by Tony Horwitz
But they were discouraged from this plan by the lawyer appointed to represent Cook. He told them that the prisoner wouldn’t be handed over to Virginia authorities quickly or without a legal contest. He was wrong. A request for Cook’s rendition arrived in the morning and at noon the manacled prisoner was put aboard a train for Charlestown, Virginia. His captors collected their $1,000 reward and Wise offered a new one of $500 for each of the men still at large.
Authorities also issued wanted notices describing the remaining fugitives on the basis of information Cook provided. The muscular and heavy-bearded Charles Tidd, the notice said, “looks like a fighting man, and his looks in this respect are in no way deceptive.” Owen Brown was described as spare and freckled, with red whiskers. Barclay Coppoc had a light mustache and “a consumptive look.” The even sicklier Francis Meriam “sometimes wears a glass eye” and had a face “blotched from the effects of Syphilis.”
Cook may have provided this information knowing that the men would be long gone by the time the notice circulated. Meriam, so weak he couldn’t walk much beyond Chambersburg, managed to slip aboard a train to Philadelphia and make his way home to Boston. After seeing him off, Charles Tidd, Owen Brown, and Barclay Coppoc continued their cross-country trek from Chambersburg, enduring rain and snow and subsisting on stolen chickens and apples. They finally found refuge with Quakers in northwest Pennsylvania. Only then did they learn the fate of those they’d left behind in Harpers Ferry, including the news that Owen’s siblings Watson and Oliver were dead, and that Barclay’s brother, Edwin, was alive but imprisoned.
They also learned that two other insurgents had taken flight. Albert Hazlett and Osborne Anderson, who had been posted at the arsenal across the street from the armory, had managed to slip away under cover of darkness or the heavy fighting around the engine house. After finding a boat, they made their way to Maryland and undertook their own hard journey through the mountains to Pennsylvania. The two men were even more conspicuous than the others, since Hazlett was white and Anderson black.
Hazlett, the rugged Kansas veteran who had apologized to Annie Brown for his tobacco spitting at the Kennedy farm, was overcome by exhaustion and blistered feet near Chambersburg and persuaded Anderson to go on alone. Hazlett then hitched a ride in a wagon and reached the Ritner boardinghouse, where he was quickly spotted and pursued. Described as being of “very rough and shabby appearance,” he limped on for another thirty miles before being captured and relieved of a pair of revolvers and a bowie knife. Like Cook, he was sent to the jail in Charlestown.
Osborne Anderson
Anderson, meanwhile, found shelter among free blacks and abolitionists in Pennsylvania and traveled north from there to his home in Canada. In his long flight from Harpers Ferry, the black fugitive had essentially followed the Underground Railroad from a slave state to a free country. He published a short account soon after his escape, “A Voice from Harper’s Ferry.” Despite the attack’s failure, he wrote, John Brown “dug the mine and laid the train which will eventually dissolve the union between Freedom and Slavery.”
IN LATE OCTOBER, WITH all of Brown’s men dead, captured, or hiding in the North, the action shifted to the Jefferson County seat of Charlestown—a town extremely hostile to the insurgents now housed in its jail. Illustrative of the mood was the headline in the local Independent Democrat on the day of Brown’s capture. THE INFERNAL DESPERADOES CAUGHT, AND THE VENGEANCE OF AN OUTRAGED COMMUNITY ABOUT TO BE APPEASED. The newspaper’s editor, like many other men in Charlestown, had taken part in the fighting.
Courthouse and street scene, Charlestown, 1859
On the day Brown was brought to jail, advertisements appeared in the local paper offering “Cash for Negroes” and seeking “MEN, WOMEN, BOYS, GIRLS, and FAMILIES, for the Southern markets.” One of the slave dealers named in these ads was John Avis, who also served as the county jail keeper. This was the man now responsible for Brown and his fellow insurgents.
