by H. W. Brands
The dignity of white labor required that white workers not be restricted in where they could settle. “That they are to go forth and improve their condition is the inherent right given to mankind by the Maker,” Lincoln said. “In the exercise of this right you must have room.” The eastern states in America had largely filled up. “Where shall we go to?” He gazed out at his audience. “Where shall you go to escape from over-population and competition?” He supplied the answer: “To those new territories which belong to us, which are God-given for that purpose.”
But if slavery got there first, white workers would find themselves competing with slave labor, and in that contest they would lose. Lincoln polled his listeners: “My good friends, let me ask you a question—you who have come from Virginia or Kentucky, to get rid of this thing of slavery—let me ask you what headway would you have made in getting rid of it, if by popular sovereignty you found slavery on that soil which you looked for to be free when you got there?” He knew the answer. “You would not have made much headway if you had already found slavery here, if you had to sit down to your labor by the side of the unpaid workman.”
Lincoln reiterated that opposition to slavery, and in particular to its spread, was not mere philanthropy for blacks. It was crucial to the betterment of whites. “It is due to yourselves as voters, as owners of the new territories, that you shall keep those territories free.”
* * *
—
LINCOLN’S DEVOTION to the antislavery cause impressed his hearers. The morning after his Cincinnati speech a local Republican called at Lincoln’s hotel. “How would you feel if we nominated you for president?” he asked.
Lincoln wasn’t ready to answer the question in public. He tried to laugh it off. “Just think of such a sucker as me as president!” he said. To a friend, Jesse Fell, he added, in a tone that was more of a lament, “Oh, Fell, what’s the use of talking of me for the presidency, whilst we have such men as Seward, Chase and others, who are so much better known to the people, and whose names are intimately associated with the principles of the Republican party.”
Fell answered that Lincoln was more electable than the others, precisely for being unknown.
Lincoln thought the matter over. “I admit the force of what you say, and admit that I am ambitious and would like to be president,” he replied. He acknowledged the compliment in Fell’s remarks. But he didn’t think what Fell envisioned could happen. “There is no such good luck in store for me as the presidency.”
Lincoln’s modesty cloaked his shrewdness, which told him to duck the question of a presidential candidacy as long as possible. William Seward and Salmon Chase were strong figures who had held public office during the period since the slavery crisis had sharpened in 1850; each had left a trail of decisions for which he might be criticized. Lincoln’s advantage was his lack of a trail; having held no office, he had no such record to defend. The longer he kept his head down, the better his chances when he finally stood up.
29
IN JULY 1859, John Brown traveled to Harpers Ferry. He called himself Isaac Smith and said he was looking for a farm to rent. John Unseld, who lived on the Maryland side of the Potomac River about a mile from the town, met Brown, Brown’s sons Watson and Oliver, and Jeremiah Anderson on the road. “Good morning, gentlemen,” Unseld recalled greeting them. “How do you do?” The equipment Brown and the others carried caused Unseld to think they were prospectors. “I suppose you are out hunting mineral gold and silver?” he suggested.
“No, we are not,” Brown answered. “We are out looking for land. We want to buy land. We have a little money, but we want to make it go as far as we can.” Brown asked what price land was selling for in the vicinity.
Unseld said it ran from fifteen to thirty dollars an acre.
“That’s high,” Brown said. “I thought to buy land here for about a dollar or two dollars per acre.”
Unseld said Brown would have to go much farther west to find land that cheap. He suggested Kansas.
Unseld let Brown’s party ponder their situation and proceeded on his errand into Harpers Ferry. Returning some hours later, he ran into the visitors again. Brown continued to express interest. “I have been looking round your country up here, and it is a very fine country, a very pleasant place, a fine view,” Brown said. “The land is much better than I expected to find it; your crops are pretty good.” He asked Unseld if any farms were for sale in the neighborhood.
Unseld directed him to a farm about four miles away, belonging to a family named Kennedy.
Brown took note, cautiously. “I think we had better rent awhile until we get better acquainted,” he said. Given the high prices, he wanted to be sure he received value for his money.
Unseld said the Kennedys might rent their farm, especially if the renting could lead to a sale.
Brown asked directions; Unseld gave them. Unseld inquired how Brown intended to use the farm. The Kennedy place didn’t have much fertile soil.
“My business has been buying up fat cattle, and driving them on to the state of New York, and selling them,” Brown said. “We expect to engage in that again.”
Unseld didn’t have reason to doubt the explanation. They parted once more. Unseld encountered Brown a couple of times during the next several days, also on the road. The first time Brown said he had arranged to rent the Kennedy farm; the second time he offered to show Unseld the receipt for the rent he had paid.
