by Tony Horwitz
Higgins waited twenty minutes before starting across the bridge to look for Williams. Designed by Benjamin Latrobe, the architect of the U.S. Capitol, the bridge was enclosed with weatherboard siding and a tin roof. It ran for over a thousand feet, so that crossing the covered span felt like passing through a long dark tunnel. While walking along the bridge, Higgins carried a lantern but no weapon, since his primary job was to watch for fire sparked by locomotives and to make sure track switches were correctly set.
As Higgins neared the Virginia end of the bridge, two men loomed in the dark, holding what looked like to him like spears and carrying short rifles beneath their long gray shawls.
“Which way?” one of the men asked him.
Unbeknownst to Higgins, this was a demand for a password. Higgins answered it literally: “Not far; I am at my station.”
In reply the stranger announced that Higgins was his prisoner and grasped the watchman’s lantern. The Irishman swung his free hand at his captor’s face, causing the stranger to stumble and let go of him. Higgins then ran to the end of the bridge and hurled himself through the window of a hotel by the railroad tracks, as two shots rang out behind him. “Lock your doors,” he told the hotel clerk, “there are robbers on the bridge.”
HIGGINS’S PARTNER, BILL WILLIAMS, had been similarly surprised and confused two hours earlier. First, a pair of armed strangers accosted him on the bridge, and then seventeen more men appeared, two of whom he recognized: the affable John Cook, who worked at a canal lock close to the bridge, and Isaac Smith, the bearded New York farmer who had crossed the Potomac from time to time since July. When Smith and his men told Williams that he was now their prisoner, he at first thought they were joking.
The men escorted Williams from the covered bridge and straight into Harpers Ferry, moving past the railroad depot and up to the granite and iron gate of the nearby armory. Its night watchman, Daniel Whelan, heard a wagon approaching and stepped out of his guardhouse just inside the armory gate. Whelan saw someone trying to open the padlocked entrance and thought this must be the head watchman. As he moved forward to help, a stranger called on him to open the gate; when he refused, armed men threatened him and used a crowbar to break in.
“I was nearly scared to death with so many guns about me,” Whelan later testified. Though he guarded a gun factory, Whelan carried only a sword. Like the bridge guards, he was mainly charged with watching for fire, in his case by making sure the armory’s many forges had been safely extinguished at the end of the workday. In fact, the entire government works at Harpers Ferry—a massive complex that included the main armory, a second rifle factory, and the arsenal where finished weapons were stored—was protected only by walls, fences, and a few elderly or unskilled men, such as Whelan.
Brown was well aware of this, because John Cook had scouted the armory and talked to its employees. “I knew Cook well,” Whelan testified, and it was Cook who took the watchman’s sword as other men swarmed into the armory yard on the night of October 16.
But Whelan quickly saw that Cook was not in charge. “The head man of them,” an older bearded figure Whelan didn’t know, posted guards by the gate and dispatched his other men out of the yard to secure the arsenal across the street, as well as Hall’s Rifle Works, half a mile away, and the bridge across the Shenandoah River. All this was swiftly accomplished, without firing a shot or raising an alarm.
By midnight, Brown and his band of eighteen men had control of Harpers Ferry’s guns (about a hundred thousand in all), rail lines, and river bridges, and they had cut telegraphic contact with the outside world. For the moment, Brown had reason to feel buoyant about the bold scheme he’d plotted in secret for so many years. And for the first time he shared it publicly, albeit before an audience of only two: the captured watchmen, Bill Williams and Daniel Whelan, alone with him in the armory yard.
“I want to free all the Negroes in this state,” he told his prisoners, further warning them, “if the citizens interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood.”
BROWN HAD WORRIED ALL summer that his plan would be exposed—by prying neighbors, by his men’s indiscretions, or as a result of some other slip. But on the night of October 16, 1859, he caught Harpers Ferry entirely unawares. One reason was the sheer audacity and outlandishness of his attack. Southerners might dread a repetition of Nat Turner’s uprising in 1831, but they had no reason to suspect that a war of liberation would be launched by a white man leading a small interracial band, striking an industrial mountain town where slaves were scarce.
