At about noon, the Charlestown militia made a dash across the bridge over the Shenandoah, firing shotguns and pistols as they ran, killing the first of Brown’s men to die that day, forty-eight-year-old Dangerfield Newby, who had been born into slavery but freed by his white father. Newby had moved North to earn money to buy freedom for his wife and six children, but had not succeeded. In Newby’s pocket was found a letter from his wife. She had written: “It is said Master is in want of money. I know not what time he may sell me, and then all my bright hopes of the future are blasted, for their [sic] has been one bright hope to cheer me in all my troubles, that is to be with you…Come this fall without fail money or no money.”
As the number of attackers swelled, Brown’s men retreated to the engine house, a formidable brick structure that was windowless on three sides and had three stout oak doors in the front. Three abolitionists, including the provisional government’s “congressman,” Osborne Anderson, held the armory, and three more men the musket works, half a mile to the west. Acknowledging the precariousness of his predicament, Brown sent out William Thompson of North Elba under a flag of truce, to propose a cease-fire. But Thompson was immediately seized and dragged away to a local hotel, where he was kept under guard. As militiamen worked their way toward the rear of the engine house, Brown then sent his twenty-four-year-old son Watson and one of his best men, the powerfully built ex-cavalryman Aaron Stevens, out under a white flag, but the mob shot them down in the street. Watson, though fatally wounded, managed to drag himself back to the engine house. Stevens, who was shot four times, was taken into custody.
Brandishing a sword that had once belonged to Frederick the Great and that had been taken from Colonel Washington, Brown strode among his remaining men, urging them to stay calm and not to waste their ammunition. Loopholes had been drilled in the doors, and through them Brown’s men tried to pick off attackers who came too near. One of their shots killed the popular mayor of Harpers Ferry, Fountain Beckham. Seeking immediate revenge, a mob of townspeople pushed its way into the hotel where William Thompson was being held, dragged him outside, and cold-bloodedly shot him in the head, as he begged for his life.
Realizing that their position was untenable, the three men in the rifle works made a run for the shallow Shenandoah, firing as they ran. Two, John Kagi, the vice president of the provisional government, and a black man named Lewis Leary, were shot down in the rapids. The black Oberlin student, John Copeland, managed to reach a rock in the middle of the river, where he threw down his gun and surrendered. William Leeman, at twenty the youngest of the raiders, broke and ran from the armory, jumped into the Potomac, and swam for his life. But he was trapped on an islet, and shot. Throughout the afternoon, militiamen with nothing else to shoot at used his body for target practice.
Late in the afternoon, Shields Green managed to reach the armory with a message from Brown. The surviving men there, Osborne and Hazlett, had already decided to try to make their escape, and they urged Green to join them. It was obvious that their position was hopeless. Green declined their offer and returned to the engine house. He must have understood that he was going back to certain death. But he had promised Brown that he would do his duty. Soon militia reinforcements arrived and attacked the engine house from the rear, cutting off his last chance of escape.
Frederick Douglass had of course been right. Brown was trapped. There would be no Subterranean Pass Way, no chain of forts, no Appalachian refuge for fugitive slaves. If Brown felt like a defeated man, however, it was not evident. As his son Watson wept with pain, Brown advised him to die “as becomes a man.” His twenty-year-old son Oliver already lay dead on the floor. When dawn came, Brown and his four remaining uninjured men looked out through their loopholes into the morning mist to see Robert E. Lee’s marines deployed with fixed bayonets, and beyond them a mass of militiamen, spoiling for more blood. Shortly after seven o’clock, Lee’s aide, a brash young lieutenant of cavalry, walked toward the engine house, carrying a white flag. He was met at the door by Brown. The soldier demanded immediate and unconditional surrender, and promised only that Brown’s men would be tried according to law. Brown asked that they instead be allowed to retreat across the river to Maryland, where they would free their remaining hostages. Suddenly, cutting Brown short, the lieutenant jumped aside, and signaled for the marines to attack. Brown could easily have shot him dead—“just as easily as I could kill a musquito,” he said later. Had he done so, the course of the Civil War would undoubtedly have been different in ways that can never be known. The lieutenant was J. E. B. Stuart, who would go on to serve in the war as Robert E. Lee’s brilliant commander of cavalry.
Time suddenly speeded up now. The marines rushed forward in two columns. Two of the burliest first tried to batter the door down with sledgehammers. When that failed, another party charged the weakened door, using a forty-foot ladder as a battering ram, breaking through on their second try. The soldiers poured through the breach. Two fell in the melee, one shot through the body and the other in the face. But Brown’s men were overwhelmed. A marine impaled Indianan Jeremiah Anderson against a wall. Another bayoneted young Dauphin Thompson of North Elba where he lay under a fire engine. An officer stabbed at Brown with his sword, and with a second stroke actually lifted him off his feet, but failed to kill him. He then knocked the dazed old man to the ground and beat him unconscious with the hilt of his sword. Minutes after it had begun, the battle was over. Only Shields Green and one of the Quaker brothers from Iowa, Edward Coppoc, were captured unwounded. Of the nineteen men who had walked across the bridge into Harpers Ferry barely thirty-six hours before, five were now prisoners, and ten had been killed or fatally injured.
