Peace in Kansas had left Brown out of work but not out of ideas. The growing belief in the North of a Slave Power conspiracy inspired the patriarch to look up some of his old friends back east. He had nurtured a plan of liberation for a decade, waiting for the right time to implement it. God told him this was that time.
Not God but Frederick Douglass visited John Brown. They sat on a rock, and the white man unfolded his plan before the incredulous black man. Twenty-two men would seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry and liberate Virginia’s slaves. Brown wanted Douglass to join his righteous army. “I want you for a special purpose,” Brown informed his guest. “When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I want you to help hive them.” Douglass liked neither his purported role as some black Queen Bee nor the plan. He urged Brown to revisit his idea of creating a mountain enclave for runaway slaves. When the white man demurred, Douglass thanked his host, quit the rock, and left Brown to his own devices.1
Brown financed the purchase of the farm and his small “army” with funds from some of New England’s leading white abolitionists, known as the “Secret Six.” Their support for Brown, though, was hardly clandestine. In the South, their names would become synonyms for perfidy: Gerrit Smith, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, George Stearns, Franklin Sanborn, and Samuel Gridley Howe—all from prominent New England families and most with close ties to evangelical Protestantism. These were more than armchair revolutionaries. They had defied the law by harboring escaped slaves and believed in the concept of righteous violence.
Although Frederick Douglass declined the role of accomplice, fellow black abolitionist Harriet Tubman proved more receptive to the plot. Tubman, like Douglass a native of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, had become a legendary liberator by the late 1850s. After escaping from bondage in 1849, Tubman served as a powerful voice for abolition and women’s rights. Her fame derived less from what she said than from what she did. At great personal peril, she ventured back into the South nearly a dozen times during the 1850s to spirit out slaves through the Underground Railroad. From 1852 until the beginning of the Civil War, Tubman made one, sometimes two trips a year into Maryland or Virginia to rescue ten or more slaves at a time. In an era when one slave could reveal a plot in exchange for a privilege, the volume of Tubman’s nocturnal raids, and the fact that all of her charges (and herself) made it safely to freedom, were incredible.2
Tubman’s feats proved to Brown that a vast slave population awaited the opportunity to liberate themselves and join the army of freedom. Brown determined to provide that opportunity and sought Tubman’s help. She offered detailed information on the topography of western Virginia and agreed to enlist black recruits from Canada. Tubman proved much more successful in the first endeavor than in the second. Former slaves were willing to help their fellows in bondage but did not relish martyrdom as a probable consequence of such actions. Still, Brown was ecstatic at Tubman’s endorsement and assistance. He wrote, “I am succeeding to all appearance beyond my expectation.… Harriet Tubman hooked on … at once. He is the most of a man naturally, that I ever met with.” Brown did not confuse Tubman’s gender; her actions and bravery seemed so masculine to nineteenth-century men that Brown un-self-consciously referred to her in this manner. Brown was not the only abolitionist who made this allusion. Thomas Wentworth Higginson simply called her “Moses.”3
More than a Moses was necessary to pull off Brown’s harebrained scheme. The secrecy of his operation was no more secure than the identities of his white abolitionist benefactors. He left a detailed paper trail at his Maryland farm. His small band (now down to eighteen men) departed for Virginia with only one day’s rations. While the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry was a logical target if one hoped to secure arms, it was not an ideal location from which to foment a slave rebellion. Situated in the northwestern part of Virginia, a region of small slaveholdings, Harpers Ferry lay a considerable distance from the main centers of plantation slavery in Southside Virginia where, nearly a generation earlier, Nat Turner launched his bloody but futile rebellion. Although Brown and his band would take the arsenal with deceptive ease, nary a slave rallied to their banner. But the United States Marines under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee did, putting an inglorious end to the plot.4
Governor Henry A. Wise charged Brown with treason against the state of Virginia, a curious accusation since Brown was not a resident of Virginia and owed no allegiance to the state. The wounded warrior, carried into court on a stretcher, maintained a stoic defiance throughout the brief trial, at the end of which he was allowed to make a five-minute speech. His was the eloquence of a man just short of the gallows and long convinced of his righteousness. Brown’s brief statement emphasized the basic contradiction between slavery and America’s democratic Christianity. Men who loved God and who believed God loved them could not allow the institution to exist:
This Court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done … in behalf of His despised poor, is no wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done.5
On December 1, 1859, John Brown wrote his last words before the escort came to his cramped cell: “I … am now quite certain that the crime of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” Still suffering from his wounds, he slowly mounted the scaffold, ramrod straight. As he ascended he could look above and through the now-barren trees of impending winter to a church steeple. The bells were tolling.6
