by Norman Lock
“Father also thinks there will be war, which is the reason I’m here in Washington,” said Austin soberly. “I met with Sumner this morning.”
Senator Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, was as efficacious as John Brown in inciting antislavery opinion in the North against the slave power. In 1856, after the sack of Lawrence, South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks nearly beat the Massachusetts man to death with a heavy walking stick for having vilified his cousin, a Democratic congressman and slaveholder, for having taken “the harlot, slavery” as his “mistress.”
“What business did you have with him?” I asked, happy to have left Kate Scott in the wake of our conversation.
“Sumner is chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and, if war is imminent, our clients can benefit from his European connections. The adverse effect of hostilities on commercial interests will be catastrophic unless they can be sheltered abroad. Sumner is a powerful man in Congress, and I admire him in spite of his lavender trousers.”
I nodded my head knowingly, although I did not care whether their interests or their heads went to hell in a handbasket.
My well-being must have been on your brother’s mind, because he returned to the theme of my rootless existence. I was, in equal parts, touched by his solicitude and irritated by his officiousness.
“Robert, is this enough?”
His hand indicated the dining room, but it was meant to take in the capital, the army, and perhaps even my chaplaincy, which may have seemed frayed as an old cassock to his discerning eyes.
I sat up straight in my chair and postured self-importantly like most everyone else in Washington, which, like capital cities the world over, was as much a theater stage as a seat of government.
“A modicum of contentment is all that a man can hope for who believes himself to be in the service of honorable ends,” I replied. “I leave happiness to fools and brides.”
What tripe! Even now I blush to recall those words and the mincing manner in which I spoke them.
Austin did not appear to mind my pomposity; perhaps the business of law and his visits to Washington had inured him to shameful displays of self-love.
“I wish you well, Robert, in your vocation. We’ll pray for you if war does come.”
I thanked him, and we parted that night as friends.
FEARFUL & EXCITING INTELLIGENCE!
SLAVE UPRISING AT HARPER’S FERRY!
Conspiracy of Negroes in Virginia & Maryland.
U.S. Arsenal Raided, Blood Shed & Lives Lost!
Slaves Armed with Rifles & Pikes.
Terror on the Train——Hostages Taken——
Telegraph Wires Cut——Massacre of Civilians——
Thousands of Army Rifles Seized by Negroes.
Slave Insurrection Spreads to the Interior.
EXTRA-ORDINARY MASSACRE FEARED!
&c. &c. &c.
Fenzil and I were thrown together unexpectedly on October 17, the day following John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. With him, were sixteen white men, including three of his sons, three free negroes, one freed slave, and one fugitive slave. They were equipped with Sharp’s carbines and had brought with them 950 iron pikes, with which to arm the slaves expected to revolt in the vicinity of the town, which stood beneath high bluffs, at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers.
The night before, a Sunday, the “Provisional Army,” as Brown grandiosely referred to his meager force, had taken hostages, cut telegraph wires, seized a train, overcome the guard, and quickly gained control of the arsenal, where 100,000 army muskets and rifles were stored. By his action, Brown intended nothing less than the overthrow of slavery, believing that, as news of the insurrection spread, blacks would rise up against their masters, kill them if they must, and join him in his holy war against the South.
On the afternoon of Monday, October 17, President Buchanan ordered the marines at the Washington barracks to put down the rebellion, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, who would, two and a half years later, lead a great and vengeful host against us as general of the Army of Northern Virginia. And in reply to “Dixie,” the boys in blue would sing “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave. His soul’s marching on!” History is the superb ironist and cuckolder. We came to arrest John Brown and ended in martyring him.
It is strange, Emily, how the circumstances surrounding our lives appear haphazardly assembled, like a crowd come to watch a building burn. If we could only ascend high enough—in a balloon, say—to some supreme vantage point, the purpose of our lives might show clear through the muddle and perplexity, like gold nuggets in a pan.
