by Tony Horwitz
The closing arguments ended at one thirty on the afternoon of Monday, October 31, two weeks to the day after Brown’s men had been trapped at the engine house. The jurors withdrew, but returned after just forty-five minutes, having put ballots in a hat and found their opinion was unanimous. The courtroom was now so packed that the crowd spilled into the hallway and outside the building’s front door.
“Gentlemen of the Jury,” the court clerk asked, “what say you, is the prisoner at the bar, John Brown, guilty or not guilty?”
“Guilty,” the foreman replied.
“Guilty of treason, and conspiring and advising with slaves and others to rebel and murder in the first degree?”
“Yes.”
There was no sound in the courtroom, “not the slightest expression of elation or triumph,” reported the New York Herald. Brown, who had listened to the day’s proceedings from his cot, often with his eyes shut, sat up to hear the verdict. Once it was read he “said not even a word, but, as on any previous day, turned to adjust his pallet, and then composedly stretched himself upon it.”
Though the judge did not sentence Brown until a few days later, the verdict left little doubt about his fate. Convicted of three capital crimes, he appeared certain to hang. It also seemed likely that he would go to the gallows quickly, in company with his co-conspirators. The court began trying them immediately after Brown’s verdict was handed down on Monday afternoon, and it would hastily convict three more of the insurgents before the week was out.
As the judge and prosecutor had hoped, Virginia was dispensing justice in “double quick time.” Even the temporary telegraph office in Charlestown closed a few days after Brown’s conviction, in expectation of a swift and uneventful conclusion to the affair.
BROWN, HAVING FAILED TO sway the Virginia jury, had thus far fared poorly in the North as well. Conservative, pro-southern organs like the New York Herald blasted Brown and his allies as “Nigger-Worshipping Insurrectionists.” The middle-of-the-road New York Times called Brown “a fanatic; sui generis,” and later termed him “a wild and absurd freak.”
Papers strongly aligned with the antislavery cause were critical, too, and they sought distance from Brown’s violent abolitionism. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune called Harpers Ferry a “deplorable affair” and “the work of a madman,” adding that “the way to Universal Emancipation lies not through insurrection, civil war and bloodshed, but through peace, discussion, and the quiet diffusion of sentiments of humanity and justice.” William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the radical but nonviolent Liberator, was sternly disapproving, calling the Harpers Ferry attack “misguided, wild, and apparently insane.”
Worse still, Brown’s innermost core of supporters had all but deserted him. Just after Brown’s capture, Franklin Sanborn broke the news in a letter to another member of the Secret Six, Theodore Parker, who was in Italy sick with tuberculosis. “Our old friend struck his blow in such a way,—either by his own folly or the direction of Providence—that it has recoiled and ruined him, and perhaps those who were his friends,” Sanborn wrote on October 22. By then, the teacher had fled Concord for Quebec, writing en route to Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “According to the advice of good friends and my own deliberate judgment I am to try change of air for my old complaint.” Sanborn ended his note: “Burn this.”
Two other members of the Secret Six soon followed Sanborn to Canada, even though a lawyer advised them that they were safe from arrest in Massachusetts. Frederick Douglass also fled north, and then left Canada for England on a previously planned trip. Though not a member of the Secret Six, Douglass was linked to Brown in papers found at the Kennedy farm, and Virginia authorities sought to apprehend him. “I have always been more distinguished for running than fighting,” Douglass wrote in a letter from Canada to a New York newspaper, “and tried by the Harper’s Ferry insurrection test, I am most miserably deficient in courage.”
Douglass, at least, was forthright about his flight, and he called Brown “noble and heroic.” Very different was the response of Gerrit Smith, the philanthropist who had bankrolled Brown from the start. He immediately destroyed all correspondence linking him to Brown and then, amid press speculation that he might be indicted, became so agitated that he was committed to the New York State Lunatic Asylum. Diagnosed as suffering from acute mania, Smith was treated with cannabis and morphine and quickly recovered his wits—though not, apparently, his memory. He denied any knowledge of, or complicity in, Brown’s Virginia campaign, later stating that he had “but a hazy view of nearly the whole of 1859.”
Samuel Howe, like Smith, was frequently named in letters published after Brown’s capture. Yet he, too, loudly disclaimed any association with Harpers Ferry. “That event was unforeseen and unexpected by me,” he wrote from Canada in a statement published by the New York Tribune. “It is still, to me, a mystery, and a marvel.”
This disavowal enraged the combative preacher Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the only member of the Secret Six who didn’t leave the country or take refuge in an asylum. It was “the extreme of baseness,” he wrote, for the Six to deny knowledge of Brown’s enterprise, and he judged Howe’s disingenuous letter and Smith’s alleged insanity as “two sad results of the whole affair.”