Having witnessed the capture of the engine house, Osborne Anderson and Hazlett slipped out the back of the armory, climbed a wall, and scuttled behind the embankment of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to the bank of the Shenandoah, where they found a boat, and, while attention was concentrated on the scene at the engine house, paddled across to the Maryland shore. Two more of the original group, including Brown’s son Owen, played no part in the fighting, having been sent back to join the three men in Maryland before the battle commenced. Of the seven who managed to evade the debacle, two would be caught later in Pennsylvania, and eventually executed. Five would escape.
After the attack, panic swept like an electric charge through the network that had provided Brown with logistical and financial support. Hazlett and three men whom Brown had left behind to guard supplies were soon captured in Pennsylvania, and later extradited to Virginia. Jermain Loguen and Frederick Douglass destroyed whatever documents they had that might implicate them in Brown’s plot, and fled to Canada, as did several of Brown’s secret backers. Gerrit Smith collapsed with a nervous breakdown, becoming so “wild” with guilt and hallucinations that he committed himself to the insane asylum at Utica. William Still stayed at his post to assist the last of Brown’s fleeing men, including Osborne Anderson, who appeared at his door in Philadelphia “footsore and powder begrimed,” and put them on the Underground Railroad for Canada.
Harriet Tubman was in New York City when she learned that Brown’s raid had failed. She remembered a strange dream that she had just before she met Brown for the first time. She was in “a wilderness sort of place, all full of rocks and bushes,” when she saw a serpent lift its head among the rocks, and become transformed into the head of an old man with a white beard, gazing at her “wishful like, jes as ef he war gwine to speak to me.” Two other heads rose up beside him, younger than he. As she stared back at them, a crowd of men rushed up and struck down first the younger heads and then the old man’s. Only now did the dream finally make sense to her. She recognized the two younger serpents as Brown’s sons, Watson and Oliver. The third, bearded serpent, looking toward her so hopefully, was John Brown himself.
On October 25, Brown and his six surviving men were charged with treason, first-degree murder, and “conspiring with Negroes to produce insurrection.” T
hey were tried at Charlestown, the county seat, ten miles from Harpers Ferry. All the charges carried the death penalty. The outcome was never in doubt. Throughout, Brown remained serene and unapologetic. From the Bible, he told the court, he had early learned to do unto others as he would have done unto himself: “It teaches me further to remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction…Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done.”
He met death stoically on the morning of December 2. At eleven o’clock, he was led out of the jail and seated on a small wagon carrying a white pine coffin. He handed a note to one of his guards: “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.” Escorted by six companies of infantry and a company of cavalry, he was driven to a scaffold that had been built for him in an open field. At about eleven-fifteen, a cloth sack was placed over his head, and the rope adjusted around his neck. Then, while he stood atop the trap door in a pair of bright red slippers, the soldiers marched and countermarched until their officers finally got them into position. Brown told his guard, “Don’t keep me waiting longer than necessary.” They were his last words. At eleven-thirty, the trap was pulled away, and with “a few slight struggles,” he yielded up his life.
Shields Green and John Copeland were hanged two weeks later. Green, born and formerly enslaved in the South, falsely told the authorities that he had been born in Rochester, New York. In a sense, perhaps, he had been. He preferred to die remembered as a free man. The Oberlin graduate went silently to his death. Green engaged in loud and earnest prayer until the moment the trap opened beneath his feet and, as a reporter put it, he was “launched into eternity.”
In death, John Brown did more to quicken the mind of America on the subject of slavery than any man of his time. “We shall be a thousand times more Anti-Slavery than we ever dared to think of being before,” shouted the Newburyport ( Massachusetts) Herald. In a deeply pious age, his death was viscerally understood as a martyrdom, a living part of the eternal Christian drama. “Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified,” Henry David Thoreau opined, in a speech in Concord, on the day of Brown’s execution. “This morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.”
Paranoid rumors of more insurrections raced through the South. Gun sellers made fortunes: in the four weeks after the raid, Baltimore dealers were reported to have sold ten thousand pistols to terrified Virginians. Northern schoolteachers, peddlers, and preachers were subjected to all manner of indignities. Real and apocryphal stories of persecution fed Northern rage. A planter was said to have forced his slaves to execute a Yankee evangelist who was found preaching to them. A peddler was said to have been strung up by the neck six times (but let down before he expired) on suspicion of being an abolitionist. In South Carolina, an Irish stone cutter was allegedly flogged, tarred, and feathered for daring to say that slave labor was degrading to white labor.
