by Tony Horwitz
“She is all nerve”: Aaron Stevens to “Dear Brother,” March 8, 1860, KSHS.
“to see thy lovly face”: Aaron Stevens to Jennie Dunbar, Oct. 7, 1859, KSHS.
“Mr. Stevens rose”: Jennie Dunbar to James Redpath, May 7, 1860, OGV.
“we all recovered ourselves”: ibid.
“The near approach of death”: ibid. For more on the prison visit, see interview with Lydia Stevens Pierce, 1908, OGV.
“He is in the best of spirits”: Jennie Dunbar to Julia Lindsley, March 15, 1859, KSHS. See also “Notes from Jennie Dunbar’s Letter—visit to A.D.S.,” May 7, 1860, KSHS, and Jennie Dunbar manuscript, “An Echo,” July 1908, in OGV.
“He was talking to us”: Jennie Dunbar’s account of the morning of the execution is in her letter to James Redpath, May 7, 1860, OGV.
“Both exhibited”: New York Times, March 17, 1860.
“Hazlett seemed to die”: Baltimore report quoted in Carlisle (Pa.) American Volunteer, March 22, 1860.
“a free land”: from “Bury Me in a Free Land,” a poem Aaron Stevens copied for Jennie Dunbar in prison, KSHS. See also Rebecca Spring to Annie Brown, March 26, 1860, Houghton Library.
“Attached to the button-hole” and “for whom it was”: New York Herald, March 19, 1860.
“It apparently was”: Carrie Andrews to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, March 29, 1860, BPL.
“as soon as he entered”: Annie Brown Adams to Richard Hinton, June 7, 1894, KSHS. She also told of this in a letter to Alexander Ross, April 2, 1889, Gilder Lehrman Collection.
“seemed to suffer”: The account of the séance appears in a letter from Julia Lindsley to Lydia Pierce, May 19, 1860, KSHS.
“the love of Soul”: Aaron Stevens to Jennie Dunbar, Dec. 20, 1859, KSHS. In the same letter he writes of “knowing that we shall ere long meet in the Spirit-land.” In 1861, Dunbar moved to Minnesota, where she told no one of her ties to the Browns or to Stevens. She married and lived in anonymity until an article about Stevens appeared in a New York paper, fifty years after Harpers Ferry, describing the music teacher as his “lover.” For more see the interview with Jennie Dunbar Garcelon, 1908, OGV.
Epilogue: Immortal Raiders
“The curtain has”: Virginia Free Press, March 22, 1860.
“Abram”: Adam Goodheart, 1861 (New York: Knopf, 2011), 40.
“John Brown’s effort”: The address at Cooper Institute, Feb. 27, 1860, appears in Roy Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953), vol. 3, 522–50. Lincoln later credited this speech, and a dignified Mathew Brady portrait taken the same day, with getting him elected. Campaigning in Kansas on the day of Brown’s hanging, Lincoln stated that “We can not object” to the execution, “even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed and treason.”
“I am not, nor ever”: For quotations from the Douglas debates, I’ve drawn on Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial (New York: Norton, 2010), 108.
“an irrepressible conflict”: William Seward, quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals, 191. See also page 227, for a typical attack on Seward after Harpers Ferry; as the Tennessee legislature declared, Brown and his men were “the natural fruits of this treasonable ‘irrepressible conflict’ doctrine, put forth by the great head of the Black Republican party.” Seward was also tarnished by controversy in the winter of 1859–60 over the speakership of the House and Hinton Helper’s inflammatory book about slavery, The Impending Crisis of the South and How to Meet It. See Elizabeth Varon, Disunion! (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 311–12, 331–32.
“denounce the lawless”: The Republican Party platform is available at http://cprr.org/Museum/Ephemera/Republican_Platform_1860.html.
“Black Republican” and “war of extermination”: Potter, The Impending Crisis, 448. For more on the 1860 election, see Douglas Egerton’s excellent Year of Meteors (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010).
“Now that the black radical”: diary entry, Nov. 8, 1860, in Isabella Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, eds., A Diary from Dixie, as Written by Mary Boykin Chesnut (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1905), 1.
“The union now subsisting”: South Carolina Ordinance of Secession, Dec. 20, 1860, quoted in Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 324.
“Our position is thoroughly”: Mississippi’s “Declaration of Immediate Causes,” quoted in Charles Dew, Apostles of Disunion (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 12.
The provisional constitution of the Confederacy is available at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_csapro.asp.
“Blood will be flowing”: Wise, quoted in Encyclopedia Virginia, an online publication of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities: www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Virginia_Consitutional_Convention_of_1861. For more on the burning of the arsenal, see George Mauzy to “Mr. Burton,” April 19, 1861, HFNP. The destruction of the buildings at the Point by Hector Tyndale and his men was reported in the Feb. 10, 1862, New York Tribune, which wrote of the burning: “John Brown’s ghost is marching on.”