At three o’clock that afternoon, we boarded a Baltimore and Ohio train for Harper’s Ferry. We took two twelve-pound howitzers and enough ammunition to subdue a thousand fanatics. At the time, we didn’t know the strength of our adversary, nor were we aware that the Virginia militia, as well as local farmers and shopkeepers, had skirmished with Brown’s tiny force and taken the bridge across the Potomac, by which it might have escaped into the mountains. The telegraph had been rendered useless, and, if not for the eastbound train, which Brown had stopped, then foolishly let pass, we would not have known of the raid at all. The “fearful intelligence” was reported by the train’s conductor on reaching Baltimore.
The slave revolt, on which Brown had been relying to swell his ranks, did not occur. None mutinied, and no abolitionist joined the Provisional Army. The raid’s first fatality was a colored man named Hayward Shepherd, a porter on the express train that had been fired on and stopped by Brown’s men. Even with a wagonload of guns, twenty-two untrained marauders had no hope of withstanding an assault by a force ten times their number.
On the train from Washington, I was too distracted to notice the scenery. It could have been polar snows or the Arabian Desert for all I knew of it. I was always so when I went into battle. For all their indecent songs and bravado, the marines who shared the train with me were also apprehensive. How could it have been otherwise? No one knows better than a man who has been to war how fearful a thing war is.
“People say niggers remember their savage ways, soon as they get shut of white folk,” one marine told another, sitting together on the seat behind me. “Don’t matter if they got Jesus in them or not, they turn animal when the chains come off. They’ll cut a man open and unravel his tripes before the poor bastard’s finished squirting his tobacco.”
“I’m not scared of no man on earth, but I’m scared of niggers. I know a man in Georgia who once saw a black take the whip out of the hand of a driver, who’d just given him twenty stripes, and stuff the handle down his throat. ‘There is no more fearful sight than a negro who’s lost his mind,’ my friend said.”
“I’ve heard tales of them eating white people raw.”
I recalled the white cannibals among the Donner Party.
“John Reid’s Ruffians were right to kill the abolitionists.”
“If I get ‘Old Brown’ in my sights, I’ll send him straight to hell!”
When the Civil War began, I remembered those two men and wondered whether they had joined the boys in oatmeal gray or kept their blue sack coats. The Confederate army was born at the siege at Harper’s Ferry; it grew from the Virginia militia, but John Brown was the spur for all that followed. History is an unending roundabout, on which we fool ourselves into believing that we are in the vanguard of events, when, in actuality, we are merely chasing one another’s tails.
The marines’ nervous energy soon flagged and most of them slept, or pretended to sleep, or smoked pensively. Only Luke Quinn appeared calm as he read a Testament given him by the Pennsylvania Bible Society when his train had stopped at North Philadelphia Station on the way to Washington.
You should have been a chaplain instead of me, I thought as I watched his head bowed over the Good Book’s thin pages.
I had killed a man in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake—a man, l
ike me, of God. My conscience gnawed at me not for having cut short his life—he was a mean son of a bitch—but for having broken the principal commandment of a God whose silence I could scarcely justify, one who seemed unconcerned by our growing inclination to tear one another to pieces. And yet, as the train hurtled toward a destination as inevitable as it was dangerous, I felt myself better suited to a life of violence than one of peace.
“What do you think we’ll find at Harper’s Ferry?” asked Fenzil, who sat beside me.
He was chewing his nails, not because he was afraid, but because it was his habit—a repellent one for a surgeon, I thought.
“I don’t know,” I replied, trying to dissemble my fear.
We had both read the report published hastily in a special edition of The National Era, a Washington abolitionist paper. Our blood had cooled to read that the slaves were armed with rifles and—more terrifying still—pikes and that the rebellion was spreading into the South. It took little imagination to picture fierce black men in rags, impaling white men, women, and children in their beds and dooryards.
EXTRA-ORDINARY MASSACRE FEARED!
I shut my eyes and saw in my mind’s night the blood of the wicked and of the innocent soaking the dusty streets, homes and businesses afire, fields sown with salt, barns pulled down, cattle slaughtered, and the corpses of proslavery men hanging from lampposts, assuming the village had lampposts. If not, any tree would do; violent death is not particular. I opened my eyes and saw, outside the window, that the light, which had been keeping pace with us in the ribbon of dirty ditch water beside the tracks, had dimmed.
