A final attempt was made to persuade Brown to surrender by Captain Sinn, of the Frederick militia, who hailed the fire-engine house and was invited inside by Brown. Sinn found him wearing the sword of Frederick the Great, carrying a Sharps carbine, wearing a large bowie knife on his belt, and full of complaints that his men “had been shot down like dogs” while bearing flags of truce. Sinn rather brusquely replied that men who took up arms against their own government “must expect to be shot down like dogs.” Brown took no umbrage at this, but merely replied that “he had weighed the responsibility and should not shrink from it.” He insisted that his followers “had killed no unarmed men,” but Sinn pointed out that the mayor had been unarmed when he was killed. Brown said that if so, he “deeply regretted it.” The two men, though opponents, clearly respected each other. Sinn crossed the street to the hotel, and returned with a surgeon to look at the wounds of Brown’s son Watson; the surgeon saw at once that the young man was dying, and that nothing more could be done but to make him as comfortable as possible.
With the departure of Captain Sinn and the surgeon, Brown’s men and his prisoners settled down for the night as best they could in the total darkness and cold of his tiny “fort.” Brown, with all his experience of last-ditch frontier warfare in Kansas, told his men to load all the rifles and stack them by the loopholes so they would not need to reload when the assault came; then he and Colonel Washington sat down to chat amiably enough together, and Brown reassured Washington that he would return President Washington’s sword undamaged, since this appeared to be Washington’s chief concern. From time to time Oliver Brown groaned and begged to be put out of his agony, to which his father replied first, “Oh, you will get over it,” then later, more sharply, “If you must die, die like a man.”
Many of Brown’s biographers have commented on the harshness of these remarks to his dying son, and of course to the modern ear they do sound unfeeling, but Brown’s love for his sons and grief for their loss were intense beyond any doubt—his spirit was that of the Old Testament, however, not the New, and like Abraham, his submission to God’s will was absolute and unquestioning. If the Lord demanded the sacrifice of two more of his sons to bring about the end of slavery, then so be it. It was for his boys and himself to accept God’s will with courage, as Isaac had done on Mount Moriah: hence the stern advice to Oliver to “die like a man.”
By eleven o’clock Oliver fell silent, and Brown said, “I guess he is dead.” Watson Brown’s quiet breathing indicated that he was still alive, if only just. Inside the fire-engine house, most of it taken up by two fire engines and their hoses, were the two dead or dying boys; the body of one of Brown’s followers, who had been killed while shooting through the gap between the main doors; Brown himself and five of his men, armed with Sharps rifles and revolvers; and Colonel Washington and ten other hostages. It was a small, cramped space, and cannot have been made more cheerful by the unmistakable sound of Lee’s marines replacing the militia around one in the morning, boots crashing in unison, orders being given and obeyed crisply—the arrival of regular troops could only mean that an assault was imminent.
Lee made his plans carefully. Now that the fire-engine house was surrounded by the marines, he was certain nobody could escape. He ordered Lieutenant Green to pick a party of twelve men to make the assault, plus three especially robust men to knock in the doors with sledgehammers, and a second party of twelve to go in behind them once the main door was breached, and made it clear that they would all go in with their rifles unloaded—in order to spare the hostages, the assault was to be made with bayonets; no shots were to be fired. Green did not even have a revolver—because his orders had come from the White House, he had assumed that his marines were urgently required for some ceremonial duty. They wore their dress uniforms, and he was armed merely with his officer’s dress sword, the marines’ famous “Mameluke” commemorating their assault on Tripoli, with its simple ivory grip and slim curved blade, an elaborate, ornamental, but flimsy weapon intended for ceremony rather than combat, instead of the pistol and heavier sword he would normally have worn on his belt going into battle. Major Russell, the paymaster, as a noncombatant officer, carried only a rattan switch, but being marines these officers were not dismayed at the prospect of assaulting the building virtually unarmed.
At first light J. E. B. Stuart was to walk up to the door and read to the leader of the insurrectionists—his name was assumed to be Isaac Smith—Lee’s letter. Whoever “Smith” was, Lee took it for granted that the terms of his letter would not be accepted, and he wanted the marines to get to “close quarters” as quickly as possible once that had happened. Speed—and the sheer concentrated violence of the assault—was the best way of ensuring that none of the hostages was harmed. The moment “Smith” had rejected Lee’s terms, Stuart was to raise his cap and the marines would go in.
As dawn broke Stuart advanced calmly to the doors carrying a white flag and Lee’s message. Through the gap he could see a familiar face, and the muzzle of a Sharps carbine pointed directly at his chest at a distance of a few inches—after being captured John Brown remarked that he could have wiped Stuart out like a mosquito, had he chosen to. “When Smith first came to the door,” Stuart would later write, as if he had met an old friend, “I recognized old Osawatomie Brown, who had given us so much trouble in Kansas.”