A significant portion of Harpers Ferry wasn’t even Virginia soil—much of the town belonged to the U.S. government, which owned not only the sprawling gun works but the town hall, dozens of houses and commercial buildings, and the grounds of schools, churches, public squares, and graveyards. Blacks, barred from skilled factory jobs, made up less than 10 percent of the population, and a third of them were free—unusual ratios for a southern town. Also atypical was the large sprinkling of immigrants and northern-born workmen. All told, in a community of almost three thousand, only about fifty male slaves were available for Brown to free and arm.
But Harpers Ferry was peculiar in another respect: it lay close to a very different landscape. Just west of town, the area’s steep shale cliffs and river gorges gave way to the gently rolling farmland of the Shenandoah Valley. This part of Jefferson County, Virginia, was fairly typical of the upcountry South, a mostly rural society with a few wealthy landowners, a large class of yeoman farmers, and 40 percent of its population enslaved. It was into this territory that Brown, after securing the gun works and bridges in Harpers Ferry, dispatched a wagonload of men to begin the real work of liberation.
AT ABOUT ONE THIRTY on the morning of October 17, Lewis Washington awoke to a low voice calling his name from the hallway outside his bedroom. A forty-six-year-old widower with grown children, Washington lived at Beallair, his 670-acre estate five miles west of Harpers Ferry. He described himself as a farmer, but this was misleading. The great-grandnephew of George Washington, he was also a close associate of Virginia’s governor, an honorary colonel, and one of the wealthiest and most prominent citizens of Jefferson County.
When Washington heard someone summoning him in the night, he thought a traveling friend had arrived late and been let in a back door “by the servants.” These “servants” were, of course, his slaves, who were a commodity as well as a workforce in antebellum Virginia. In just the past year, Washington had sold nine slaves for $7,300 and “hired” two servants, meaning he paid another slave owner for the year’s use of their labor. Washington recorded these transactions in his diary, alongside his notations about the purchase and sale of bacon, potatoes, and cord wood. In July 1859, he noted in the same diary that he was decamping for a mountain spa until September, leaving his overseer and slaves to toil in the summer heat.
Lewis Washington and his home, Beallair
Early that fall, soon after his return to Jefferson County, Washington visited Harpers Ferry and was approached in the street by a young stranger. “I believe you have a great many interesting relics at your house,” the man said, and asked if he could come out to Beallair and see them.
Washington, who was fond of displaying his possessions and assumed the man was a gunsmith at the armory with an interest in firearms, invited him to visit. When the man appeared at Beallair, Washington showed him several heirlooms, including a pistol that the Marquis de Lafayette had presented to George Washington. His visitor, in turn, showed Washington two heavy Colt revolvers, which he said he’d carried as a buffalo hunter in Kansas. One of them was etched with the name John Cook, which Washington later learned was that of his guest.
The visitor then suggested a shooting contest with the Colts. Washington agreed, and they went outside and fired two dozen rounds at a target. Washington hadn’t handled the revolver before and his shooting skills were rusty. Cook, though he chose not to show it that day, was a crack marksman. The colonel manag
ed to win the contest. “He told me I was the best shot he had ever met,” Washington said.
Pleased with this flattering young gun enthusiast, the colonel sought him out that October on a return trip to Harpers Ferry. Told that Cook had left town, Washington assumed that he had departed for Kansas, as he had mentioned his intention to return to the territory soon.
The colonel was therefore greatly surprised to meet Cook again, this time at one thirty in the morning of October 17, when Washington went to his bedroom door at Beallair in nightshirt and slippers. He was greeted by Cook and several other men carrying guns. One held a pine torch that lit the hallway; he brandished a large revolver and informed Washington, “You are our prisoner.” This was Aaron Stevens, the toughest and most experienced of Brown’s soldiers.
Stevens ordered Washington to get dressed. The Virginia gentleman took his time, pausing to express concern about bits of fire falling from the intruders’ torch. “I asked them to come in my room and light my candles, so as to prevent my house from being burnt,” he later stated.
