by H. W. Brands
In fact the Virginians suffered few losses, for all the noise and shooting. Brown realized he and his men were trapped. “We will hold on to our three positions”—the armory, the arsenal and the rifle factory—“if they are unwilling to come to terms, and die like men,” he declared.
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WHAT BROWN EXPECTED by way of terms is unclear. Indeed, much about his thinking at this point is unclear. For one who had conducted himself and his followers with tactical acuity in Kansas, he floundered at Harpers Ferry. The only logic behind attacking Harpers Ferry rested in seizing its weapons and making an escape to the mountains. To try to hold the armory was madness. The position was surrounded by the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, which met within a stone’s throw of the armory, and by Bolivar Heights, the elevation behind the town. Even if Brown’s men could retain control of the Harpers Ferry ends of the bridges, they could never fight their way through the militia forces on the other sides. And the heights gave the militia ideal spots for pouring fire down upon Brown’s position.
He seems to have expected that slaves in the area would learn of his bold stroke and rush to his side. The slaves, of course, were the ones to be supplied with the weapons, both the hundreds of pikes he brought with him and the guns he acquired from the armory. But how they were to reach him at Harpers Ferry, even if they wanted to, he never explained.
Brown’s lieutenants believed the slaves were not supposed to reach them at Harpers Ferry. John Kagi, Brown’s most able subordinate, understood that the operation made sense only if the raiders struck and escaped before the countryside was aroused. By messenger from the rifle works, which he had taken with two other raiders, Kagi pleaded with Brown to order the evacuation. But Brown refused, leaving Kagi and his comrades dangerously exposed.
John Starry, the doctor who spread the alarm, had watched the fighting from the town side. At about three in the afternoon, as the militiamen were driving closer to Brown’s position in the armory, Starry informed them where they could find some more of the raiders. “I said to them that two or three of Brown’s men were in Hall’s works”—the rifle factory—“and if they wanted to show their bravery they could go there,” he related.
An officer of the militia took the suggestion and directed his men’s fire at the rifle shop. “At the first fire Kagi and the others who were with him in Hall’s works went out the back way towards the Winchester railroad, climbed out on the railroad and into the Shenandoah River. There they were met on the opposite side by a party who were there and driven back again, and two of them were shot. Kagi was killed, and a yellow”—mulatto—“fellow, Leary, was wounded and died that night, and the yellow fellow Copeland was taken unhurt.”
The other militiamen pressed their attack on Brown’s central position. They drove the raiders out of the arsenal, throwing them back into the armory. Before long Brown lost most of that. The engine house was his final redoubt. Less than twenty-four hours after launching his long-planned war of liberation, Brown had effectively made himself and his surviving men prisoners.
Perhaps he was deluded into thinking the people of Virginia were like those of Kansas, where his audacity had more than once made up for his deficiency in numbers. But in Kansas he fought Missourians, for whom Kansas was a political cause, not their home. Nor in Kansas was he threatening to start a slave rebellion, the hoary nightmare of white Southerners. In Kansas his irregular forces fought irregulars; at Harpers Ferry he faced organized militias.
The fighting on Monday afternoon was sporadically cruel. Brown’s men fired out from the armory and then from the engine house. Their accuracy was almost random, seeming to the townsfolk more like sniping or assassination than honest warfare. A prominent slaveholder, George Turner, had just arrived in the town when a bullet struck him in the neck and killed him. The popular mayor of Harpers Ferry, Fontaine Beckham, surveying the state of affairs in the town, was killed by another raider’s bullet.
Brown’s men suffered worse. As their position deteriorated, Brown tried to parley. He sent one of his men, William Thompson, with a hostage to seek a truce. When Thompson got close enough to the defenders to talk, several aimed their guns at him and threatened to blow off his head. Thompson gave up the hostage and was himself taken captive. Brown tried again, dispatching his son Watson and Aaron Stevens. The townsfolk ignored the truce flag the two carried, shooting both Watson Brown and Stevens. Watson staggered back to the engine house; Stevens was captured.
