by H. W. Brands
His dark, dirty hat was removed; a fresh white hood was placed over his head. The sheriff helped him to his spot on the scaffold’s trapdoor. A noose was fitted around his neck. The sheriff awaited the signal that the troops were at last in position. They were still shuffling when the captain of the guard decided to honor Brown’s request. He nodded to the sheriff, who swung a hatchet that severed the rope holding the trapdoor.
The door fell away beneath the prisoner. The noose caught his fall but didn’t snap his neck. He slowly strangled, his body twitching for several minutes before the motion finally stopped. Two doctors examined the hanging body and pronounced John Brown dead.
PART IV
The Telegraph Office
35
“JOHN BROWN WAS hung today,” Thomas Jackson wrote to his wife. “He behaved with unflinching firmness.” Jackson had yet to win the nickname Stonewall; in 1859 he taught at the Virginia Military Institute and commanded cadets from the school assigned to Charles Town for the execution. Jackson was an ardent defender of Virginia against all its enemies; he believed Brown deserved his sentence. But Jackson was also a pious Christian who feared for the fate of Brown’s soul. “I was much impressed with the thought that before me stood a man, in the full vigor of health, who must in a few minutes be in eternity. I sent up a petition that he might be saved. Awful was the thought that he might in a few minutes receive the sentence ‘Depart ye wicked into everlasting fire.’ I hope that he was prepared to die, but I am very doubtful—he wouldn’t have a minister with him.”
Also present at the hanging was a twenty-one-year-old actor named John Wilkes Booth. The Maryland-born Booth agreed with Jackson that Brown deserved to die. Yet the boldness of Brown appealed to his sense of the dramatic. He joined one of the militia regiments for the sole purpose of seeing the execution; he later declared, “John Brown was a man inspired, the grandest character of the century!”
Robert E. Lee had returned to his home on the Potomac after the storming of the engine house, but he was back in western Virginia for the execution. Lee supervised federal troops who provided security beyond that afforded by the militia. His preparations were thorough; he expected no trouble. “Tomorrow will probably be the last of Captain Brown,” Lee wrote to his wife on December 1.
* * *
—
HE COULDN’T HAVE been more wrong. The hanging was not the end of John Brown but a new beginning. Brown’s parting testament shortly surfaced, scribbled on a scrap of paper passed to a sympathetic guard before he left the jail. “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood,” he declared.
The dreadful forecast made the martyr into a prophet as well. Or so it seemed to those who commenced the apotheosis of John Brown. Henry Thoreau praised Brown as the model of what every American should aspire to be. “He was a superior man,” Thoreau told a crowd in Concord. “He did not value his bodily life in comparison with ideal things. He did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bid.” Thoreau rejected the authority of the Virginia court—or any human court—over one like Brown. “He could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist.” Some antislavery men criticized Brown for launching his assault on bondage with so few men; Thoreau rejoined, “When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?” Brown’s foes called the raid on Harpers Ferry a failure; they didn’t understand the nature of history, Thoreau said. Failures could portend the greatest success. “I see now that it was necessary that the bravest and humanest man in all the country should be hung.” Thoreau called upon his state to honor such a man. “I would rather see the statue of Captain Brown in the Massachusetts State House yard than that of any other man whom I know. I rejoice that I live in this age, that I am his contemporary.”
