John Brown at Harpers Ferry

Some wars are declared in capitals by men in frock coats, with seals and parchment and a careful weighing of the public mood. Others are lit in the dark by a single believer who has decided, against every prudent counsel of the age, that the hour will not wait on the consent of the prudent. The believer is rarely the man the age would have chosen. He is older than its young men and stranger than its old, a man whose theology has outrun his century, and whose patience with argument expired some years before anyone noticed.

THE TANNER'S SON

John Brown is fifty-nine years old on the night of the sixteenth of October 1859, and has been in some sense walking towards Harpers Ferry since he was a boy in Hudson, Ohio, watching his father Owen the tanner shelter fugitives in the loft above the workshop. He was born at Torrington, Connecticut, on the ninth of May 1800, into a Scots-Irish Calvinist line whose male ancestor came out of Cromwellian Scotland in the 1660s and put down at the lower edge of the Connecticut River valley. The Browns of New England were a sober and unspectacular people: tanners, shoemakers, drovers, deacons. They read the Old Testament closely and the Constitution warily. By his twenty-second year he had taken the abolition of slavery as the work of his life; by his fifty-seventh, after the killings at Pottawatomie Creek in the Kansas of 1856, he had taken it as the work of his hands. He has buried children, gone bankrupt in the wool trade, raised twenty by two wives, and arrived at the conviction, settled and undramatic, that the slave power of the southern states will not be argued down. It will be broken, or it will not be broken at all.

THE KENNEDY FARM

Since June he has been at the Kennedy Farm, a rented clapboard farmhouse five miles north of Harpers Ferry on the Maryland side of the Potomac, with the Blue Ridge rising blue-grey to the west and the river running fast below the house. Twenty-one men have come to him there. Sixteen are white, five are Black; the youngest is twenty-one, the eldest forty-eight. Dangerfield Newby, free since 1858, has a wife and seven children still held on a Loudoun plantation thirty miles south. Lewis Sheridan Leary has left a wife and a six-month-old daughter in Oberlin without telling them where he was going. The pikes have come in by wagon in long crates marked as hardware; the Sharps rifles are stacked in the loft. The women of the household, his daughter Annie and his daughter-in-law Martha, have spent the summer keeping the curious neighbours from the door. The plan, on the map he keeps folded in his coat, is plain: take the federal armoury at the confluence, distribute the hundred thousand muskets to the enslaved population of Loudoun and Jefferson and Frederick counties, withdraw into the Appalachian spine, and let the rising move south through country no militia can hold.

THE PORCH AT TEN AT NIGHT

It is twenty past ten and there is a thin cold rain coming off the Blue Ridge. The men are on the porch and in the parlour with their carbines across their knees. He has prayed with them, in the long unadorned manner of his father's house, and the prayer is finished. Now there is the silence in which a man may still draw back. He weighs it as a tanner weighs a hide, by feel, by long acquaintance with the grain of the thing. The armoury at the Ferry is the weapon-store of the Upper South, the rifle-works beside it the finest in the republic; together they hold enough iron to put a gun in the hand of every field hand from the Potomac to the Roanoke. The enslaved of the surrounding country number, by his summer's reckoning, some eighteen thousand. He has no compact with them. He has sent no word ahead. He has trusted that the sight of the arms, and the rumour of the arms, and the name of the Lord moving over the arms, will be sufficient. He knows, as a man of business knows a thin ledger, that this is not sufficient by the worldly accounting. He knows also that the worldly accounting has presided over the auction-block at Charleston and the coffle on the National Road and the whip in the cotton fields of Mississippi for two hundred and forty years, and that the worldly accounting is the thing he has come to overturn. The rain quickens on the shingles. He thinks of his sons Watson and Oliver inside, who will go down the road with him, and of his son Frederick who is already dead in Kansas. He has flattered himself, he will write later from the Charlestown jail, that the work might be done without very much bloodshed. He no longer flatters himself. He buttons his coat. He turns to the men and says, in the voice he uses for the leading of prayer, Men, get on your arms; we will proceed to the Ferry.