The bells tolled in New England, too. John Brown accomplished more in death than in life. He did not cause the nation to disintegrate or the bloody civil war that followed. But his death illuminated the growing estrangement of North and South perhaps more than any other previous incident, coming as it did on top of an accumulation of perceived wrongs, insults, and aggressions from both sides. George Templeton Strong, who, like many of his fellow northerners, condemned the raid but recognized the controlling influence of Brown’s legacy, wrote in his diary: “Old John Brown was hanged this morning; justly, say I, but his name may be a word of power for the next half century.” Strong underestimated that legacy. Sixty years later, in his poem “John Brown,” Edwin Arlington Robinson has the old man vowing, “I shall have more to say when I am dead.”7
Most northerners denounced the deed even as they admired Brown’s stoicism. His martyrdom did not create a groundswell for the abolitionist cause; nor did it provide a boost for the Republican Party. Northerners recoiled from the raid’s implications: a slave insurrection and disunion. Harper’s Weekly, a new and influential nonpartisan magazine, editorialized that “though the leading Republican politicians and papers may and do repudiate the acts of Brown and his associates, it is likely that a large section of the people of this country will hold them responsible for what has happened.”8
Abraham Lincoln recognized the danger in just such an association, particularly after authorities discovered the cache of correspondence between Brown and various white and black New England abolitionists, some with ties to the Republican Party. Lincoln’s opposition to Brown’s Raid derived not from political expediency but from his genuine regard for the rule of law and his concern that such acts, however well intentioned, could set back the anti-slavery cause. He explained that Brown’s plot was “wrong for two reasons. It was a violation of law and it was, as all such attacks must be, futile as far as any effect
it might have on the extinction of a great evil.” Lincoln admired Brown’s “great courage [and] rare unselfishness” but diagnosed the old man as “insane,” concluding with the wry comment that the raid was “an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate.”9
African Americans living in the North held a different perspective. For many, the idea that a white person would give up his life and the lives of his sons for their cause was a novel thought. White anti-slavery martyrs existed, such as Elijah Lovejoy, but these individuals used words; Brown took action and carried the fight to the South, and gave his life for that effort. Harriet Tubman, who knew about bravery, noted, “When I think how he gave up his life for our people, and how he never flinched, but was so brave to the end, it’s clear to me it wasn’t mortal man, it was God in him.”10
Southerners dismissed northern disclaimers as self-serving. They read about the church bells tolling all over New England at the hour of Brown’s execution. They recalled William H. Seward’s comment about an “irrepressible conflict” and how that suddenly sprang to life in western Virginia. They saw the widely broadcast comments of prominent abolitionists whom they had come to invest with considerably more influence than they actually enjoyed—part of the process of each section believing the worst about the other and convincing themselves that the worst was the norm.
The event confirmed for southerners that the Republican Party was “organized on the basis of making war” against the South. Others mocked the demonstrations of piety and moral outrage, especially in New England, a region “built up and sustained by the products of negro slave labor.” The solemn processions of mourning and the tableaux depicting the martyred Brown doubtless broke the cold, gray monotony of a Boston December. “It is a pity that they haven’t a witch or two to drown or burn, by way of variety.”11
That the Slave Power had created a martyr, abolitionists did not doubt. Some southerners agreed. A Kentucky editor predicted that “if old John Brown is executed, there will be thousands to dip their handkerchiefs in his blood; relics of the martyr will be paraded throughout the North.” Though the journalist overestimated the procession, several prominent northern writers compared John Brown’s execution with the crucifixion. Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted that Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Thoreau, on the day of Brown’s execution, wrote, “Some 1800 years ago Christ was crucified; this morning … Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.”12
Such expressions of grief gave heart to southern disunionists. Since the Jackson administration, a small but expanding group of southern leaders dreamed of a unified region. The moderation of the Upper South, the discipline of party, and the influence of southern politicians in the federal government muted nationalist movements in the South. John C. Calhoun labored long and hard during the 1830s and 1840s to develop a regional unity that transcended party, to little avail. Occasionally, southerners came together in commercial conventions to lessen their dependence on northern trade, manufacturing, and finance. But concerted political efforts floundered. The flashpoints of the 1850s all seemed to break the South’s way—the Fugitive Slave Law, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and Dred Scott. Yet the region had little to show for these “triumphs.”