“I expect we’ll both be run off our feet by this time tomorrow,” said Fenzil.
I grunted in reply.
“We’ll make a delightful party of four,” he said. I looked at him quizzically. “The surgeon, the chaplain, the beneficiary of our quite different skills, and, if things go wrong for him, the grave digger.”
My eyes had begun to water because of the tobacco smoke that filled the carriage with a bluish ghost.
“There’s nothing to cry about, Winter,” said Fenzil with the easy cruelty of our kind.
When our train arrived at Harper’s Ferry, the militia had already attacked the arsenal and forced Brown and his men to take refuge inside the engine room next door. Two dozen hostages had been rescued from the armory guardroom, and two of Brown’s sons, Watson and Oliver, had been shot dead.
You will want to know my impressions of the town and countryside thereabouts.
An idyllic landscape of dramatic heights, woodland, rivers, and meadows, which would have moved Edmund Spenser to write a pastoral. Thus are we betrayed by first impressions and by words. Rancor, envy, and fear doubtless ran through Harper’s Ferry like a vein of rust, as they do everywhere on earth. Spenser’s sheep were sick, his shepherds and their lasses poxed.
Outwardly, the leaves were those of autumn; the wind rustled them, turning them this way and that. The rivers were broad and sandy-bottomed. The fish were abundant, and, if the rivers sounded discordant, it was only the noise of guns and cannon, the alarms and shouts of men that made them seem so. Mankind is a boil on Nature’s back.
Fenzil and I were billeted in the post office. From that time until the end of the uprising, we would have to lay aside our hostilities and work together, bound by the mortal complication, which our two professions sought, each in its own way, to unknot.
“If you were to read any of these letters, Robert, you’d be disappointed. For all the to-and-fro of words, we still don’t seem able to find the right ones.”
“What would be the right words?” I asked, curious, for once, to hear what Fenzil had to say.
“Those that disarm before a blow is struck . . . endear before anger hardens the heart . . . console before a heart is broken past mending. Words that—what is it you padres say?—‘turn swords into plowshares.’”
His reply had verged on prayer, uttered with an uncharacteristic earnestness, which surprised me. To have shown his feelings no doubt embarrassed him, as a lady would be whose petticoats had peeked out from the bottom of her skirts. He quickly hid them from me.
“Do you think John Brown could be right?” I asked impulsively.
I watched in amazement as his face, which had a moment earlier been frank and open, recomposed itself into a mask.
“The army relieves us of moral misgiving,” he replied, neither with a smile nor a smirk. In his voice, however, I sensed his relief. “I have my doctoring and you your ministering. We’ll leave right and wrong to God and the generals.”
And that, dear Emily, concluded my first night in Harper’s Ferry—peaceful enough for a siege, although shots were exchanged long after the moon had set, according to the sentries and to the evidence of my dreams, which were troubled and noisy with rifle and musket fire.
On Tuesday morning, October 18, Lieutenant Colonel Lee sent his aide-de-camp, J. E. B. Stuart, under a white flag of truce, to negotiate Brown’s surrender. Brown refused with more dignity than indignation (surprising in that his son Watson had been shot dead while carrying a white flag). Having received his answer, Stuart ordered Lieutenant Greene and his squad against the engine house. Sledgehammers proving useless on the iron-bossed doors, Greene and ten marines battered them down with a heavy ladder. Once inside, the lieutenant knocked Brown senseless with a saber blow to the back of the neck. Before he dropped, he had fired wildly, hitting Luke Quinn in the gut. He gasped his last breath without benefit of clergy or so much as a kind word to send him on his way. The way led to a fearsome darkness. Thus is it ever, though we light candles, pray, and say “Amen.”
