The Zealot and the Emancipator

by H. W. Brands

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  THE QUESTION OF Brown’s sanity exercised nearly everyone involved in the slavery debate. Many Southerners had long deemed abolitionists mad for trying to overturn the South’s beneficent institution, or if not certifiably mad, then hysterical in the lengths to which they took their false altruism. Other Southerners, though, reckoned that imputations of insanity would let the North off too easily. They contended that actions like Brown’s were the all-too-logical consequence of allowing the abolitionists a place at the political table.

  The Republican party had a special interest in Brown. From nothing in 1854 the Republicans had become the equals of the Democrats, whose lineage ran back to Thomas Jefferson. Their first presidential candidate, John Frémont, had come close to winning the White House; their next candidate would have an even better chance, unless something unforeseen occurred.

  Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry might be just that something. Republicans at once took cover. “We are damnably exercised about the effect of Old Brown’s wretched fiasco in Virginia upon the health of the Republican party!” a Chicago Republican wrote to Abraham Lincoln. “The old idiot—the quicker they hang him and get him out of the way, the better.” Republicans in Chicago were contending that Brown had nothing to do with them. “You see how we treat it,” Lincoln’s correspondent continued. “I hope we occupy the right ground.”

  Some Republicans had trouble getting out of the way. William Seward was the best known of the Republicans, having been a senator from New York for a decade, starting with the Whig party. Antislavery sentiments sat well with New York voters, and Seward had indulged himself on numerous occasions, including his first speech in the Senate, in which he bearded the lions of the Whig party, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Clay and Webster contended that the Constitution required what they were proposing as the Compromise of 1850; Seward rejoined that there was “a higher law than the Constitution.” Seward’s assertion didn’t scuttle the compromise, yet it helped torpedo the Whig party. And it put him at the head of Republicans looking toward the White House as the 1860 election approached.

  But it also made him vulnerable to charges that his “higher law” was exactly what extremists like John Brown appealed to, and that Seward would do to the Republicans what he had already done to the Whigs. Some in the party chafed at evidence that Seward was already awarding himself the nomination. “He has forgotten everything else, even that he is a senator and has duties as such,” one of his Senate colleagues, a Maine Republican, asserted, adding that Seward affected “the airs of a president.”

  Seward’s opponents allowed themselves to imagine that John Brown could save the party rather than wreck it, by denying Seward the nomination. “Since the humbug insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, I presume Mr. Seward will not be urged,” a Pennsylvania Republican wrote hopefully to Lincoln.

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  LINCOLN HIMSELF groaned on hearing the news from Harpers Ferry. It overtook him while he was touring Kansas, meeting and speaking to local Republicans. Some of his listeners knew Brown; all knew of him. Many admired him. To them Lincoln said, “John Brown has shown great courage and rare unselfishness.” He could hardly have said less while seeking their support.

  But neither could he say more if he hoped to convince Americans elsewhere that he stood for moderation and the rule of law. Lincoln deliberately distanced himself from Brown’s actions, if not his motives or character. “No man, North or South, can approve of violence or crime,” Lincoln said. Besides being wrong, Brown’s raid would surely be unavailing. “It was, as all such attacks must be, futile as far as any effect it might have on the extinction of a great evil.”

  It couldn’t have come at a worse time. The prospects of the Republican party had been improving by the month. So had Lincoln’s own prospects.

  And now this. Lincoln shook his head in dismay.

  32

  IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH of the storming of the engine house, there was no way to describe the Harpers Ferry raid other than as a wretched fiasco. Most of the raiders were dead or in custody; the few who had escaped before the storming, including Osborne Anderson, were on the run. The encouragement to slaves to flee their masters had failed utterly; those who joined Brown had been compelled to do so. Far from freeing them, Brown’s quixotic venture seemed certain to fasten their chains tighter, as chains had been tightened after the Nat Turner rebellion.

  Yet Brown was unrepentant. As the wounded were hauled out of the engine house, he was asked, “Are you Captain Brown of Kansas?”

  “I am sometimes called so,” he replied.

  “Are you Osawatomie Brown?”

  “I tried to do my duty there.”

  “What was your present object?”

  “To free the slaves from bondage.”

  “Were there any persons but those with you now, connected with the movement?”

  “No, there was no one connected with the movement but those who came with me.” This was not true, but Brown wasn’t going to implicate anyone his captors didn’t already know about.

  “Did you expect to kill people in order to carry your point?”

  “I did not wish to do so, but you forced us to do it.”

  Brown’s wounds at first appeared to be life threatening. This appearance, and some wishful thinking, accounted for the early reports that he was dead or dying. Israel Green’s dress sword had lacerated Brown’s scalp, causing his blood to flow freely and then clot in his hair and beard, lending him a gruesome mien. One of the marines had bayoneted him in the side, but the blade had struck no vital organs. The result was that though he couldn’t move without pain, he could speak coherently—indeed forcefully.