Lee’s message made no great impression on John Brown, who continued to argue, with what Stuart called “admirable tact,” that he and his men should be allowed to cross the Potomac and make their way back to a free state. Stuart got along well enough with his old opponent from Kansas—except for their difference of opinion about the legitimacy of slavery, they were the same kind of man: courageous, active, bold, exceedingly polite, and dangerous—and the “parley,” as Stuart called it, went on for quite some time, longer almost certainly than Lee, who was standing forty feet away on a slight rise in the ground, had intended. At last Brown said firmly, “No, I prefer to die here,” and with something like regret, Stuart took his cap off and waved it, stepping sideways behind the stone pillar that separated the two doors of the building to make way for the marines.
There was a volley of shots from the fire-engine house as the three marines with sledgehammers stepped forward and began to batter away at the heavy oak doors. Because Brown had used rope to hold the doors slightly open, the sledgehammers made no impression at first, merely driving them back a bit as the rope stretched. Green noticed a heavy ladder nearby, and ordered his men to use it as a battering ram, driving “a ragged hole low down in the right hand door” at the second blow. Colonel Washington, who was inside, standing close to Brown, remarked later that John Brown “was the coolest and firmest man I ever saw in defying danger and death. With one son dead by his side, and another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand and held his rifle with the other, and commanded his men with the utmost composure, encouraging them to be firm and to sell their lives as dearly as they could.” This admiration for John Brown as a man was to become a common theme in the South in the next few weeks: he had all the virtues southerners professed to admire, except for his opinion of slavery.
Colonel Washington cried out loudly, “Don’t mind us. Fire!” as the door splintered, and Lee, who recognized Washington’s voice, exclaimed admiringly, “The old revolutionary blood does tell.”
Lieutenant Green was first through the narrow, splintered opening his men had created in the door. The inside of the fire-engine house was already dense with smoke—in the days before the invention of smokeless gunpowder, every shot produced a volume of thick, acrid black smoke—but despite it he at once recognized Colonel Washington, whom he knew. Washington pointed to Brown, who was kneeling beside him reloading his carbine, and said, “This is Osawatomie.” Green did not hesitate. He lunged forward and plunged his dress sword into Brown, but the blade struck Brown’s belt buckle and was bent almost double by the force of the blow. Green took the bent weapon in both han
ds and beat Brown around the head with it until the old man collapsed, blood pouring from his wounds. As the marines followed Green in, led by Major Russell with his rattan cane, one of them was shot in the face, and another killed. The rest “rushed in like tigers,” in Green’s words; stepped “over their fallen comrades”; and bayoneted two of Brown’s followers, pinning one of them against the far wall. The others surrendered, and the fight was over in three minutes. Green would later remark that “a storming party is not a play-day sport,” which was no doubt true enough, but Lee had achieved his objective: none of the prisoners was harmed in the assault. Colonel Washington refused to leave the fire-engine house until he was provided with a pair of gloves, since he did not want to be seen in public with dirty hands.
Lee “saw to it that the captured survivors were protected and treated with kindliness and consideration.” Indeed, once the fire-engine house was taken, everybody seemed impressed by John Brown, rather than infuriated or vengeful. Lieutenant Green assumed he had killed Brown, but it soon appeared that the old man’s wounds were less serious than had been thought, and Lee had him carried to the office of the paymaster of the armory, where Brown soon recovered enough strength to hold what would now be called a “celebrity press conference” combined with some of the attributes of a royal audience. Lee courteously offered to clear the room of visitors if their presence “annoyed or pained” Brown, who, though in considerable pain, replied that “he was glad to make himself and his motives clearly understood,” a considerable understatement given what was to come in the next six and a half weeks, during which Brown would be transformed into a national hero and martyr, largely by the skill with which he played on public opinion in the North, and by his natural dignity and courage.
The small room was crowded. Brown and one of his wounded men, both lying on some blood-soaked old bedding on the floor, were surrounded by Lee; Stuart; Governor Wise of Virginia; Brown’s former prisoner the indomitable Colonel Washington; Senator Mason of Virginia, who in the near future would become the Confederacy’s “commissioner” in the United Kingdom; Congressman Vallandigham of Ohio and Congressman Faulkner of Virginia, among others; and perhaps more important than all of these, two reporters, one from the New York Herald and one from the Baltimore American, with their notepads at the ready. To everybody’s surprise, Brown allowed himself to be questioned for three hours, never once losing his self-control or the respect of his audience, and giving “no sign of weakness,” even though Lieutenant Green’s first thrust with his sword had pierced through him almost to his kidneys before striking his belt buckle.
Governor Wise perhaps spoke for everyone when he said of Brown, “He is a man of clear head, of courage, fortitude and simple ingenuousness. . . . He inspired me with a great trust in his integrity as a man of truth. He is a fanatic, vain and garrulous, but firm, truthful and intelligent,” unusual words to describe a man who had just stormed and captured a town and a federal arsenal, and was responsible, at least morally, for the death of four townspeople and one marine. Wise added, “He is the gamest man I ever saw,” a sentiment everybody seemed to share.
He was also the most eloquent. When Senator Mason asked him how he could justify his acts, Brown replied, “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 in 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.” When Mason asked him if he had paid his men any wages, Brown replied, “None,” and when J. E. B. Stuart remarked at this, a trifle sententiously, “The wages of sin is death,” Brown turned to him and said reprovingly, “I would not have made such a remark to you, if you had been a prisoner and wounded in my hands.”
