostages and headed for the mountains, he wanted reporters who descended on Harpers Ferry to have at their disposal some newsworthy sources.

  Before he left the Kennedy farm, Brown had made it clear that he didn’t want to subject the residents of the Ferry to any unnecessary danger. Yet he understood, as the commander of an invading force, that his actions had to be taken seriously—which meant instilling a measure of fear in the villagers. And so, as the two captive watchmen stood outside the firehouse beset by uncertainty, Brown told them, “I came here from Kansas, and this is a slave state. I want to free all the slaves in this state. I shall soon have total possession of the armory, and if the citizens interfere with me I must burn the town and have blood.”

  Stevens then directed the prisoners to the watch room, leaving them in the custody of Jerry Anderson and Dauphin Thompson. Brown climbed down from the wagon. He was ready to cross the street and take the arsenal.

  Since no watchman was on duty inside the arsenal, Albert Hazlett and Edwin Coppoc merely had to enter the grounds from an alley in the rear. They took possession of the larger of two storage buildings. Using the crowbar, Coppoc forced open a door, and he and Hazlett went inside.

  The arsenal and the musket factory were now in Brown’s hands. The rifle works was the next objective.

  Fog had begun to settle on the lower village. Brown welcomed it, knowing it would give him and his soldiers added concealment. As they neared the wagon bridge over the Shenandoah River, Will Thompson and Oliver left the formation to take their posts. Brown and the remaining soldiers continued their march to a causeway arching over a narrow channel between the mainland and the island on which the rifle works was located.

  The cluster of workshops that made up the works was constructed decades after the musket factory and arsenal—hence its relative remoteness. The original purpose of the gunsmiths employed at the rifle works was to create cutting-edge weapons and innovative manufacturing processes. A former gunsmith at the facility was Christian Sharps, the inventor of the breech-loading rifle that eventually morphed into the carbine Brown had supplied to his soldiers. The old man had a genuine appreciation for what was being accompl
ished at the rifle works, but he didn’t target it for that reason. It was the last facility of the armory, an armory that wouldn’t be completely under his control until the rifle works was occupied. From Cook’s surveillance report, Brown learned it was patrolled by a lone watchman—an elderly gentleman who, coincidentally, was the father of Bill Williams, one of the watchmen already imprisoned at the firehouse. An unarmed Sam Williams surrendered when he saw the display of force that greeted him at the gate. He stood shivering amid his captors, unsure of his fate, as Brown gathered his soldiers together to disclose the details of the final phase of the operation.

  First, though, he made an announcement: “Gentlemen, we have taken the US armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. And we have done so without the snap of a gun or any violence whatsoever.”

  On an evening when the point of land flanked by the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers was obscured by darkness and fog, the muted glow of the watchman’s lantern made it impossible for Brown to read the expressions on the faces of his men at that special moment. No matter. The Lord had seen fit to honor his efforts, and for that he was thankful.

  He assigned the task of garrisoning the rifle works to Kagi and John Copeland. Both men could be relied on, even though Brown was putting them at great risk; they would be isolated on an island at the farthest point from the old man’s headquarters. He promised to reinforce their position as soon as possible.

  It was time for Stevens to take charge of a detachment whose main purpose was to capture slaveholders to be used as hostages. Colonel Lewis Washington and John Allstadt owned farms just off the Charles Town Turnpike four miles west of Harpers Ferry. As Brown had explained earlier, Stevens was to appropriate the colonel’s four-horse wagon and use it to transport Washington and Allstadt—along with their male slaves—to the firehouse. Stevens also was to do what he could to spread word of the invasion to other slaves in the area, many of whom already knew it was coming.

  The detachment included veteran soldiers John Cook and Charlie Tidd and three of the recent arrivals: Osborne Anderson, Shields Green, and Lewis Leary. As Stevens led them away, Brown was left with two soldiers—Dangerfield Newby, the manumitted slave and eldest member of the company, and twenty-year-old William “Billy” Leeman, the youngest though not the least experienced of Brown’s men. Leeman was only seventeen when he joined Brown’s Kansas Regulars in September 1856. Annie noticed at the Maryland farm that Leeman exhibited an adventurous spirit, occasionally escaping to the village even though her father had forbidden such conduct. She said he “smoked a good deal and drank sometimes” and was one of the hardest of her “invisibles” to keep caged. Brown never doubted Leeman’s commitment to the cause and rewarded him with the rank of captain. Still, he felt compelled to assign Leeman duties that ensured his adventurous spirit would be kept under control.

  It was not yet midnight when Brown, Newby, and Leeman—along with their prisoner Sam Williams—arrived back at the musket factory. Jerry Anderson met them at the gate and reported that Will Thompson and Oliver had arrested a father and son at the Shenandoah wagon bridge. They were on their way home from a late-night revival meeting. After dropping the two captives at the firehouse, Oliver and Will were getting ready to return to their posts when Bill Williams—the watchman seized on the railroad bridge—announced that the person scheduled to relieve him was a young Irishman with a no-nonsense reputation who wasn’t likely to be taken without a fight. Worried about the safety of his brother, Oliver had grabbed a handful of pikes, and he and Will had hustled to the bridge to alert Watson and his fellow sentry Stewart Taylor.

  Brown didn’t like the fact that the Shenandoah Bridge had been left unguarded. It rankled him that Oliver had acted without consulting him. Before deciding what to do about the situation, the old man wanted to reassure his prisoners he meant them no harm. So he entered the firehouse’s watch room and stood with his back to the five captives huddled in a corner. He warmed his hands over the iron stove.

  “I have not come to rob you,” he said, turning to the prisoners. “My only aim is to free the slaves. There will be others joining you. If you do not attempt to escape you shall be allowed to return to your loved ones.”