  From the moment of capture he began to impress his enemies. The governor of Virginia, Henry Wise, reached Harpers Ferry in time to interrogate the raiders after the taking of the engine room. “I immediately examined the leader, Brown, his lieutenant, Stevens, a white man named Coppie, and a negro from Canada,” Wise subsequently reported to the Virginia legislature. “They made full confessions. Brown repelled the idea that his design was to run negro slaves off from their masters. He defiantly avowed that his purpose was to arm them and make them fight by his side in defense of their freedom, if assailed by their owners or anyone else; and he said his purpose especially was to war upon the slaveholders and to levy upon their other property to pay the expense of emancipating their slaves. He avowed that he expected to be joined by the slaves and by numerous white persons from many of the slave as well as the free states.”

  Brown’s story shifted in the days after his capture, but what didn’t change was the effect he had on his interrogators. “They are themselves mistaken who take him to be a madman,” Henry Wise declared. “He is a bundle of the best nerves I ever saw cut and thrust and bleeding and in bonds. He is a man of clear head, of courage, fortitude and simple ingenuousness.” Lewis Washington and the other hostages told Wise that Brown had treated them humanely; Wise saw no reason to question their testimony. “He inspired me with great trust in his integrity as a man of the truth,” Wise said of Brown. “He is a fanatic, vain and garrulous; but firm, truthful and intelligent.” Wise related what Lewis Washington had said of Brown, that he was “the coolest and firmest man he ever saw in defying danger and death. With one son dead by his side, and another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand and held his rifle with the other and commanded his men with the utmost composure, encouraging them to be firm and to sell their lives as dearly as they could.”

  Henry Wise wasn’t alone in wanting to speak with Brown. James Mason was one of Virginia’s senators; his home was but thirty miles from Harpers Ferry, and he couldn’t resist the opportunity to stand up to his state’s enemies. Charles Faulkner was a congressman who lived even closer. Clement Vallandigham, also a congressman, was from a district in Ohio barel
y more distant. A reporter for the New York Herald recounted a conversation between Brown and the three lawmakers, held in the crowded office of the armory, where Brown lay on the floor on some old bedding. The prisoner’s compromised state couldn’t disguise his vigor and strength of character, the reporter said. “He is a wiry, active man, and, should the slightest chance for an escape be afforded, there is no doubt he will yet give his captors much trouble. His hair is matted and tangled, and his face, hands, and clothes, all smouched and smeared with blood. Colonel Lee stated that he would exclude all visitors from the room if the wounded men were annoyed or pained by them, but Brown said he was by no means annoyed; on the contrary, he was glad to be able to make himself and his motives clearly understood. He converses freely, fluently and cheerfully, without the slightest manifestation of fear or uneasiness, evidently weighing well his words, and possessing a good command of language. His manner is courteous and affable, and he appears to make a favorable impression upon his auditory, which, during most of the day yesterday, averaged about ten or a dozen men.”

  Senator Mason wanted to know who was behind Brown’s venture. Brown refused to give names.

  “Can you tell us, at least, who furnished money for your expedition?”

  “I furnished most of it myself,” Brown lied. “I cannot implicate others. It is by my own folly that I have been taken. I could easily have saved myself from it had I exercised my own better judgment, rather than yielded to my feelings.”

  “You mean if you had escaped immediately?” asked Mason.

  “No; I had the means to make myself secure without any escape, but I allowed myself to be surrounded by a force by being too tardy.”

  “Tardy in getting away?”

  “I should have gone away, but I had thirty odd prisoners, whose wives and daughters were in tears for their safety, and I felt for them. Besides, I wanted to allay the fears of those who believed we came here to burn and kill. For this reason I allowed the train to cross the bridge, and gave them full liberty to pass on. I did it only to spare the feelings of those passengers and their families, and to allay the apprehensions that you had got here in your vicinity a band of men who had no regard for life and property, nor any feeling of humanity.”

  “But you killed some people passing along the streets quietly,” Mason objected.

  “Well, sir, if there was anything of that kind done, it was without my knowledge. Your own citizens, who were my prisoners, will tell you that every possible means were taken to prevent it. I did not allow my men to fire, nor even to return a fire, when there was danger of killing those we regarded as innocent persons, if I could help it. They will tell you that we allowed ourselves to be fired at repeatedly and did not return it.”

  A bystander in the room spoke up. “That is not so,” he said. “You killed an unarmed man at the corner of the house over there”—he pointed—“and another besides.”

  Brown refused to yield. “See here, my friend, it is useless to dispute or contradict the report of your own neighbors who were my prisoners.”

  Mason returned to the matter of Brown’s collaborators. “If you would tell us who sent you here—who provided the means—that would be information of some value.”

  “I will answer freely and faithfully about what concerns myself,” Brown said. “I will answer anything I can with honor, but not about others.”