Again and again Brown trumped his opponents. When asked upon what principle he justified his acts, he replied: “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.”
Lee would later write that the ineptitude of Brown’s plan proved he was either “a fanatic or a madman,” and from the military point of view he was right: twelve of Brown’s eighteen men, including two of his sons, had been killed, and two (including himself) wounded. But in fact Brown’s plan had worked out triumphantly, though not in the way he had intended.
Lee ordered Lieutenant Green to deliver Brown to the Charles Town jail to await trial, but Brown was far from being a political prisoner in the modern sense; he was allowed to carry out from the very beginning an uncensored and eloquent correspondence with his admirers and his family. The initial reaction in the North was that he had given abolitionism a bad name by his violent raid, but that quickly changed to admiration—here was a man who did not just talk about ending slavery, but acted. Although his wounds obliged him to attend his trial lying on a cot and covered with blankets, Brown’s behavior during it transformed him into a hero and a martyr throughout the world except in the slave states.
Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted that Brown “will make the gallows glorious like the cross”; Henry David Thoreau would call Brown “a crucified hero”; from France Victor Hugo wrote an open letter pleading for Brown’s pardon; and in Concord, Massachusetts, Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women, defined the widening gulf between North and South over the issue of slavery when she wrote of Brown’s coming execution,
No monument of quarried stone
No eloquence of speech,
Can grave the lessons on the land
His martyrdom will teach.
Lee was glad to leave Harpers Ferry and return home, but after a few days there he was ordered back to organize the defense of the armory, since the growing storm of protest over Brown’s sentence had made Governor Wise fearful of a new attack on it, or of an attempt by armed abolitionists to free Brown—though Brown himself had discouraged all such attempts, convinced now that his martyrdom was part of God’s plan for the destruction of slavery. Lee, who above all things disliked emotional personal confrontations, was obliged to deal as tactfully as he could with the arrival in Harpers Ferry of Mrs. Brown, who wished to see her husband before he was executed. Mrs. Brown had come, accompanied by a few abolitionist friends, “to have a last interview with her husband,” as Lee wrote to his wife, explaining, “As it is a matter over which I have no control I referred them to General Taliaferro.” (William B. Taliaferro was the commander of the Virginia Militia at Harpers Ferry.)
The day of the execution, December 2, Lee was no more anxious to watch Brown hang than he had been to deal with Mrs. Brown, and took care to station himself with the four companies of federal troops from Fort Monroe, which had been sent by the president to guard the armory at Harpers Ferry at the request of Governor Wise. In his majestic biography of Brown, Oswald Garrison Villard—grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist and supporter of John Brown—mused, “If John Brown’s prophetic sight wandered across the hills to the scene of his brief Virginia battle, it must have beheld his generous captor, Robert E. Lee, again in military charge of Harper’s Ferry, wholly unwitting that upon his shoulders was soon to rest the fate of a dozen confederated states.”
But of course no such “prophetic sight” or “spiritual glance,” as Villard also imagined it, carried that far from the scaffold. The old man, who had arrived seated on his own coffin, in a wagon drawn by two horses, was as dignified and commanding a presence as ever—as he reached the scaffold, he remarked, looking at the line of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he had hoped to shelter with the slaves he had freed and armed, and from which he had intended to raid from time to time to free more until a kind of human chain reaction brought an end to slavery, “This is beautiful country. I never had the pleasure of seeing it before.” Erect, serene, calm, he had to wait for twelve minutes with the noose
around his neck while the Virginia militia tried clumsily to form up in ranks as a square around the gallows, without showing the slightest sign of trembling in his legs or of fear on his face; the fierce eyes, which countless people who knew him compared to those of an eagle, stared unblinkingly at more than a thousand witnesses to his execution before the hood was placed on his head.
Many in the ranks around the scaffold would die in the war that was coming, some of them rising to fame and high rank, one of them at least to lasting infamy. In command of a detachment of cadet artillerymen from the Virginia Military Institute in their uniforms of gray and red was Thomas J. Jackson, professor of natural and experimental philosophy and instructor of artillery, who was praying fervently for John Brown’s soul and who in just nineteen months would receive his nickname, “Stonewall,” at First Manassas—First Bull Run, in the North—and would go on to become Lee’s most trusted corps commander and lieutenant. Also among the troops drawn up to prevent Brown’s being rescued were Edmund Ruffin, a white-haired firebrand secessionist who was determined to see Brown die, had purchased some of the blades from John Brown’s pikes in order to send one to the governor of each slave state as a reminder of Yankee hatred of the South, and would fire the first shot on Fort Sumter; and, in the Richmond company of the Virginia militia, a private of dramatic appearance, eyes fixed on the figure on the scaffold and delighted to be part of a historic scene: the actor John Wilkes Booth, who in five years would become Lincoln’s assassin, and would himself have stood on a scaffold like Brown’s had he not been shot by a Union soldier.
Clouds of Glory Page 3