“John Brown’s body”: Franny Nudelman, John Brown’s Body, 14.
“holy and glorious”: ibid., 167. See also Nudelman’s discussion of Julia Ward Howe and the song, 164–68.
“As he died to make”: This was the penultimate line in the version of Howe’s song first published on the cover of the Atlantic Monthly in February 1862.
“Emancipation would be equivalent”: New York Herald, Dec. 10, 1861. Lincoln added: “Our position is surrounded with a sufficient number of dangers already. Abolition would throw against us, irrevocably, the four states of Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, and Maryland.” He also overruled an edict by a western commander, John C. Frémont, freeing slaves in Missouri. See Goodwin, Team of Rivals, 391–94.
“in rebellion against”: The Emancipation Proclamation is available on the National Archives site: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/emancipation_proclamation/.
“God bless Abraham”: Mary Brown to Mary Stearns, Jan. 7, 1863, BSC.
“able-bodied COLORED”: undated circular, HSP.
“a band” and “whose business”: Douglass, Autobiographies, 796–97.
“I had been”: Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York: Knopf, 2008), 125.
“This mighty scourge”: Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, Foner, The Fiery Trial, 325.
“Lincoln and John Brown”: New Orleans Tribune, April 22, 1865, quoted in Carolyn Harrell, When the Bells Tolled for Lincoln (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1997), 75.
“for the purpose of”: J. D. Enos, introduction to second edition of Osborne Anderson’s “A Voice from Harper’s Ferry,” 1873, BSC. For more on Anderson in his later years, see Eugene Meyer, “Sole Survivor,” Washington Post, Dec. 12, 2004.
“What a pity”: Annie Brown Adams to Richard Hinton, Feb. 16, 23, 1862, in Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz, “‘Could I Not Do Something for the Cause?’ The Brown Women, Antislavery Reform, and the Memory of Militant Abolitionism” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 2009). Annie wrote William Lloyd Garrison about her desire to teach “Contrabands” in a letter of June 9, 1863 (BSC). On her attending Sunday school on the plantation of Henry Wise, see her April 13, 1879, letter to Alexander Ross, Gilder Lehrman Collection.
“Yankees would break”: James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 317.
“I could stand prouder”: Craig Simpson, A Good Southerner (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 303.
“God knew”: ibid., 301–2.
“a chance to do”: Mary Brown to Mary Stearns, Aug. 4, 1863, BSC.
“I very much regret”: Mary Brown to Owen Brown, Jan. 31, 1864, HLHS. For more on family’s move west see Jean Libby, ed., John Brown’s Family in California (Palo Alto: Allies for Freedom, 2006).
“She was born”: John Brown, Jr., to Mary Stearns, May 1, 1860, BSC.
“bone-crushing sorrow”: Ruth Brown Thompson to Mary Stearns, April 22, 1860, BSC. In Lou Chapin, “The Last Days of John Brown,” Ruth states of Annie: “Among those who died that bloody night was her first lover. She went about the house pale, silent and tearless.”
“wonderfully happy”: Sarah Wall to “Dear Friend,” Dec. 7, 1884, KSHS.
“He just sits”: Annie Brown Adams to Franklin Sanborn, Dec. 23, 1894, BSC.
“I married the man”: ibid.
“an object of”: ibid. In a letter of September 25, 1892, to Sanborn she refused to go to the Chicago World’s Fair, stating: “I may be a relic of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, but I do not want to be placed on exhibition with other relics and curios.”
“to buy bread”: Annie Brown Adams to Rev. Joshua Young, April 19, 1899, in “Extracts from letters written by the Brown family,” BSC.
“wished to live” and “shut the past”: Galley proof, “The Trip to Annie Brown Adams,” unpublished article by Katherine Mayo, BSC. See also Mayo’s interview with Annie Brown Adams, 1908, in OGV.
“watchdog”: Richard Hinton, John Brown and His Men, 245.
“People who never did a heroic deed”: Katherine Mayo notes on Mrs. Annie Brown Adams, 1908, OGV.
“waited upon them”: Annie Brown Adams, quoted in Franklin Sanborn, Recollections of Seventy Years, 177.
“neither saints”: ibid.
“I used to lock myself” and “The honor and glory”: Annie Brown Adams to Alexander Ross, Dec. 28, 1887, Gilder Lehrman Collection.
“easily upset” and “The Last Survivor”: Mary Fablinger to Boyd Stutler, June 14, 1949, BSC.
“Death Comes”: Associated Press dispatch, datelined Eureka, Calif., Oct. 5, 1926, HLHS. The coroner’s certificate, dated Oct. 3, 1926, is from the California Dept. of Public Health, copy in HLHS. It notes that she also suffered from carcinoma of the lip.