Brown’s Raid was another matter: a bold if farcical invasion of the South compounded by an outpouring of grief and invective from the North. Perhaps southerners could see now the true beliefs of their adversaries. A South Carolina editor enthused, “Never before, since the Declaration of Independence, has the South been more united in sentiment.” “Recent events have wrought almost a complete revolution in the sentiments, the thoughts, the hopes, of the oldest and steadiest conservatives in all the southern states,” the Richmond Whig rejoiced. The Whig counted “thousands upon … thousands of men in our midst who, a month ago, scoffed at the idea of a dissolution of the Union as a madman’s dream, but who now hold the opinion that its days are numbered, its glory perished.”13
Southerners now had their own version of the Slave Power conspiracy. The Charleston Mercury, ever in the forefront of disunion sentiment, admitted that Brown’s insurrection “has been silly and abortive.” But, the editor claimed, the raid was a small part of a “wide-spread scheme … maturing at the North for insurrections throughout the South.” It was clear to the Mercury that “the great source of the evil is that we are under one government with these people.” John Brown’s Raid provided southern extremists with a patina of credibility. After more than a decade of preaching that the sky was falling, here was an overt act that seemed to corroborate their predictions.14
The fears themselves were all the more unsettling because they contradicted the basis of pro-slavery propaganda, that the institution was a positive good. Slavery rested on a tower of illogic that rendered the South increasingly defensive, for what is defended more fiercely than the indefensible: an institution of bondage in a land founded for freedom; evangelicals claimed slaves had souls, yet masters typically considered them property; slaveholders argued that the African possessed a limited intellect, yet slaves worked a variety of skilled occupations, and a few managed plantations; pro-slavery advocates maintained that the institution civilized the African, yet they emphasized the indelible primitive nature of his culture; and they asserted that the institution’s basic benevolence created happy workers, yet feared their homicidal retribution.
Such introspection did not characterize southern public discourse in the 1850s. Protecting the institution of slavery remained foremost on the agenda of southern leaders as the Congress gathered three days after John Brown’s execution. For the next two months, Republicans and Democrats hurled insults across the aisle until the Republicans, holding a scant majority of eight members, managed to elect the new Speaker of the House. South Carolina senator James H. Hammond commented wryly, “The only persons who do not have a revolver and a knife are those who have two revolvers.” Reporters noted that even those in the gallery carried weapons.15
Republicans stood little chance of passing their favorite bills with a slim majority in the House, a Democratic majority in the Senate, and a Democratic administration. Measures such as a western homestead bill to attract eastern workers and farmers to the territories, federal assistance to a transcontinental railroad, and a higher tariff to protect industries and their workers all went down to defeat, either by the Senate or with President Buchanan’s veto. Southern Democrats fought these proposals fiercely: 160-acre homesteads precluded plantation agriculture; a Republican-sponsored transcontinental railroad would invariably bypass the South; and the tariff threatened the South’s booming cotton economy—all good reasons for opposition. But without a countervailing program other than the slave code, Democratic opposition appeared obstructionist, a collective vote against progress, against the workingman, against the settling of the West; in short, against everything Americans had dreamed of, fought for, and uprooted their lives to achieve over the past generation.
Southerners had dreams, too. They resented the implication that the North was synonymous with America. They resented any intimation that they were retrograde and opposed to progress, technology, and innovation. They rejected any suggestion of inferiority—moral, political, or economic. The fight over the extension of slavery into the territories touched on all three. The Republicans had made that extension a moral issue—Lincoln had stated as much during his debates with Douglas. The loss of access to the territories would seal the South’s position as a perpetual political minority. If the Republicans, an avowedly sectional party, attained power, the consequences for the South and slavery could be dire.
Walt Whitman, ever the nationalist, groped for a way of uniting North and South on some common ground, of bypassing the self-serving politicians and poseurs. He envisioned a “healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or boatman,” who will
“come down from the West across the Alleghenies, and walk into the Presidency.” If the West embodied America’s future, it also represented its salvation.16
Abraham Lincoln had considered the blacksmith’s trade and had piloted various craft on the western waters, though he would claim neither as a vocation. He dared not think of himself as presidential timber either, joking in October 1858, “Just think of such a sucker as me as President.” If Lincoln did not think much of the idea, other men did. Some viewed his relatively brief career in Washington as an attribute: an outsider unsullied by corruption and unseemly behavior; a fine orator conversant with the basic moral and religious principles that informed the beliefs of many Americans; and a man who, in the age of the common man, seemed genuinely common.17
Lincoln had distinguished himself in his losing battle against Stephen A. Douglas and in speeches throughout the Midwest during the latter part of 1859. Easterners began to notice, and a group of them supporting Ohio senator Salmon P. Chase for the Republican presidential nomination and seeking to upset the bandwagon for the front-runner, New York’s William H. Seward, arranged an invitation through Horace Greeley for Lincoln to deliver a speech at Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn early in 1860. It was a difficult time for Republicans, as many Americans associated the party with Brown’s Raid and the Union-threatening agitation of the slavery question. Lincoln’s trip east represented not only an effort to overshadow Seward’s popularity in his home state but also an attempt to bring a fresh face and voice to eastern Republicans.18
America Aflame Page 23