Henry Beecher joined Thoreau in blessing Brown. Beecher traced Brown’s antislavery struggle from Kansas—where, Beecher reminded his flock, Brown had lost a son to slavery’s partisans—to Harpers Ferry. The struggle had pushed him to extremes, perhaps even unbalanced him slightly, but it also brought out traits honest men could only admire. “Bold, unflinching, honest, without deceit or dodge, refusing to take technical advantages of any sort, but openly avowing his principles and motives, glorying in them in danger and death as much as when in security—that wounded old father is the most remarkable figure in this whole drama. The governor, the officers of the state, and all the attorneys are pygmies compared to him.” Beecher didn’t condone all of Brown’s actions, yet he could not but praise the man. “By and by, when men look back and see without prejudice that whole scene, they will not be able to avoid saying: ‘What must be the measure of manhood in a scene where a crazed old man stood head and shoulders above those who had their whole reason? What is average citizenship when a lunatic is a hero?’ ”
Wendell Phillips spoke at the funeral. John Brown’s body was taken to North Elba; the Boston abolitionist gave the eulogy. “He has abolished slavery in Virginia,” Phillips asserted, surprisingly. He explained, “History will date Virginia emancipation from Harpers Ferry. True, the slave is still there. So, when the tempest uproots a pine on your hills, it looks green for months, a year or two. Still, it is timber, not a tree. John Brown has loosened the roots of the slave system. It only breathes, it does not live, hereafter.” Virginia had tried and convicted John Brown, Phillips said, but now Virginia was called to account. “Virginia stands at the bar of the civilized world on trial. Round her victim crowd the apostles and martyrs, all the brave, high souls who have said, ‘God is God,’ and trodden wicked laws under their feet.” The Almighty had blessed slavery’s opponents by sending them John Brown. “Could we have asked for a nobler representative of the Christian North putting her foot on the accursed system of slavery?”
* * *
—
JOHN BROWN’S ARREST and execution had a different effect on those who had been his closest allies and material supporters. Several feared being swept up in Brown’s prosecution. “On the evening when the news came that John Brown had taken and was then holding the town of Harper’s Ferry, it so happened that I was speaking to a large audience in National Hall, Philadelphia,” Frederick Douglass recalled. “The announcement came upon us with the startling effect of an earthquake. It was something to make the boldest hold his breath. I saw at once that my old friend had attempted what he had long ago resolved to do, and I felt certain that the result must be his capture and destruction.” The subsequent news of Brown’s arrest therefore came as no surprise.
What did surprise—and alarm—Douglass was the discovery that he himself might be implicated in Brown’s actions. “His carpet-bag had been secured by Governor Wise, and it was found to contain numerous letters and documents which directly implicated Gerrit Smith, Joshua R. Giddings, Samuel G. Howe, Frank P. Sanborn, and myself. This intelligence was soon followed by a telegram saying that we were all to be arrested.” Douglass’s presence in Philadelphia had been well advertised; he could only assume that those seeking his arrest would look for him there. He sought the help of friends, but his friends made themselves scarce. “Upon one ground or another, they all thought it best not to be found in my company at such a time,” Douglass observed. He couldn’t fault them. “The truth is that in the excitement which prevailed my friends had reason to fear that the very fact that they were with me would be a sufficient reason for their arrest with me.”
Douglass judged he would be safer the greater distance he placed between himself and Virginia. He headed for the Delaware River wharf, where he could catch a boat for New York. The boat was behind schedule, and Douglass grew tenser with each minute’s delay. Finally the boat came and he made his escape. “I reached New York at night, still under the apprehension of arrest at any moment, but no signs of such an event being made, I went at once to the Barclay Street ferry, took the boat across the river.” He spent the night—�
�an anxious night,” he said—with a friend in Hoboken.
Things looked no better in the morning. The papers reported that the government was sparing no effort to seize all those behind the Harpers Ferry raid, and any documents they might have. “I was now somewhat uneasy from the fact that sundry letters and a constitution written by John Brown were locked up in my desk in Rochester,” Douglass related. To keep the papers from being discovered, he sent an unsigned telegram to the telegraph operator in Rochester, a friend who would know what it meant: “Tell Lewis”—Douglass’s eldest son—“to secure all the important papers in my high desk.” The message arrived none too soon, for agents of the Virginia state government arrived shortly thereafter. “The mark of the chisel with which the desk was opened is still on the drawer, and is one of the traces of the John Brown raid,” Douglass later wrote.