He also complained to Sanborn, who returned from Canada but kept urging Higginson to stay quiet about their role in the insurrection. “Sanborn is there no such thing as honor among confederates?” Higginson fired back, disgusted that Brown and his men had suffered while “silent safe partners make haste to secure our good reputation by a lie!” He refused to destroy Sanborn’s letters, and signed one of his own: “There is no need of burning this.”
Henry David Thoreau
WHILE HIGGINSON STEWED IN private, another New Englander went boldly public in defense of Brown. A few days after the Harpers Ferry attack, Henry David Thoreau told townspeople in Concord that he planned to give a speech supporting the jailed abolitionist. Though many citizens of the freethinking town had backed Brown strongly just months before, they now dreaded any association with Harpers Ferry. Local abolitionists discouraged Thoreau from speaking and town selectmen refused to ring a bell announcing his lecture. Undaunted, Thoreau rang the bell himself—on October 30, the eve of the abolitionist’s conviction—before delivering a stirring oration that was published under the title “A Plea for Captain John Brown.”
Harking back to his famous essay “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau cast Brown as an exemplar of principled resistance to authority. “Is it possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?” he asked. “Are laws to be enforced simply because they are made?” Brown, he said, had resisted unjust laws and stood up for human dignity, “knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. In that sense he was the most American of us all.”
Thoreau contrasted this individual heroism with the “cackling of political conventions” and the cravenness of the northern public, particularly “the herd” of commentators who condemned Brown or pronounced him “insane.” Thoreau also mocked his Yankee neighbors who saw everything in terms of gain, and therefore felt that Brown had thrown his life away. “No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to,” Thoreau said.
He reserved his greatest praise for the words spoken by Brown to the Virginians who had questioned him at the armory soon after his capture. All of the many antislavery speeches by northern congressmen, combined and boiled down, Thoreau said, “do not match for manly directness and force, and for simple truth, the few casual remarks of crazy John Brown” as he lay bleeding on the floor of the paymaster’s office. As Thoreau memorably put it: “He could afford to lose his Sharpe’s rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,—a Sharpe’s rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.”
THREE DAYS LATER, ON November 2, Brown would show himself fully worthy of Thoreau’s praise. Brown was now well enough to walk
, though with difficulty, and during the court session that day he sat instead of lying on a cot. “It was late, and the gaslights gave an almost deathly pallor to his face,” one reporter wrote. “He was like a block of stone.” Brown remained impassive as the judge denied a defense motion seeking to overturn his verdict. Then the court clerk told Brown to rise and asked him if he had anything to “say why sentence should not be pronounced upon him.”
This caught Brown off guard. He’d expected to be sentenced with the other prisoners, once they’d all been convicted. “He seemed to be wholly unprepared to speak at this time,” one reporter wrote. If so, Brown recovered very quickly. Leaning slightly forward and resting his hands on a table, he spoke in a clear, distinct voice.
“I have, may it please the Court, a few words to say,” he began. “In the first place I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, of a design on my part to free slaves. I intended certainly to have made a clean thing of that matter, as I did last winter when I went into Missouri and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moving them through the country and finally leaving them in Canada. I designed to have done the same thing again on a larger scale. That was all I intended. I never did intend murder or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection.”
This summary wasn’t altogether true. In Missouri, one of Brown’s men had shot a slaveholder dead. And the attack on Harpers Ferry was clearly intended as more than a large-scale reprise of his slave rescue. Brown later admitted as much in a letter, telling the prosecutor Andrew Hunter that he misspoke in court “in the hurry of the moment.” His intent at Harpers Ferry had been to arm slaves to defend themselves within the South, rather than to “run them out of the slave States.”
But the point was legally moot. As he continued speaking in court, Brown no longer sought to question the specifics of the prosecution’s case. He even declared himself “entirely satisfied” with his treatment and praised the “truthfulness and candor” of the witnesses. What he challenged instead was the very basis of his indictment. Why was it a crime to try to free slaves?
“Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved,” Brown said in his courtroom speech, “had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.”
Brown accepted his conviction under Virginia law. But he invoked another, higher code. “This Court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things ‘whatsoever I would men should do to me I should do ever so to them.’ It teaches me, further, to ‘remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.’ I endeavored to act up to these instructions.”
He had abided by the Golden Rule and the scriptural injunction to care for the afflicted. This was all he had done. To do otherwise would have been a much greater crime. “I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, was no wrong but right.”
This brought Brown to the climax of his speech—in effect, to the climax of his long struggle against slavery. “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I submit. So let it be done!”