Some of the townsmen weren’t content to take prisoners. Harry Hunter, a grandnephew of Mayor Beckham, later explained how he and another man burst into the hotel where Thompson and Stevens were being held. A woman put herself between them and Thompson, but they thrust her aside. “We then caught hold of him and dragged him out by the throat, he saying, ‘Though you may take my life, eighty thousand will rise up to avenge me and carry out my purpose of giving liberty to the slaves.’ We carried him out to the bridge, and two of us, leveling our guns in this moment of wild exasperation, fired, and before he fell a dozen more balls were buried in him. We then threw his body off the trestle work.”
Hunter and the other man returned to the hotel to give Stevens the same treatment. They changed their minds when they got close. “We found him suffering from his wounds and probably dying. We concluded to spare him and start after others and shoot all we could find. I had just seen my loved uncle and best friend I ever had shot down by those villainous abolitionists, and felt justified in shooting any that I could find. I felt it my duty and had no regrets.”
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NIGHTFALL ON Monday evening silenced the guns. Brown understood he was surrounded, yet he remained defiant. The commander of the Virginia militia called on him to surrender; he responded with his terms. “In consideration of all my men, whether living or dead, or wounded, being soon safely in and delivered up to me at this point with all their arms and ammunition,” Brown said, “we will then take our prisoners and cross the Potomac bridge, a little beyond which we will set them at liberty; after which we can negotiate about the government property as may be best. Also we require the delivery of our horse and harness at the hotel.”
Brown’s offer was rejected out of hand. He wasn’t going to be allowed to leave Harpers Ferry with any hostages. If most of those in Harpers Ferry had their way, he wouldn’t leave with his life.
Inside the engine house the night passed slowly. Oliver Brown and Watson Brown suffered badly from their wounds. Watson’s hopes improved slightly when the captain of one of the Maryland militia companies allowed his unit’s surgeon to go to the engine house and dress Watson’s wounds. Oliver was soon beyond care. “In the quiet of the night young Oliver Brown died,” one of the hostages recalled. “He had begged again and again to be shot, in the agony of his wound, but his father had replied to him, ‘Oh, you will get over it,’ and ‘If you must die, die like a man.’ ” John Brown turned to speak with some of the prisoners. “Oliver Brown lay quietly over in a corner,” the hostage continued. “His father called to him, after a time. No answer. ‘I guess he is dead,’ said Brown.”
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OUTSIDE THE ENGINE HOUSE John Brown’s fate was being sealed. The president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, less phlegmatic than his own train superintendent, had sent telegrams to the governor of Virginia and the president of the United States as soon as he heard of the troubles in Harpers Ferry. “The United States armory at Harpers Ferry is in the possession of rioters,” he told James Buchanan. “The presence of United States troops is indispensable for the safety of government property and of the mails. A special train will be ordered to be in readiness for any troops ordered to be sent.” He added, “The rioters are more than two hundred strong.”
Buchanan accepted the offer and set the federal military in motion. The army had no troops at the capital, but there were some marines nearby
. To command them, Buchanan chose an officer he and others in the military judged to be the country’s most promising. Robert E. Lee was supposed to be in Texas fighting Comanches, but family matters had drawn him back to Virginia, to the plantation he and his wife had inherited from her father. Conveniently, the plantation lay hardly a mile from the White House, on a hill in Arlington overlooking the Potomac. Buchanan summoned Lee and ordered him to lead the marines against the insurrectionists at Harpers Ferry.
Lee chose as his adjutant a young cavalry officer named J. E. B. Stuart. The two caught a train at Washington that took them to the main B&O line west of Baltimore. The marines were already en route to Harpers Ferry; Lee ordered them to halt short of the town so he and Stuart could catch up. They did so, and with Lee in command the federal force continued to Harpers Ferry, arriving just before midnight.