Afterward, as I knelt over his body, I recalled a fragment from a story told in some Greek or Latin text read long before at Gettysburg: Charon’s obol, a coin placed in the mouth of a corpse, with which to pay the ferryman for crossing the river Styx. By now, I thought that one notion of the afterlife was as true or false as another. Had I not absolved Manzanero of his sins? Hadn’t I read the words of the angel Moroni over a dead Mormon? Then why not put a penny in Luke’s mouth? I’d have daubed him with mud and plastered him with turkey feathers if, in so doing, I could have ensured him of a kind and merciful welcome by whatever Divinity was prepared to receive him.
Brown’s dead were also left to me, including the freed black Dangerfield Newby, whose ears had been cut off as souvenirs. I mumbled over the corpses—I might have recited the names of the baseball players on the Brooklyn Excelsiors team or the capital cities of the United States for all the significance I gave to them. To be truthful, I wished Brown and his men damned to hell. If Luke had not taken a fatal bullet, I might have felt otherwise. Thus do our opinions seesaw on the fulcrum of circumstance.
Fenzil had his work cut out for him, sewing up the wounded. Private Ruppert had been shot in the face during the storming of the engine house, and his wound was the most grievous of any I had seen. Fenzil whipstitched the torn flesh and then, like a tailor having finished with his needle and thread, leaned against a wall and quietly smoked a cigar—his once-spotless apron decorated ingloriously with the gore of friend and foe alike.
“What do you smell, Robert?” he asked, offering me a cigar. Thinking that he’d meant the cigar smoke, I replied, “Good Virginia tobacco.”
“I mean after a fracas—what stink is in your nostrils, what taste in your mouth?”
“A gritty taste, an acrid smell,” I replied, blowing smoke into the reeking atmosphere of the engine room, which now served us as a field hospital. The dead were stacked up outside like cordwood waiting for winter. A winter that seemed to have no end would take us unawares at Fredericksburg, in ’62.
“I smell rancid butter,” he said. “I taste pennies on the tongue.”
The spoiled body of Christ in a weevily Communion cracker and Charon’s obol.
By the end of the day—one, it has since been said, which made the Civil War impossible to evade—Fenzil and I wanted only to sleep in our post office
billet. We did so after having first anesthetized ourselves with a draft of ether.
–9–
JOHN BROWN AND SIX OF THE SURVIVING SOLDIERS of liberation—nine had escaped us—were taken to Charles Town, seven miles from the arsenal, to be tried and hanged for treason, conspiracy, and murder. I accompanied them reluctantly, having charge over their souls, however much their recent actions may have cast doubt on their salvation. I would remain there until, on December 2, time ceased for Brown and eternity or extinction commenced. I wouldn’t stay to watch the remnant of his misguided or—who knows?—inspired followers march to the gallows.
You might have thought we were on a picnic. The marines loafed like careless boys. They played baseball with a peg leg, which, they boasted, had once belonged to Santa Anna. They fished for brown trout and smallmouth bass. They sang all manner of songs—comical, minstrel, and bawdy. They were no more inclined to hymn singing than boys are. They courted and danced with the village girls after a barn raising like red-faced country clods lit by corn whiskey. Ordinarily serious and often severe, Lee tolerated their high jinks. He, too, may have had an inkling of what would soon be visited on them and on the nation—a war as terrible as any of old Egypt’s plagues.
With iron gray hair seemingly galvanized by a lightning bolt, grizzled beard, hectic eyes, and a gift for apocalyptic pronouncements, Brown seemed a veritable Moses. Fenzil saw to the prophet’s wounds while he sat in his jail cell with a Bible for solace. He did not repent of the mischief he had caused. If he grieved for his sons, none ever knew. In the meantime, the men waited with a patience out of all character for the machinery of the law—Virginia law—to grind on toward a foregone conclusion: John Brown would be hanged—and good riddance to him!
“Say what you like about ‘Old Brown,’ he’s an impressive fellow,” said Fenzil, taking the rocking chair next to mine on the front porch of the courthouse, where the abolitionist’s trial would be conducted. “He suffers his wound in disdainful silence, knowing all the time that he has an appointment with the hangman. I tell you, Winter, the man scares me—his eyes do when they clamp on mine! I can see fire glittering in them—whether the devil’s or Divinity’s, I could not say.”