DOWN THE MARYLAND HEIGHTS ROAD

The wagon goes first, loaded with the pikes. The men walk behind in two files, rifles slung. They come to the covered bridge over the Potomac at midnight, and the watchman is taken at the armoury gate at quarter past, without a shot. By one in the morning the armoury and the rifle-works are theirs, the bridges over the Potomac and the Shenandoah are held, the telegraph wire is cut. He posts Newby and Leary at the Potomac bridge. He sends a party to fetch Colonel Lewis Washington, great-grandnephew of the general, from his plantation at Beall-air, and to bring with him the sword that the Marquis de Lafayette is said to have given to the first president; he wants the symbol in his hand. By dawn he is inside the brick engine-house with about forty hostages and ten of his men. He waits for the country to rise. The country does not rise. The first man killed in his war is Heyward Shepherd, the free-Black baggage-master of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, shot at the depot at midnight by one of his own party; the irony of it will follow him into the jail, and he will not look away from it.

THE ENGINE-HOUSE

The Jefferson County militia comes in through the morning of the seventeenth, then the Charlestown militia, then the Martinsburg men. By eleven Newby is dead at the Potomac bridge, shot through the throat with a six-inch spike fired from a second-storey window. By afternoon the bridges are lost. By evening the engine-house is ringed. Watson is hit and crawls back inside to die slowly on the brick floor; Oliver is hit and asks his father to shoot him, and his father says, If you must die, die like a man, and goes on loading. Colonel Robert E. Lee of the United States Army, on leave at Arlington, is sent down by special train overnight with Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart and a company of marines. At dawn on the eighteenth Stuart walks to the engine-house door under a flag, recognises the prisoner inside as the Osawatomie Brown of the Kansas papers, withdraws, and waves his hat. Twelve marines break the door with sledges and a ladder used as a ram. Lieutenant Israel Green strikes Brown twice with a light dress sword that bends on his belt-buckle and does not kill him. Ten of the twenty-one are dead, including Watson and Oliver. Seven, including their father, are taken alive. The raid has lasted thirty-six hours.

CHARLESTOWN

He is tried at Charlestown, the county seat of Jefferson, on the twenty-fifth of October 1859, on a pallet because his wounds will not let him stand. The charges are treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, murder in the first degree, and conspiracy to incite servile insurrection. He is convicted on the second of November. Asked if he has anything to say before sentence, he speaks for five minutes, without notes, in the courtroom voice of a Connecticut deacon. He has, he says, done no wrong but acted in behalf of His despised poor. The sentence is death by hanging. In the six weeks he is given, he writes letters; he writes more letters than he has written in any six weeks of his life. He writes to his wife Mary at North Elba, to his surviving children, to strangers in Massachusetts and Ohio who have sent him money and tracts. The Virginians who guard him come to like him, in the bewildered way men come to like a thing they cannot account for. On the morning of the second of December 1859 he hands his jailer a slip of paper on which is written, in the small clear hand of the ledger-keeper he once was, 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. He is hanged at twenty past eleven from a scaffold in a field outside the town. Among the Virginia militia drawn up around the gallows is a young actor named John Wilkes Booth, in a borrowed uniform, watching closely. Among the cadets sent down from the Virginia Military Institute is their professor of artillery, Major Thomas Jonathan Jackson, who writes home that the prisoner went to his death with unflinching firmness.

THE MARCHING SONG

Sixteen months and ten days after the rope is cut at Charlestown, the South Carolina batteries open on Fort Sumter. The Massachusetts regiments come south through Boston that summer to a tune the soldiers have made up in barracks, John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on, and Julia Ward Howe sets new words to the melody at Willard's Hotel in Washington in the November of 1861. The Thirteenth Amendment is ratified on the sixth of December 1865, six years and four days after the hanging. He had said that the institution would be broken with blood, and the blood, when it is counted at Appomattox, will run to something near seven hundred thousand. The careful historians of the war, Reynolds and Horwitz and Gates among them, will write a century and a half later that the eighteen months from Harpers Ferry to Sumter are a single sequence, and that the man who began it was the tanner's son from Torrington.

THE FORT BY THE RIVERS

Some hours, when destiny knocks, are answered by men who weigh their hand against the odds and decline the cast. This hour was answered by a man who had stopped weighing some years before, and who walked down a wet Maryland road at midnight to begin a war he would not live to see. The brick engine-house at the confluence still stands, moved twice and returned, low and square, with three round-headed doorways under a small cupola. The rivers run past it as they ran past it in 1859, the Potomac broad from the north, the Shenandoah narrower from the south, and the freight trains on the Baltimore and Ohio line cross above on the iron bridge. They call the building, in the National Park signs and on the brass plate by the door, John Brown's Fort.