What to do with himself was now the problem. “To stay in Hoboken was out of the question, and to go to Rochester was to all appearance to go into the hands of the hunters, for they would naturally seek me at my home if they sought me at all,” Douglass reflected. “I, however, resolved to go home and risk my safety there. I felt sure that, once in the city, I could not be easily taken from there without a preliminary hearing upon the requisition, and not then if the people could be made aware of what was in progress.” But getting to Rochester was no small detail. “It would not do to go to New York City and take the train, for that city was not less incensed against John Brown conspirators than many parts of the South.” Instead he sneaked by night to Paterson, New Jersey, where he caught an Erie Railroad train for Rochester.
Home proved no refuge. He had been there only moments when a neighbor, the lieutenant governor of New York, informed him that the governor would be obliged to honor an extradition request from the governor of Virginia. The people of Rochester might defend him, but in the interest of civil peace the lieutenant governor urged him to continue north, to Canada. Off Douglass went. And just in time. “Several United States marshals were in Rochester in search of me within six hours after my departure,” he said.
Douglass realized he hadn’t covered himself in glory by high-tailing it out of the country. He tried to explain in a letter he sent from Canada to a Rochester newspaper. John Brown’s lieutenant John Cook had escaped Harpers Ferry ahead of the storming of the engine house but been captured while fleeing north; he had been quoted in the press as calling Douglass a coward for having promised to take part in the raid and then backing out. “Mr. Cook may be perfectly right in denouncing me as a coward,” Douglass wrote. “I have not one word to say in defense or vindication of my character for courage; I have always been more distinguished for running than fighting, and, tried by the Harper’s-Ferry-Insurrection test, I am most miserably deficient in courage, even more so than Cook when he deserted his brave old captain and fled to the mountains.” But Cook was quite wrong to assert that Douglass had promised to take part in the raid. “Of whatever other imprudence and indiscretion I may have been guilty, I have never made a promise so rash and wild as this. The taking of Harper’s Ferry was a measure never encouraged by my word or by my vote. At any time or place, my wisdom or my cowardice has not only kept me from Harper’s Ferry, but has equally kept me from making any promise to go there. I desire to be quite emphatic here, for of all guilty men, he is the guiltiest who lures his fellow-men to an undertaking of this sort, under promise of assistance which he afterwards fails to render. I therefore declare that there is no man living, and no man dead, who, if living, could truthfully say that I ever promised him, or anybody else, either conditionally, or otherwise, that I would be present in person at the Harper’s Ferry insurrection.”
Douglass said that no man hated slavery more than he did. So why had he not joined Brown? “My answer to this has already been given; at least impliedly given—‘The tools to those who can use them!’ Let every man work for the abolition of slavery in his own way. I would help all and hinder none.” Moreover, as an escaped slave himself, he stood in a peculiarly delicate position. “A government recognizing the validity of the Dred Scott decision at such a time as this is not likely to have any very charitable feelings towards me, and if I am to meet its representatives I prefer to do so at least upon equal terms.” Douglass was willing to face a jury in New York, but a former slave would get no justice in Virginia. This was why he had fled. “I have quite insuperable objections to being caught by the hounds of Mr. Buchanan, and ‘bagged’ by Gov. Wise. For this appears to be the arrangement. Buchanan does the fighting and hunting, and Wise ‘bags’ the game.”
* * *
—
THE NEWS FROM Harpers Ferry caught Frank Sanborn as unprepared as it did Frederick Douglass. The young man taught school when he wasn’t agitating for abolition. “Arrangements had been made for the annual chestnuting excursion of my pupils,” he recalled of the week of the raid. The field trip proceeded even as the raid story unfolded. “The interval gave me the information that an indefinite number of my letters, with those of Gerrit Smith, Dr. Howe and others, had been captured at the Kennedy Farm; and nobody knew to what extent the records of our conspiracy were in the hands of the slaveholding authorities,” Sanborn wrote. He consulted the other members of the secret committee, who emphatically agreed that they must cover their tracks. “I therefore spent hours Tuesday and Wednesday nights searching my papers to destroy such as might compromise other persons.” With George Stearns he obtained legal advice from a Boston lawyer of their acquaintance, John Andrew. “We put our case before our friend Andrew, without stating to him the full particulars of our complicity with Brown.” Andrew said they stood a good chance of being seized by agents of the Virginia government and hustled out of the state.