BROWN SPOKE, IN ALL, for about three or four minutes. If his words had any effect on the judge, there was no sign of it. Parker moved immediately to sentencing. “You have been found by an impartial jury of your countrymen to be guilty of the offenses charged against you,” he said. “In mercy to our own people—to protect them against similar invasions upon their rights—in mercy and by way of warning to the infatuated men of other States who, like you, may attempt to free our negroes by forcing weapons into their hands, the judgment of the law must be enforced against you.”
Judge Parker then declared: “The sentence of the law is that you, John Brown, be hanged by the neck until you are dead.” Furthermore, “for the sake of the example,” the execution should occur in public rather than in the jail yard. He set December 2, a month hence, as the date for the hanging. “And may God have mercy on your soul.”
Earlier in the court session, the many spectators crowded in the room had uttered execrations, calling Brown a “damned black-hearted villain” and other slurs. But they listened to his speech and sentencing with solemnity and silence. Then, after the judge had spoken, one man broke the quiet by clapping his hands. “This indecorum was promptly suppressed and much regret was expressed by citizens at its occurrence,” a reporter wrote. The crowd also remained silent as the defendant returned to prison.
The first press reports on Brown’s sentencing were likewise muted. Correspondents in the court faithfully recorded his words but made little comment on them. One wrote that Brown’s “composure, and his quiet and truthful manner” commanded respect and even some sympathy. Another thought he “spoke timidly—hesitatingly, indeed—and in a voice singularly gentle and mild.” A Virginian in the court described Brown’s tone as “indifferent” and quoted only the speech’s opening line.
The courtroom clerk didn’t even bother to reproduce that much. His official record consisted of ten words. Brown, upon being asked if he had reason why judgment should not be passed against him, “said he had nothing but what he had before said.”
In a sense, the clerk was right: Brown had said all of this before, in letters and in reply to his interrogators at the armory. Many elements of his speech, particularly his invocation of the Golden Rule, were decades-old touchstones for him. Brown may not have been fully prepared when the court called on him to speak in his own defense, but he’d been rehearsing for this moment his entire life.
And he had, at last, found the perfect stage, before a mostly hostile audience and a collection of correspondents who quickly transmitted the scene across the land. Brown’s public speaking style often lacked punch, but in print, his words and manner carried tremendous force. In a speech of just six hundred words, without notes or apparent preparation, he had cut through decades of cant and equivocation over slavery. Moreover, he had done so, not from the safety of a northern pulpit or editorial page, but while standing in a slave state courtroom, on trial for his life.
“Has anything like it been said in this land or age,” marveled a Philadelphia minister, writing the next day “with joy unutterable” to an abolitionist friend. “Slavery & Freedom brought face to face standing opposite; the one all black wrong, the other white as an angel.”
In essence, Brown’s speech had turned the case against him on its head. He had put his accusers on trial and pronounced them guilty, of crimes before God. He had also denied Virginians the righteous satisfaction of hanging a convicted felon. Feeling “no consciousness of guilt,” he told the court, he would gladly go to the gallows for “the ends of justice,” in solidarity with the slaves he had sought to free. Instead of pleading for his life, he made his death sentence a triumph. So let it be done!
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most eminent intellectual of his day, hailed Brown’s speech as one of the finest in history, and he would later call it and the Gettysburg Address “the two best specimens of eloquence we have had in this country.” This praise reflected the strong shift in northern opinion that occurred following Brown’s conviction and sentencing. Emerson, like many others, had initially viewed Harpers Ferry with horror, writing that Brown “lost his head” and committed a “fatal blunder” in attacking Virginia. Now, moved
by Brown’s words—and those of his neighbor Thoreau—Emerson reconsidered his earlier stance and became one of the abolitionist’s greatest champions.
Like Thoreau, Emerson trafficked in ideal types. Years before, in an essay titled “Heroism,” he had conjured an “unschooled man” who feels rather than thinks and “finds a quality in him that is negligent of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of reproach.” Unafraid of suffering and censure, and heedless of learned authority, Emerson’s hero also had to be persistent: “When you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself to the world.” Above all, heroism demanded certitude and self-reliance, right to the end. “Its ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood and wrong, and the power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents.”
Brown seemed to exemplify these attributes, and once Emerson embraced him, he did so without reserve. Brown’s words conveyed “his simple, artless goodness joined with his sublime courage,” while his character fused the “perfect Puritan faith” and the revolutionary fervor of his forebears. “He believes in two articles—two instruments, shall I say?—the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence.”
Emerson’s loftiest praise came in his lecture “Courage,” which he delivered at the Music Hall in Boston five days after Brown’s sentencing. “None purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death,” Emerson said. Brown represented nothing less than “the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.”