“The larger portion”: quoted in Barbara Post, “Beyond John Brown: Jennie Chambers and Harpers Ferry” (master’s thesis, Duke University, 2007), 55, HFNP. For more on Harpers Ferry during and just after the war, see James Noffsinger, Contributions Towards a Physical History, 45–52, HFNHP. On the engine house, see Clarence Gee, “John Brown’s Fort,” West Virginia History, Jan. 1958, BSC. On Storer, see Vivian Verdell Gordon, “A History of Storer College,” The Journal of Negro Education, Autumn 1961, 445–49.
“upon the very soil” and “first tree”: Douglass, Autobiographies, 885.
“His zeal”: For Douglass’s speech, I’ve drawn on “An Address by Frederick Douglass, at the Fourteenth Anniversary of Storer College” (Dover, N.H.: Morning Start Job Printing House, 1881).
“condemned my sentiments”: Douglass, Autobiographies, 886. For the burning of Hunter’s home on July 17, 1864, see J. E. Taylor, With Sheridan Up the Shenandoah Valley in 1864 (Dayton, Ohio: Morningside House, 1989), 53.
“commended me”: Hunter is quoted in Douglass, Autobiographies, 885–86. Douglass regretted being unable to accept the invitation, writing, “I could not doubt the sincerity with which it was given.”
“The abolition of”: ibid., 885.
“Here on the scene”: This occurred at a meeting of the Niagara Movement, described in David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Dubois: Biography of a Race (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 328–29. The resolution, written by Dubois, appears in W.E.B. Dubois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Dubois (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 249. For more on Brown’s memory and early civil rights movement, see chapter four of R. Blakeslee Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives!
On the disinterment and reburial of raiders in 1899, see Thomas Featherstonhaugh, “The Final Burial of the Followers of John Brown,” New England Magazine, April 1901, 133–34.
Newby relations: see Schwarz, Migrants from Slavery, 149–68, and Scott Casper, Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), 171—73. Harriett’s second husband, William Robinson, later worked at Mount Vernon, which was owned before the war by a cousin of Lewis Washington’s, whose plantation Brown’s men raided. See also, “The Life and Death of Dangerfield Newby,” Jefferson Co. Black History Preservation Society, 2005.
“My grandmother”: Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), 17. He recounts the story of the shawl on page 12 and says it was sent to his grandmother a few weeks after Leary’s death, “full of bullet holes.” He later notes that he inherited the shawl and kept it with his manuscripts in a safe-deposit vault in New York. For description of his grandmother wrapping him in the shawl, see Mark Scott, “Langston Hughes of Kansas,” The Journal of Negro History, 1981, 4—5.
“who went off to die”: Langston Hughes, I Wonder As I Wander (New York: Octagon Books, 1990), 309.
“October the Sixteenth”: This title, and the version I have quoted, are from the poem’s first publication, in Opportunity, Oct. 31, 1931. It was later retitled and published, in slightly different form, as “October 16: The Raid.” The revised version is in Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, eds., The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 141–42, and a discussion of the differences from the original is on page 639.
Selected Bibliography
This is a partial list of books I used in my research, an abbreviated guide for those who want to do more reading. Citations for other materials appear in the endnotes, where I have also commented on some of the works below.
Achenbach, Joel. The Grand Idea: George Washington’s Potomac and the Race to the West. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.
Anderson, Osborne P. “A Voice from Harper’s Ferry.” Boston: printed for the author, 1861.
Avery, Elijah. The Capture and Execution of John Brown. Chicago: Hyde Park Bindery, 1906.
Banks, Russell. Cloudsplitter. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999.
Barry, Joseph. The Strange Story of Harper’s Ferry. Martinsburg, W.Va.: Thompson Brothers, 1903.
Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2001.
Carton, Evan. Patriotic Treason. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.
Clinton, Catherine. Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom. New York: Little, Brown, 2004.
Dean, Virgil, ed. Kansas Territorial Reader. Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 2005.
DeCaro, Louis A. “Fire from the Midst of You”: A Religious Life of John Brown. New York: New York University Press, 2002.
———. John Brown: The Cost of Freedom. New York: International Publishers, 2007.
Dew, Charles. Apostles of Disunion. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.
Douglass, Frederick. Autobiographies. New York: Library of America, 1994.
Dubois, W.E.B. John Brown. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1909.
Earle, Jonathan. John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry. New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008.
Egerton, Douglas. Year of Meteors. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.
Etcheson, Nicole. Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era. Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2004.
Faust, Drew Gilpin. James Henry Hammond and the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1982.
Fellman, Michael. Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Finkelman, Paul, ed. His Soul Goes Marching On. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995.
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