Lee assessed the situation, soon learning that the number of the raiders was vastly exaggerated. They were a small group, and pinned in the engine house. His instinct was to attack at once. But his concern for the hostages caused him to wait until daylight, when it would be easier to distinguish the hostages from their captors.
“Their safety was the subject of painful consideration,” Lee reported afterward, “and to prevent, if possible, jeopardizing their lives, I determined to summon the insurgents to surrender.” His terms to the raiders were straightforward and implacable. “If they will peacefully surrender themselves and restore the pillaged property, they shall be kept in safety to await the orders of the President,” Lee wrote in a note. He added, “Colonel Lee represents to them, in all frankness, that it is impossible for them to escape; that the armory is surrounded on all sides by troops; and that if he is compelled to take them by force he cannot answer for their safety.”
To deliver the note, Lee turned to Jeb Stuart. The junior officer later recalled the moment. “I approached the door in the presence of perhaps two thousand spectators, and told Mr. ‘Smith’ that I had a communication for him from Colonel Lee,” he said. Those outside the engine house still thought they were dealing with Isaac Smith, the one who had called himself a cattle buyer. “He opened the door about four inches, and placed his body against the crack, with a cocked carbine in his hand.” Stuart had served in Kansas during the troubles there; he suddenly identified the mastermind of the present insurrection. “I recognized old Osawatomie Brown, who had given us so much trouble in Kansas,” he said.
Brown tried to negotiate. “He presented his propositions in every possible shape, and with admirable tact, but all amounted to this—that the only condition on which he would surrender was that he and his party should be allowed to escape,” Stuart recounted. “Some of his prisoners begged me to ask Colonel Lee to come to see him. I told them that he would never accede to any terms except those he had offered.”
Lee had prepared for Brown’s refusal to surrender. He ordered the marines to stand ready for a swift assault. “My object was, with a view of saving our citizens, to have as short an interval as possible between the summons and the attack,” Lee explained afterward.
Israel Green was the marines’ unit commander. “Colonel Lee gave me orders to select a detail of twelve men for a storming party, and place them near the engine-house in which Brown and his men had entrenched themselves,” Green said. “I selected twelve of my best men, and a second twelve to be employed as a reserve.” Green and Stuart agreed that the moment the parley failed, Stuart would step aside from the door and wave his hat. “I had my storming party ranged alongside of the engine-house, and a number of men were provided with sledge-hammers with which to batter in the doors,” Green said. “Suddenly Lieutenant Stuart waved his hat, and I gave the order to my men to batter in the door. Those inside fired rapidly at the point where the blows were given upon the door. Very little impression was made with the hammers, as the doors were tied on the inside with ropes and braced by the hand-brakes of the fire-engines, and in a few minutes I gave the order to desist. Just then my eye caught sight of a ladder, lying a few feet from the engine-house, in the yard, and I ordered my men to catch it up and use it as a battering-ram. The reserve of twelve men I employed as a supporting column for the assaulting party. The men took hold bravely and made a tremendous assault upon the door. The second blow broke it in. This entrance was a ragged hole low down in the right-hand door, the door being splintered and cracked some distance upward.”