Unseld shook his head. “I don’t want to see the receipt,” he said. “It is nothing to me.” Unseld drew no particular inference from Brown’s offer, and he was willing to accept Brown’s story. The Kennedy farm lay on the main road four miles from Unseld’s place, and five miles from Harpers Ferry, and each time Unseld ventured by the Kennedy place, he naturally looked to see what was going on. Brown was friendly. He said he had been a surveyor and had worked in New York, Ohio and as far west as Kansas. He said he prospected for minerals while out surveying. “I have a little instrument that I carry in my hand, about the size of a small bucket, that has a magnet that will tell where there is any iron ore,” he said. “Sometimes I carry that; it has a needle to it; if the ore is in front of me the needle will point to it, and as I come there it will turn.”
During August and September other members of Brown’s company arrived at the Kennedy farm. They stayed in the two houses on the property and mostly kept out of sight lest the presence of a large group of single men draw suspicion. Brown enlisted one of his daughters and a daughter-in-law to cook and clean for the group and lend an air of normality.
Osborne Anderson was one of Brown’s followers. Anderson was a black man, born free in Pennsylvania, who attended Oberlin College before moving to Chatham, Canada, to open a printing shop amid the black community there. He heard of the convention Brown called for his provisional constitution and decided to attend. On account of his facility with words he was made recording secretary of the convention, and in the course of the meeting he became a convert to Brown’s project. He joined Brown at the Kennedy farm, traveling the last leg from the Pennsylvania-Maryland border under cover of darkness. In slave-state Maryland any unfamiliar and unsupervised black man was certain to attract attention.
Anderson found the farm and its lodgings suitably nondescript. “To a passer-by, the house and its surroundings presented but indifferent attractions,” he recalled. “Any log tenement of equal dimensions would be as likely to arrest a stray glance. Rough, unsightly, and aged, it was only those privileged to enter and tarry for a long time, and to penetrate the mysteries of the two rooms it contained—kitchen, parlor, dining-room below, and the spacious chamber, attic, store-room, prison, drilling room, comprised in the loft above—who could tell how we lived at Kennedy Farm.”
John Brown imposed a disciplined routine. Every morning he gathered the family—as he called the group—for prayer, which always concluded with a plea for
those in bondage. “I never heard John Brown pray, that he did not make strong appeals to God for the deliverance of the slave,” Anderson recounted. The praying done, Brown sent most of the men, especially Anderson and the handful of other blacks, into the loft for the day. “Few only could be seen about, as the neighbors were watchful and suspicious,” Anderson said. “It was also important to talk but little among ourselves, as visitors to the house might be curious.” Hidden in the loft, the men read a military manual Hugh Forbes had written before defecting, and they whispered among themselves, relating their biographies to one another. “But when our resources became pretty well exhausted, the ennui from confinement, imposed silence, etc., would make the men almost desperate.” Relief came only at night. “We sallied out for a ramble, or to breathe the fresh air and enjoy the beautiful solitude of the mountain scenery around, by moonlight.”
In early October, Brown traveled to Pennsylvania to coordinate with John Kagi, his second-in-command, who oversaw the transport of weapons to the Kennedy farm. These included the pikes Brown had ordered in Connecticut and finally paid for. While Brown was gone, the discipline among the men slipped. “The men at the farm had been so closely confined,” Anderson said, “that they went about the house and farm in the day-time during that week, and so indiscreetly exposed their numbers to the prying neighbors, who thereupon took steps to have a search instituted in the early part of the coming week.”
The slip forced Brown’s hand. He had hoped to wait for more arrivals. With the score he had on hand, he could hardly strike terror into the slave South. But he wasn’t sure any more were coming. Even some of those he had expected had suffered a change of heart. Now, learning that the suspicions of the neighbors had been stirred, he decided he had no choice.
On Sunday morning, October 16, he brought his men together. “He read a chapter from the Bible, applicable to the condition of the slaves, and our duty as their brethren, and then offered up a fervent prayer to God to assist in the liberation of the bondmen in that slaveholding land,” Anderson recalled. “The services were impressive beyond expression. Every man there assembled seemed to respond from the depths of his soul, and throughout the entire day, a deep solemnity pervaded the place.”
After breakfast Brown called the roll. A sentinel was stationed outside the door, and Brown let the men know that the time had come. He read the provisional constitution. Those who had not sworn allegiance to it before now did so. Orders were issued as to who would do what and how the men were to comport themselves. “Gentlemen, let me impress this one thing upon your minds,” Brown said. “You all know how dear life is to you, and how dear your life is to your friends. In remembering that, consider that the lives of others are as dear to them as yours are to you. Do not, therefore, take the life of any one, if you can possibly avoid it. But if it is necessary to take life to save your own, then make sure work of it.”
The balance of the day was filled with final preparations. At eight o’clock in the evening, after dark had completely fallen, Brown said, “Men, get on your arms. We will proceed to the Ferry.”
* * *
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THE COMPANY HEADED OFF. Brown drove a wagon loaded with weapons; the men marched behind him. No one spoke a word; to the eye of a casual observer the group might have been a funeral procession, except that the wagon bore pikes rather than a body.