Avis, a Mexican War veteran, had also taken a prominent role in the fighting at Harpers Ferry. He was nonetheless considerate to his new inmates, treating them as he did all others. They were given fresh clothes, allowed to send and receive mail, and quartered close to Avis and his family, who occupied one part of the jailhouse, a two-story brick building with barred windows and a high-walled yard that otherwise resembled a private home. Brown and Aaron Stevens shared a ground-floor room that visitors described as large and well-lit; it was heated by a stove and furnished with chairs and a writing desk.
Diagonally across from the jail stood the county courthouse, a Greek Revival edifice fronted by Doric columns and topped by a bell tower. At the time of Brown’s capture the circuit court for western Virginia was in autumn session; the session would end in another few weeks, not to resume until spring. If the insurgents weren’t tried quickly, they would have to be kept under guard for months, a prospect few Virginians relished. “There is danger on the one hand of a rescue by their friends, and on the other of Lynch-law from the indignant populace,” Governor Wise wrote on October 22.
While he fretted about security, his lead prosecutor, Andrew Hunter, worried that Aaron Stevens might “die of his wounds if we don’t hang him promptly.” The court should observe “all the judicial decencies,” Hunter wrote Wise, “but at double quick time.”
On October 25, exactly one week after their capture, Brown and his men were led between ranks of militiamen from the jail to the cannon-ringed courthouse. The town was swollen with soldiers and journalists. To accommodate the press, the telegraph line had been extended from Harpers Ferry to Charlestown. Fresh developments were quickly transmitted by wire to a national audience; as well, leading artists for publications such as Leslie’s and Harper’s Weekly provided a pictorial record, at a time when photographs weren’t yet reproduced in newspapers and magazines.
This publicity worked to Brown’s advantage. Even anti-abolitionist papers noted the swiftness of the proceedings and the defendants’ questionable fitness for trial. “There is an evident intention manifested here to hurry the trial through, and to execute the prisoners as soon as possible,” the Baltimore American noted upon the men’s first appearance in court. Brown, manacled to Edwin Coppoc, looked “weak and haggard, with his eyes swollen from the effects of the wounds on his head,” while Stevens was so feeble that he fainted during the initial testimony and had to lie on a mattress.
The first day’s session concerned itself with a formality: whether there was enough evidence to call a grand jury. Brown nonetheless seized the moment to speak beyond the courtroom, answering a straightforward legal question with a short speech. “Virginians, I did not ask for any quarter at the time I was taken. I did not ask to have myself spared,” he said. But, having been promised a fair trial by Governor Wise, he wanted no part in a legal charade that rushed him to judgment without time to prepare or recover from his wounds. “If you seek my blood, you can have it at any moment, without this mockery of a trial,” he said. “I am ready for my fate.”
His words had no practical effect. The court kept up the pace, assigning lawyers, selecting jurors, and summoning witnesses within twenty-four hours of the proceedings’ commencement. But Brown’s defiant, unflinching demeanor, in spite of his wounds and manacles, reinforced the impression he’d made while lying bloodied at the armory. He was “game,” to use Governor Wise’s cockfighting term, a courageous foe who commanded respect. “I have now little to ask,” Brown stated that first day in court, “other than that I be not publicly insulted as cowardly barbarians insult those who fall into their hands.” Brown may have misjudged many aspects of southern society, but he intuitively grasped—and identified with—its chivalric code of honor.
Virginians believed they were holding to their own high standards by conducting a trial in a civilian court, before the eyes of the nation, rather than administering “drum-head justice” in a closed military tribunal. All the legal “decencies” would be duly observed in the Charlestown cour
t. But given the realities of antebellum society in Jefferson County and its surrounds, an impartial hearing for Brown and his men was impossible.
Richard Parker, the presiding judge, was a respected, by-the-book jurist. He was also a slave owner and a former paymaster at the Harpers Ferry armory, who stated in his opening instructions to the jury: “I will not permit myself to give expression to those feelings which at once spring up in every breast when reflecting on the enormity of the guilt” of the defendants, who had invaded “our common country” and shot down Virginians “without mercy.” Then, having given expression to precisely those feelings, he reminded the jurors, most of whom were slaveholding farmers, that the defendants should be given “a fair and impartial trial.”