Brown, even before his death, was accused by many Americans of sheer madness for undertaking such a hopeless endeavor as the attack on Harpers Ferry. But if any American was seriously detached from reality in these waning years of peace, it was President Buchanan, ever an apologist for slavery. In his annual message to Congress, delivered barely two weeks after Brown’s execution, Buchanan sounded a note of delusory optimism. Barely mentioning “the recent sad and bloody occurrences at Harpers Ferry,” he implored Americans of North and South to “cultivate the ancient feelings of mutual forbearance and good will toward each other,” and to allow agitation over slavery to “give place to other and less threatening controversies.” He went on in his inimitable way, smugly reiterating his belief in the inalienable right of any American citizen to own slaves, and to carry them into any territory of the United States, rights which he praised as “so manifestly just in themselves and so well calculated to promote peace and harmony among the States.”
Buchanan’s words were, in their spineless way, a fitting epitaph for the age of slavery, for the long acquiescence of Northern political interests to the South. They were the last gasp of the “doughfaces,” of the temporizers, hypocrites, and opportunists who had for generations helped to protect and preserve American slavery. What followed was Abraham Lincoln, secession, and war.
4
The work of the underground did not end with John Brown’s capture and execution. Later in December, Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia told the state legislature that the underground still posed a greater threat to slavery than John Brown’s raid. “It is no solace to me,” he said, “that our border slaves are so liberated by this exterior system, by this still, silent stealing system that they have no need to take up arms for their liberation.” Slaves continued to flee their masters, and masters continued to hunt them down. Bold rescues still occurred: in April 1860, in Troy, New York, a crowd of thousands that included Harriet Tubman snatched the fugitive Charles Nalle from federal marshals. Federal commissioners would continue to remand recaptured fugitives into the hands of their owners as late as April 1861, just days before the outbreak of the Civil War. Even on the cusp of war, the “trains” of the Underground Railroad continued to run, and new recruits continued to join the clandestine ranks. One of the last was Arnold Gragston, a nineteen-year-old slave living in Mason County, Kentucky. Sometime in 1859, Gragston was “courtin’” on a neighboring plantation when the woman he was visiting told him that she knew a girl who wanted to cross the Ohio River to Ohio, and asked if he would take her. “I was scared and backed out in a hurry,” Gragston told an interviewer, later in life. “But then I saw the girl, and she was such a pretty little thing, brown-skinned and kinda rosy, and lookin’ as scared as I was feelin’, so it wasn’t long before I was listenin’ to the old woman tell me when to take her and where to leave her on the other side.” Gragston finally agreed to row the girl across to Ripley, Ohio, the following night. All the next day, however, his mind tossed back and forth between visions of his master “laying a rawhide across my back, or shootin’ me,” and of the desperate girl beseeching him with huge eyes.
“I don’t know how I ever rowed the boat across the river—the current was strong and I was trembling,” Gragston recalled. “I couldn’t see a thing there in the dark, but I felt that girl’s eyes.” Where would he put her out of the boat? he worried. Would there be anyone there to meet them? Would it be a friend or enemy? Gragston had never been to Ohio, and knew nothing about the north bank of the river. “Well, pretty soon I saw a tall light and I remembered what the old lady had told me about looking for that light and rowing to it. I did, and when I got up to it, two men reached down and grabbed her.” Gragston’s entire body shook with terror. “Then one of the men took my arm and I just felt down inside of me that the Lord had got ready for me. ‘You hungry boy?’ is what he asked me, and if he hadn’t been holdin’ me I think I would have fell backward into the river.”
Gragston overcame his fear and soon became a regular conductor, crossing the river three or four times a month, always on moonless nights, usually carrying two or three passengers in each load. But apart from his first passenger, the girl with the huge eyes, he never again saw the face of anyone he helped. He was given a password, “Menare,” which he supposed was taken from the Bible, and with it he would identify his passengers, who would invariably meet him either in a darkened field or in an unlit house. He usually delivered them to a man whom he knew as “Mister Rankins,” in Ripley. Although the Reverend John Rankin was still alive, and his home on the hill above Ripley was still illuminated at night with a light that Gragston “remembered” a
s a “lighthouse in his yard, about thirty feet high,” the slave’s contact was more likely one of the old minister’s younger sons, who served as conductors in the years before the Civil War. Gragston came to relish the excitement and danger. And, like so many underground agents before him, he discovered that his courage had given him the power to bestow the gift of freedom. “Even though I could have been free any night myself,” he said, “I figgered I wasn’t getting along so bad so I would stay on Mr. Tabb’s place and help the others get free.”
Gragston was still a relative beginner in the underground when Abraham Lincoln was elected the first Republican president of the United States, on November 6, 1860. On December 20, South Carolina seceded from the Union, followed six weeks later by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. In his inaugural address, Lincoln made clear his determination to preserve the Union, and stated that he neither intended to abolish slavery nor repeal the Fugitive Slave Law. But the time for reconciliation had run out. On April 12, 1861, South Carolina militiamen fired on Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor. Immediately afterward, four more states—Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee—joined the Confederacy. About three hundred sixty thousand Union soldiers and two hundred sixty thousand Confederates would die before the war was over.
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