At about ten thirty Brown’s party reached the east end of the bridge from Maryland over the Potomac to Harpers Ferry. A watchman guarded the town at the west end. Perhaps hearing Brown’s wagon, he hoisted a lantern and crossed the bridge toward the raiding party. Two of Brown’s men, John Kagi and Aaron Stevens, aimed their rifles at him and demanded his surrender. He thought they were joking. He recognized Brown, though he knew him as Isaac Smith, and he couldn’t imagine why Brown and his friends would want to take him prisoner. But they soon convinced him they were serious, and he handed over his gun and let himself be taken.
The raiders continued across the bridge into the town. Just beyond the bridge was the gate of the federal armory. The gate was locked, with a guard, Daniel Whelan, in the watch house behind the gate. “I heard the noise of their wagon coming down the street,” Whelan recalled. “I advanced about three yards out from the watch-house door and observed the wagon standing facing the armory gate.” Whelan thought the wagon belonged to his boss, the head watchman, and he walked toward the gate to greet him. But two of the strangers started picking at the padlock on the gate. “Hold on!” he said. They ignored him. Whelan then saw the rest of Brown’s party. The raiders demanded he open the gate. He said he wouldn’t. But he had ventured too close to the gate. One of the raiders reached through and grabbed him by the coat. “Five or six ran in from the wagon, clapped their guns against my breast, and told me I should deliver up the key,” he recounted. He said he didn’t have it.
Brown couldn’t decide whether to believe him. He didn’t want to shoot Whelan, if only because it would alert the town. So while several of his men kept their rifles leveled at Whelan, two others employed a crowbar and hammer and broke the lock.
Whelan felt helpless. “They all gathered about me and looked in my face,” he said. “I was nearly scared to death with so many guns about me. I did not know the minute or the hour I should drop. They told me to be very quiet and still and make no noise or else they would put me to eternity.”
Brown ordered his men to take control of the armory, starting with the watch house and the attached fire-engine house. The place was empty but for Whelan and a guard at the far end, three hundred yards away, and the task was swiftly accomplished.
Brown declared his purpose to Whelan and the other prisoner, the bridge sentry. “I came here from Kansas, and this is a slave state,” Brown said. “I want to free all the negroes in this state. I have possession now of the United States armory. If the citizens interfere with me, I must burn the town and have blood.”
* * *
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MOST OF THE TOWN had slept through the minor commotion thus far. They proceeded to sleep while Brown sent small parties to secure the rifle factory, on the south side of the town, fronting the Shenandoah River; the arsenal, where finished weapons were stored; and the bridge over the Shenandoah River. In the process the raiders took a few more prisoners, to prevent their spreading the word of the operation. Brown ordered his men to cut the telegraph wires leading out of town, to extend the isolation.
By midnight Brown could congratulate himself on the success of the first stage of the operation. With fewer than twenty men he had seized the parts of the town that mattered for his purposes. No one had been killed, and almost no one knew what was happening. Nor would anyone find out until Monday morning, when the town would awake to discover Brown’s liberation army in its midst.
He put the intervening hours to use. The point of the raid was only partly to acquire weapons; equally it was to alert the slaves in the area that their freedom was at hand—that it was in their hands if they would grasp it. No sooner had Brown secured the three positions in town than he sent some of his men into the Virginia countryside. Lewis Washington owned a farm and numerous slaves about five miles from Harpers Ferry. He was a great-grandnephew of George Washington, an associate of the Virginia governor, and an important man in that part of the state. He later recalled being roused from his sleep by a band of armed men. “They appeared at my chamber door about half past one o’clock in the morning,” he said. “My name was called in an under tone, and supposing it to be by some friend who had possibly arrived late, and being familiar with the house, had been admitted in the rear by the servants, I opened the door in my night-shirt and slippers. I was in bed and asleep. As I opened the door there were four armed men with their guns drawn upon me just around me. Three had rifles, and one a large revolver. The man having a revolver held in his left hand a large flambeau”—torch—“which was burning.” The man in charge of the group, Aaron Stev
ens, informed Washington that he was a prisoner.
Washington assessed the situation. “I observed that each man had two revolvers sticking in his belt in front besides the rifle,” he recounted. They were too well armed simply to rob him, he thought. “Possibly you will have the courtesy to tell me what this means,” he inquired of them.
Stevens answered, “We have come here for the purpose of liberating all the slaves of the South.”
Washington couldn’t decide if the men before him were insane. But he chose not to test them. He got dressed and prepared to do as they said.
John Cook, one of his captors, had learned that Washington owned a collection of antique weapons. He relayed the information to Stevens, who demanded that Washington reveal where they were. Washington showed them to a gun closet in his dining room. The raiders took out three guns, along with a sword said to have been presented to George Washington by Frederick the Great of Prussia.
Stevens wasn’t satisfied with the haul. “Have you a watch?” he demanded.