Like Parker, the two lawyers appointed to defend Brown were competent and highly regarded—and, like him, they were slaveholders. They had also taken part in the military action at Harpers Ferry. The lead prosecutor, Andrew Hunter (another slaveholder), was related by marriage to Fontaine Beckham, the slain mayor of Harpers Ferry. And Hunter’s son, Henry, was one of the gunmen who had burst into the Wager House to avenge Beckham’s shooting by dragging William Thompson to his death on the Potomac bridge.
As well, Andrew Hunter was a close associate of the governor and shared Wise’s desire to implicate—and, if possible, indict—prominent Northerners. “What we aim at,” Hunter stated, “is not only the destruction of these men whom we have in confinement,” but “higher and wickeder game.”
Virginians’ ferocious hostility to abolitionism was reflected in the far-reaching indictment that Hunter drafted. It charged Brown and his men with first-degree murder, with conspiracy to induce slaves “to make insurrection against their masters,” and with having “traitorously” levied war and rebellion against Virginia. Treason was generally understood as a crime against the nation, and none of the defendants were citizens of the state they’d allegedly betrayed. But Hunter cited Brown’s Provisional Constitution as evidence that he and his men sought to usurp Virginia’s laws and establish a new government. They did so, he added, “not having the fear of God before their eyes, but being moved and seduced by the false and malignant counsel of other evil and traitorous persons and the instigations of the devil.”
The defendants were required to stand during the reading of the seven-page indictment, which took a full twenty minutes. Brown stood with difficulty and Stevens had to be held up by two bailiffs before returning to his mattress. “He has the appearance almost of a dying man; breathing with difficulty and panting for breath,” one reporter wrote. The defendants pleaded not guilty and asked to be tried separately. Hunter elected to prosecute Brown first.
Brown sought a short delay, saying that his wounds had left him enfeebled and hard of hearing. But Judge Parker, eager to move the process along, denied this request (as he would almost every other defense request). Returned to jail during the lunch recess, Brown took to his bed and claimed he was too weak to get up for the afternoon session. So he was carried back to the courtroom on a cot, where he lay with his eyes closed and a blanket drawn to his chin, “determined to resist the pushing of his trial by all the means in his power,” the Baltimore American reported.
Brown’s theatrics heightened what was already a colorful courtroom scene. Hundreds of spectators packed the vast chamber, cracking chestnuts and peanuts as they watched the legal drama. “The floor of the court, excepting within a few feet of the Judge, was inches deep, in places, with nut shells, and the noise of people moving about was like that which would be made by trampling on glass,” wrote a reporter for the New York Herald. One of the prosecutors chewed tobacco, a wad sometimes slipping from his mouth; he showed up in court with his face bruised from a brawl the night before. Even the judge appeared casual, “comfortably reclining in his chair, his legs resting upon the table before him, amid the chaos of law-books, papers, and inkstands.”
Charlestown courtroom with Brown on cot at left center
The legal proceedings were also irregular. Brown frequently lurched up from his cot to challenge a witness or make a pronouncement, before slumping back down and closing his eyes. His defense team kept changing: six different lawyers acted on his behalf in a trial that lasted less than five days. And the proceedings had barely gotten under way when a telegram arrived from a prominent citizen of Akron, Ohio, stating that a number of Brown’s relatives had been committed to “a Lunatic Asylum” or died insane. “These facts can be conclusively proven by witnesses residing here, who will doubtless attend the trial if desired.”
THE INSANITY DEFENSE WAS a new but widely accepted doctrine in American courtrooms. In a sensational murder trial just months before Brown’s, a New York congressman, Daniel Sickles, had successfully pleaded temporary insanity after shooting his wife’s lover dead in a park in Washington, D.C. Brown, with his wild hair and even wilder scheme for slaves’ liberation, fit many people’s notion of a lunatic. “As mad as a March hare,” opined the Chicago Press and Tribune, offering a typical view of Brown a few days after his capture.