  A voice from the shadows: “How long will you keep us?”

  A long pause, then in Brown’s rasping voice: “It is in God’s hands.”

  The cold, damp night air jolted the old man as he left the watch room. He shivered, worried that he might suffer another attack of his chronic illness. As he stood outside the firehouse, he told himself to put such thoughts out of his mind. There were decisions that needed to be made. Oliver and Will had abandoned their posts. He would have Newby and Leeman take their place.

  Before he was able to give the order, the early morning stillness was shattered by a gunshot, a dull report unlike the loud crack of a Sharps carbine. The shot came from the railroad bridge, and Brown assumed it was from a Maynard revolver, the sidearm carried by his soldiers. He moved tentatively toward the fence separating the musket factory from the railroad platform. He heard rapid footfalls and the panting of someone running across the platform. A door slammed shut.

  “What shall we do, Captain?”

  Brown was unaware that Newby had followed him and was standing in the dark only a few feet away.

  “We shall do nothing until we know more than we do now,” the old man said. Then, guided by the odor of smoke coming from the chimney of the watch room’s stove, he and Newby made their way back to the firehouse.

  What if the shot had aroused others? Brown didn’t want word of the invasion to reach the locals prematurely—not before Stevens returned with the hostages and certainly not before runaway slaves had a chance to join him. In the meantime he wanted Newby and Leeman on the street. They could detain anyone who might be a threat and keep an eye out for runaways.

  Brown picked up a lantern, told Dauphin Thompson to continue guarding the prisoners, then sent Newby and Leeman to patrol Shenandoah Street. He posted Jerry Anderson at the gate, gave him some instructions, and was on his way to the covered bridge when someone called out from the darkness.

  “Father, is that you?”

  “Watson?”

  “Yes, Father. Oliver has a gash in his leg and I need to stop the bleeding.”

  As Brown searched the covered wagon for the box containing bandages and medicine, Watson told of Oliver and Will showing up at the railroad bridge, that they arrived just moments before the relief watchman.

  “We told him to halt, Father,” Watson said. “But he wouldn’t listen.”

  “And you shot him?”

  “We had him in our grip but he gave Oliver an awful blow.”

  “You shot the watchman?”

  “I don’t think we hit him, Father.”

  Brown found the medicine box and removed some gauze and sticking plaster. He considered expressing his disappointment at the actions taken but thought better of it. The damage already was done. Since the relief watchman was allowed to escape, he must surely have alerted others. Now there was a need to have extra men close by. Maybe Oliver and Will ought to remain with Watson and Taylor on the railroad bridge. But that meant Newby and Leeman would be on their own, monitoring all activity between the musket factory and the Shenandoah Bridge. The old man was uncomfortable with the situation but felt he had no choice.

  After Watson returned to the railroad bridge to care for Oliver, Brown resumed his pacing outside the firehouse. He pondered the new developments.

  15

  One Hour Later

  October 17, 1859

  Harpers Ferry, Virginia

  The eastbound Baltimore and Ohio express train hadn’t figured into the old man’s plan. It was scheduled to stop briefly at Harpers Ferry—to pick up or drop off mail—before continuing on to Baltimore. At 1:25 AM, the train rolled past the musket factory and approached the railroad bridge. A dense, wet fog had settled on the tracks.

  The train’s locomotive—with its fuel tender, mail car, and
passenger coaches trailing behind—coughed smoke and cinders into the early morning darkness. Most of the villagers were asleep; they were accustomed to the screeching of metal on metal as the engineer alternately applied and released his brakes in order to bring the cars to a stop at the platform behind the Wager House.

  Conductor A. J. Phelps, lantern in hand, stepped off the mail car followed by his baggage master. The two men walked ahead of the locomotive to a section of curved track the B&O shared with the Winchester and Potomac Railroad. Tracks for both lines converged at the railroad bridge with its two separate points of entry—one for the B&O trains heading east along the Potomac, the other for the Winchester and Potomac line paralleling the Shenandoah River. It was Phelps’s duty to make sure a mechanical switch was properly positioned to allow the train to follow the correct tracks onto the bridge.

  As he bent over to inspect the tracks, Phelps remarked to his baggage master that he thought it odd the bridge watchman hadn’t met the train as he normally did. The conductor was about to signal the engineer to proceed when someone burst through the back door of the Wager House. Whoever the person was seemed in a frightful hurry, scuttling across the tracks toward Phelps and the baggage master. Phelps held up his lantern to see who it might be, but the fog had further reduced visibility in the darkness.

  “’Tis me, Captain. Patrick Higgins. The watchman.”

  The stress in the young Irishman’s voice was apparent to Phelps. He and Higgins traded pleasantries regularly whenever the B&O express stopped at the Ferry. As Higgins stood in the yellow halo of Phelps’s lantern, the conductor noticed the cloth bandage wrapped around the watchman’s head. Blood had seeped through.

  “Good Lord,” Phelps exclaimed, “what’s happened to you?”

  “They shot me, Captain. The bridge is crawlin’ with gunmen—and the town, too, it pains me to say.”

  Phelps listened as Higgins gave an account of the events that had transpired since he arrived at the bridge to begin his midnight shift. He lived in Sandy Hook, Maryland—a little over a mile from the Ferry—and he was supposed to relieve fellow watchman Bill Williams. When Higgins reached the watch shack on the Maryland side of the Potomac, he saw that the bridge light had been extinguished and Williams was nowhere to be seen. After pulling a lever that recorded the beginning of his shift, Higgins started out across the bridge. He hadn’t quite gotten to the fork where the tracks diverged when four armed men confronted him.