Green was the first one through the opening. His timing was fortunate. “Brown had just emptied his carbine at the point broken by the ladder, and so I passed in safely,” he said. “Getting to my feet, I ran to the right of the engine which stood behind the door, passed quickly to the rear of the house, and came up between the two engines. The first person I saw was Colonel Lewis Washington,” whom Green knew. “On one knee, a few feet to the left, knelt a man with a carbine in his hand, just pulling the lever to reload. ‘Hello, Green,’ said Colonel Washington, and he reached out his hand to me. I grasped it with my left hand, having my saber uplifted in my right, and he said, pointing to the kneeling figure, ‘This is Osawatomie.’ ”
Brown turned toward Green and lifted his rifle. “Quicker than thought I brought my saber down with all my strength upon his head,” Green said. “He was moving as the blow fell, and I suppose I did not strike him where I intended, for he received a deep saber cut in the back of the neck. He fell senseless on his side, then rolled over on his back. He had in his hand a short Sharp’s cavalry carbine. I think he had just fired as I reached Colonel Washington, for the marine who followed me into the aperture made by the ladder received a bullet in the abdomen, from which he died in a few minutes.” Green moved to deliver the coup de grâce. “As Brown fell I gave him a saber thrust in the left breast.” But Green’s weapon wasn’t up to the task. “The sword I carried was a light uniform weapon and, either not having a point or striking something hard in Brown’s accouterments, did not penetrate. The blade bent double.”
Brown’s life was spared by this accident. The fight for the engine house was almost over. “By that time three or four of my men were inside,” Green said. “They came rushing in like tigers, as a storming assault is not a play-day sport. They bayoneted one man skulking under the engine, and pinned another fellow up against the rear wall, both being instantly killed. I ordered the men to spill no more blood. The other insurgents were at once taken under arrest, and the contest ended. The whole fight had not lasted over three minutes.”
31
THE ASSAULT ON Harpers Ferry produced shock waves that rumbled around the region and country, with truth chasing rumor. “Insurrectionary Outbreak in Virginia,” began the Richmond Dispatch. “The startling intelligence reached this city yesterday that an insurrectionary outbreak had occurred at Harper’s Ferry, Sunday, and that negroes to the number of 500, aided by about 200 white men, the whole being under the command of a white captain, named Anderson, had seized the U.S. Arsenal at that place and captured the town itself.” The newspaper quoted the alarmed telegram from the president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to the governor of Virginia, and it described the military operations then set afoot. The paper went on to suggest that someone had been lax in Washington, citing an anonymous letter to the secretary of war predicting an attack on Harpers Ferry in mid-October. The letter warned that “abolitionists and negroes would seize the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry.” But the secretary had dismissed the warning as “so improbable” that it should be ignored.
Virginians were understandably excited about the events in their own state; the first reports suggested that the raid at Harpers Ferry was like the Nat Turner revolt a generation earlier, only worse—for being bigger, according to the numbers reported; better armed, after the capture of the arsenal; and led by white abolitionists, who presumably had support in the North.
Yet papers in other states were equally alarmed. “Fearful and Exciting Intelligence,” proclaimed the New York Herald at the top of a
ladder headline. “Negro Insurrection at Harpers Ferry / Extensive Negro Conspiracy in Virginia and Maryland / Seizure of the United States Arsenal by the Insurrectionists / Arms Taken and Sent into the Interior / The Bridge Fortified and Defended by Cannon / Trains Fired into and Stopped—Several Persons Killed.”
By the next day the Herald had caught its breath. “Who is Brown, the leader?” the paper demanded, in words approximated across the country. Facts were scarce. “Report has it that he was born in Kentucky,” said the paper, which also pronounced him dead. Brown’s trail through Kansas was traced, culminating in a confused and dismissive telling of Brown’s motivation: “After the death of his first son, occasioned by the tortures and fatigue of his forced march, Brown swore vengeance on the pro-slavery party, and it was frequently observed by the most prudent of the free-State men that he was evidently insane on the subject.” The paper went on to say in its own voice, “Captain Brown was fanatical on the subject of anti-slavery, and seemed to have the idea that he was specially deputed by the Almighty to liberate slaves and kill slaveholders.”
Even the abolitionist press had reservations about Brown. William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator characterized the Harpers Ferry raid as “misguided, wild and apparently insane, though disinterested and well-intentioned.” Garrison detested slavery with a passion second to none, but he still eschewed violence in seeking its demise. Brown’s good intentions didn’t change Garrison’s mind, and Brown’s mental imbalance, Garrison judged, didn’t aid the abolitionist cause.