  Clement Vallandigham pressed this point harder. “Mr. Brown, who sent you here?”

  “No man sent me here; it was my own prompting and that of my Maker, or that of the devil, whichever you choose to ascribe it to. I acknowledge no man in human form.”

  “Did you get up the expedition yourself?”

  “I did.”

  Brown had been searched upon capture; his pockets had contained his provisional constitution.

  “Did you get up this document?” demanded Vallandigham.

  “I did. They are a constitution and ordinances of my own contriving.”

  “How long have you been engaged in this business?”

  “From the breaking of the difficulties in Kansas. Four of my sons had gone there to settle, and they induced me to go. I did not go there to settle, but because of the difficulties.”

  “How many are engaged with you in this movement?” inquired James Mason. “I ask those questions for our own safety.”

  “Any questions that I can honorably answer I will, not otherwise,” Brown repeated. “So far as I am myself concerned I have told everything truthfully. I value my word, sir.”

  “What was your object in coming?”

  “We came to free the slaves, and only that.”

  One of the militia volunteers interjected, “How many men did you have?”

  “I came to Virginia with eighteen men only, besides myself.”

  “What in the world did you suppose you could do here in Virginia with that amount of men?”

  “Young man, I don’t wish to discuss that question here.”

  “You could not do anything,” the militiaman said.

  “Perhaps your ideas and mine on military subjects would differ materially.”

  James Mason retook control of the questioning. “How do you justify your acts?”

  “I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity. I say that without wishing to be offensive. And it would be perfectly right in anyone to interfere with you so far as to free those you willfully and wickedly hold in bondage. I do not say this insultingly.”

  “I understand that,” Mason answered.

  “I think I did right, and that others will do right who interfere with you at any time and all times. I hold that the golden rule, ‘Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you,’ applies to all who would help others gain their liberty.”

  Lieutenant Jeb Stuart spoke up. “But you don’t believe in the Bible,” he said.

  “Certainly I do,” Brown answered.

  James Mason asked what wages Brown paid his men.

  “None,” Brown replied.

  “The wages of sin is death,” quoted Jeb Stuart, a devout student of the Bible.

  “I would not have made such a remark to you, if you had been a prisoner and wounded in my hands,” Brown observed.

  Mason asked Brown if all this talking was fatiguing him.

  “Not in the least,” Brown said.

  Democrat Vallandigham wanted to know if Joshua Giddings, his Republican Ohio colleague, had been involved in Brown’s raid. “Did you talk with Giddings about your expedition here?” he asked.

  “I won’t answer that,” Brown said, “because a denial of it I would not make, and to make any affirmation of it I should be a great dunce.”

  A bystander raised the religious question again. “Do you consider this a religious movement?” he asked.

  “It is, in my opinion, the greatest service a man can render to God,” Brown said.

  “Do you consider yourself an instrument in the hands of Providence?”

  “I do.”

  “Upon what principle do you justify your acts?”

  “Upon the golden rule,” Brown repeated. “I pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them; that is why I am here—not to gratify any personal animosity, revenge or vindictive spirit. It is my sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged, that are as good as you and as precious in the sight of God.”

  “Certainly,” said the bystander. “But why take the slaves against their will?”

  Brown denied it. “I never did,” he said.

  “You did in one instance, at least.”

  Aaron Stevens, lying wounded beside Brown, now spoke. “You are right. In one case, I know the negroes wanted to go back.”

  Stevens was asked where he was from. Ohio, he said. Vallandigham asked him if he lived near Jefferson. Stevens sta
rted to answer, but Brown broke in. “Be cautious, Stevens, about any answers that would commit any friend,” Brown said. “I would not answer that.”

  Stevens didn’t. He rolled over, with a moan, and fell silent again.

  The reporter for the New York Herald who was transcribing the conversation asked Brown if he had anything more he wanted the world to know about his deeds and motives.

  “Only that I claim to be here in carrying out a measure I believe perfectly justifiable, and not to act the part of an incendiary or ruffian, but to aid those suffering great wrong,” Brown said. “I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better—all you people at the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for. The sooner you are prepared the better. You may dispose of me very easily; I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled—this negro question I mean—the end of that is not yet. These wounds were inflicted upon me—both saber cuts on my head and bayonet stabs in different parts of my body—some minutes after I had ceased firing and had consented to surrender, for the benefit of others, not for my own.”

  Jeb Stuart vehemently denied Brown’s assertion.

  Brown brushed him aside. “I believe the major would not have been alive—I could have killed him just as easy as a mosquito when he came in—but I supposed he came in only to receive our surrender,” he said. He added, “There had been long and loud calls of ‘surrender’ from us—as loud as men could yell—but in the confusion and excitement I suppose we were not heard. I do not think the major, or any one, meant to butcher us after we had surrendered.”

  Another officer asked Brown why he hadn’t surrendered before the attack.