Sanborn had already packed a bag, and he chose not to tarry. “After leaving Andrew’s office, therefore, I took my slight luggage on board the steamboat for Portland, leaving letters and instructions with my sister Sarah, who was then my housekeeper at Concord, for her action in case I should find it expedient not to return home after a few days. The whole matter was so uncertain, and the action to be taken by the national authorities, and by the mass of the people, was so much in the dark, that it was impossible to say what might be the best course.”
He reached Quebec City the evening of the next day and lay low. After most of a week he got a letter from Wendell Phillips containing a revised opinion by John Andrew. The lawyer now thought that Massachusetts law would shield Sanborn and the others from extradition to Virginia, assuming they could get to a Massachusetts court before being carried out of the state. Phillips explained that he had asked Andrew point-blank whether Sanborn should return. Andrew replied, “Send him what I have written, and let him decide for himself.” To Sanborn, Phillips said, “You know better than we what the precise contents of your letters were, and so can better judge.”
Sanborn chanced the return. He learned that George Stearns and Samuel Howe had taken refuge in Canada, and that Gerrit Smith was in a Utica insane asylum, undone by nerves. Sanborn’s friend Edwin Morton, who knew as much about the conspiracy as he did, had sailed for England.
For a time no one molested Sanborn. He began to think he was safe. He let down his guard. His was sitting in his study one evening when the doorbell rang. His servant had gone to bed and his sister was in her room. “I went down into the front hall and answered the bell. A young man presented himself and handed me a note, which I stepped back to read by the light of the hall lamp. It said that the bearer was a person deserving charity.” Sanborn pondered how to answer. “When I looked up from reading the note, four men had entered my hall, and one of them, Silas Carleton by name, a Boston tipstaff”—bailiff—“as I afterward learned, came forward and laid his hand on me, saying, ‘I arrest you.’ ”
“By what authority?” demanded Sanborn.
Carleton read an order of the U.S. Senate for Sanborn’s arrest. At the insistence of Virginia’s Senator Ma
son, the Senate had commenced investigation of the Harpers Ferry raid and had summoned Sanborn to testify. Fearing for his safety on slave soil, Sanborn had refused to go. The Senate had engaged Carleton to fetch him.
Sanborn’s sister, hearing the voices in the hallway and sensing their meaning, threw on clothes, ran to the door and began shouting to the neighbors for help.
Sanborn’s captors handcuffed him before he could move. He decided to fight nonetheless. “I was young and strong and resented this indignity,” he recalled. “They had to raise me from the floor and began to carry me (four of them) to the door where my sister stood, raising a constant alarm. My hands were powerless, but as they approached the door I braced my feet against the posts and delayed them. I did the same at the posts of the veranda, and it was some minutes before they got me on the gravel walk at the foot of my stone steps. Meanwhile, the church bells were ringing a fire alarm, and the people were gathering by tens. At the stone posts of the gateway I checked their progress once more, and again, when the four rascals lifted me to insert me, feet foremost in their carriage (a covered hack with a driver on the box), I braced myself against the sides of the carriage door and broke them in.”
By this time Sanborn’s captors realized they needed to secure his feet. One, a fellow with a long beard, grabbed Sanborn’s feet and held them together. But when the four had almost gotten Sanborn into the carriage, his sister yanked on the man’s beard, causing him to lose his grip, and Sanborn began to kick again.
The gathering crowd joined the fight. An elderly gentleman took his walking cane and beat the horses of the carriage to get them to pull away. The horses jerked the carriage several paces forward, leaving Sanborn and the four behind.