Washington also coolly inquired about their purpose. “You are a very bold looking set of fellows,” he said, noting that each man carried a rifle and two pistols stuck in his belt. “Possibly you will have the courtesy to tell me what this means.”
“We have come here for the purpose of liberating all the slaves of the South,” Stevens replied. Washington didn’t believe him. When he and his uninvited guests repaired to the dining room, Cook directed Stevens to a gun closet he’d seen on his previous visit. The intruders took several of the weapons inside, including a fowling piece, the pistol given George Washington by Lafayette, and a dress sword that had allegedly been presented to the first president by Prussia’s Frederick the Great.
Stevens also asked for Colonel Washington’s watch, which he refused to surrender. “You told me your purpose was philanthropic,” he said to Stevens, “but you did not mention at the same time that it was robbery and rascality.”
Stepping outside, Washington found that still more of his property was in the hands of the intruders. The colonel’s carriage came up to the door with an unfamiliar black man in the driver’s seat. This was Shields Green, the fugitive slave in Brown’s band. Hitched behind the carriage were four horses and Washington’s farm wagon, with several of his male slaves inside. The colonel climbed aboard his carriage and took a seat beside Cook, at which point the caravan of raiders, freed slaves, and their newly unfree master trotted off toward Harpers Ferry.
En route, the ever affable Cook asked Washington if he had done any shooting since their contest earlier that fall. He also apologized for taking his host prisoner after being so hospitably treated on his previous visit to Beallair.
This cordial exchange was interrupted when the caravan halted beside the home of John Allstadt, another prominent landowner and slaveholder. In the dark, Washington listened as his captors took a heavy log from a rail fence by the turnpike and used it to batter open the door of Allstadt’s home. “In a few moments there was a shout of murder and general commotion in the house,” Washington later said.
Unlike the colonel, Allstadt had family living with him, and it was his daughter and a female cousin whom Washington heard shouting “Murder!” from a second-floor window. Downstairs, three armed men had burst in and ordered Allstadt to get dressed and come with them. They also seized his eighteen-year-old son.
Stepping onto the porch, Allstadt found a number of his slaves already gathered. At Washington’s estate, most of the slaves had been away visiting family, as was generally permitted on Sunday nights. But all seven of Allstadt’s male slaves were present. They, along with Allstadt and his son, were loaded into the farm wagon, which resumed its journey to Harpers Ferry.
Even then, Colonel Washington wasn’t convinced that his captors had come to free slaves. He still thought that they were “merely a robbing party” and at this point they were probably returning to their lodging at Harpers Ferry. “I did not take the thing as very serious at all until we drove to the armory gate.”
There, one of the armed men on the front seat of the carriage said, “All’s well.” A sentinel gave the countersign and opened the gate. The carriage then drove into the armory yard and up to the small brick guardhouse. As Washington disembarked, he was greeted by a man he would learn was John Brown. “You will find a fire in here, sir,” he said to the colonel, “it is rather cool this morning.”
It was also still dark, hours before dawn. At first light, Brown said, he would ask Washington to “write to some of your friends to send a stout, able-bodied Negro” as ransom. Brown also told Washington why he’d been the first slave owner taken. “I wanted you particularly for the moral effect it would give our cause, having one of your name as a prisoner.”
Three months later, the members of a Senate committee would question Washington closely about this conversation.
Question. Did he tell you what his purpose was; what “cause” he was in?
Answer. He spoke generally of it. He said, perhaps, “this thing must be put a stop to,” or something of that sort. He used general terms.
Question. “This thing,” alluding to what?
Answer. Alluding to slavery.
The colonel soon realized that Brown was in deadly earnest. Upon arriving at the armory, Washington and Allstadt had been separated from their slaves and put by the stove in the guardroom. When the black men reappeared, the relationship between master and servant had changed. “They came in repeatedly to warm themselves,” Washington testified, “each Negro having a pike in his hand.”
THOUGH BROWN WAS FINALLY realizing his dream of freeing and arming slaves, not all had gone as planned while his raiding party traveled into the countryside of Jefferson County. The first hitch came just after midnight, when Patrick Higgins went to start his guard shift on the Potomac bridge and then fled the armed men who accosted and fired at him.