The telegram from Akron also contained a certain amount of truth. Nineteen Ohioans later supported it by submitting affidavits about Brown’s mental state. While these statements were collected in an obvious effort to win clemency for Brown, they attested to his family’s long history of mental illness. A number of relatives on his mother’s side had been committed to asylums. And two of Brown’s children, Frederick and John junior, were clearly disturbed, though their instability may have been inherited from their mother, Dianthe, who was described as mentally afflicted.
More telling, perhaps, were the words used to describe Brown in the affidavits and other accounts of people who knew him well. They frequently called him “excitable” or a “monomaniac”—a term that Herman Melville applied to Captain Ahab. In 1857, almost two years before the question of Brown’s mental health arose in court, a free-state official in Kansas had written a striking letter to Franklin Sanborn, reporting that Brown was acting so oddly that some free-staters “openly express[ed] the opinion that one of his old fits of insanity has returned upon him.”
Brown’s own writing also spoke to his violent mood swings; he oscillated between periods of giddy, frantic activity and sloughs of despond that left him almost paralyzed. To modern eyes, this might suggest manic depression. So would Brown’s recurrent grandiosity—his unassailable faith in his own plans and abilities, and his belief that he was “God’s instrument,” singled out for the liberation of slaves.
But diagnosing mental illness at a distance of a century and a half is a dubious exercise. Even if Brown gave signs of bipolar tendencies, there’s no evidence he had hallucinations or other symptoms so severe that he could have been considered legally insane—in the parlance of Virginia’s antebellum code, “an idiot, lunatic, non compos, or deranged.”
In any event, Brown wanted no part of an insanity defense. As soon as his lawyer read the telegram from Ohio in court, he raised himself from his cot and objected. “I look upon it as a miserable artifice and pretext of those who ought to take a different course in regard to me,” he said. “I am perfectly unconscious of insanity, and I reject, so far as I am capable, any attempt to interfere on my behalf on that score.”
This pleased Virginians but left his lawyers little to argue in his defense. There was no real dispute over the facts of the case. Under Brown’s leadership, the insurgents had seized the armory, taken hostages, armed slaves, and killed five men and wounded many others. At Brown’s insistence, his lawyers elicited testimony that showed he had treated his hostages well and ordered his men not to shoot unarmed civilians. Brown felt this demonstrated that he never intended violence; he and his men had shed blood only in self-defense.
But to Virginians, this argument held no weight. At least one of those slain, Heyward Shepherd, was a noncombatant. And Brown could hardly have expected to seize the town, take hostages, and free and arm a legion of slaves without sparking a fight. The prosecution r
egarded Brown’s defense as “too absurd to require argument” and didn’t even bother to cross-examine the witnesses called on his behalf.
Though the trial testimony did little but confirm Brown’s guilt, it provided moments that aroused the hundreds of white spectators. One witness testified to Brown’s words about his provisional government, including mention of “an intelligent colored man elected as one of the members of the House.” This notion caused a “sensation” in the courtroom, one reporter wrote. Another witness, John Allstadt, who had been taken hostage with his slaves and clearly loathed Brown, testified that the blacks in the engine house “were doing nothing, and had dropped their spears: some of them were asleep nearly all the time.” The southern audience laughed, delighted by this stereotypical portrayal of blacks as lazy and docile.
A few witnesses expressed nobler sentiments. The Maryland officer, Captain John Sinn, was called by the defense and ended his testimony by stating: “As a Southern man, he came to state the facts about the case, so that Northern men would have no opportunity of saying that Southern men were unwilling to appear as witnesses in behalf of one whose principles they abhorred.”
The last day of testimony brought one final surprise—the arrival of two eminent lawyers who had been recruited by Brown’s supporters in the North. The trial had been so hasty that the attorneys arrived without having had a chance to so much as study the indictment. They’d also missed hearing the prosecution witnesses. But the judge was intent on forging ahead and allowed the prosecution to begin its closing arguments that same afternoon. When the defense’s turn came, it could do little but argue technical points about jurisdiction and appeal to the jury to show “moral courage” and maintain Virginia’s reputation for “chivalry unstained.”