The Wager House Hotel, where Higgins had taken refuge, anchored the busiest wedge of transport and commerce in Harpers Ferry, a cramped district known as the Point, where the rivers and railroad lines converged. Three and a half stories tall, the massive hotel had two parlors, a restaurant capable of seating hundreds, and a checkered reputation, having gone to seed in recent years and become popular mainly for its bar. But a new proprietor had just taken over and begun trying to upgrade the image of his establishment. Three days before Brown’s attack, a newspaper advertisement touted the “newly fitted up” Wager House, “in the romantic Village of Harper’s Ferry,” where patrons could “rest assured no effort will be spared to render satisfaction and promote their comfort.”
Train coming off the Potomac bridge and passing the Wager House, at rear
Gunfire after midnight probably wasn’t what the proprietor had in mind. Then again, Harpers Ferry was a boisterous town, and the night clerk at the hotel, William Throckmorton, wasn’t unduly alarmed. An hour or so earlier, he’d noticed a covered wagon roll past the hotel toward the armory, followed by four or five men; he’d concluded it was a “gypsy wagon.” Now, when Patrick Higgins burst in and warned him of robbers on the bridge, he decided the excitable watchman had been alarmed by “some rowdies from the canal locks,” just over the river in Maryland.
Still, Throckmorton thought it prudent to visit the nearby railroad office, where the night porter kept a pistol. He didn’t find the porter, but on his way back to the hotel, Throckmorton saw two men on the bridge carrying guns. Whatever was going on, it looked more serious than canal rowdies or passing Gypsies.
At 1:25 A.M., when the express train from Wheeling to Baltimore pulled up at the platform by the Wager House, Throckmorton and Higgins warned the crew that armed strangers were on the bridge. The train’s conductor, Andrew Phelps, went to investigate with four other men, one of whom carried a lantern. As they entered the covered bridge, the train followed slowly behind.
About fifty yards inside the bridge, a voice called out: “Stand and deliver!” Phelps
could make out rifle muzzles in the dark and saw that they were pointed at his party. Then someone snatched the lantern away from one of his companions and extinguished it.
Phelps immediately turned and retreated, ordering the engineer to back the train off the bridge. As he reached the end of the span, he heard gunfire behind him. Moments later, a tall black man staggered out from the covered bridge, crying, “I am shot.”
Heyward Shepherd was a free black baggage master at the Harpers Ferry depot. He had charge not only of the B & O depot at night, but also of the pistol Throckmorton had gone looking for earlier. Apparently, he wasn’t carrying it when he ventured onto the bridge at about the same time as Phelps, in an effort to see what was going on.
Like the others, Shepherd reported that he had been ordered to halt. When he turned and fled instead, one of the sentinels on the bridge fired. The bullet tore through Shepherd’s back and came out his chest, just below his left nipple. He was carried to the nearby railroad office and laid on a plank between two chairs, where a doctor examined him and judged the wound fatal. John Brown’s campaign to liberate slaves had claimed as its first casualty a free black man, shot down while defying the orders of armed whites.
Who fired the shot, and why, wasn’t clear. Patrick Higgins, the bridge watchman, later identified the armed pair he’d encountered earlier on the bridge as Oliver Brown and William Thompson. But during the night, others joined them, including Steward Taylor, who had told Annie Brown about envisioning his own death at Harpers Ferry. Hours after Shepherd’s shooting, one of Brown’s men found Taylor by the bridge, pale and trembling. Taylor said he had shot a man and believed he had killed him.
Whether it was Taylor or someone else who shot Shepherd, the reason was almost certainly skittishness. As a number of men approached their post on the dark bridge with a train chugging slowly behind, Brown’s sentries couldn’t easily see who the men were or whether they were armed. It’s also unlikely that they could tell whether the men were black or white. Shepherd was described as being very large; when he turned and ran, he presented a ready target to a nervous young man with a cocked gun in his hand and orders to hold the bridge at all costs.