Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  But the repercussions resounded for years. Passions ran high in Virginia, where mobs clamored for Brown's blood. To forestall a lynching the state of Virginia hastily indicted, tried, and convicted Brown of treason, murder, and fomenting insurrection. The judge sentenced him to hang one month later, on December 2. The other six captured raiders also received swift trials; four of them (including two blacks) were hanged on December 16 and the remaining two on March 16, 1860. The matter of Brown's northern supporters provoked great interest. Brown had left behind at the Maryland farmhouse a carpetbag full of documents and letters, some of them revealing his relationship with the Secret Six. Of those gentlemen, Parker was in Europe dying of tuberculosis, and Higginson stood firm in Massachusetts, making no apology for his role and defying anyone to arrest him. But the other four beat an abject retreat. Stearns, Howe, and Sanborn fled to Canada, while Gerrit Smith suffered a breakdown and was confined for several weeks in the Utica insane asylum.

  The Canadian exiles returned after Brown was hanged, but when the Senate established an investigating committee chaired by James Mason of Virginia, Sanborn again headed north to avoid testifying. From Canada he wrote Higginson imploring him "in case you are summoned . . . do not tell what you know to the enemies of the cause." Higginson expressed contempt toward such behavior. "Sanborn, is there no such thing as honor among confederates? . . . Can your clear moral sense . . . justify holding one's tongue . . . to save ourselves from all share in even the reprobation of society when the nobler man whom we have provoked on into danger is the scapegoat of that reprobation—& the gallows too?"7

  Sanborn refused a summons from the Mason committee and resisted an attempt by the sergeant at arms of the Senate to arrest him. Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw voided the arrest warrant on a technicality. Howe and Stearns did go to Washington and faced the Mason committee. For some reason the committee never called Higginson—probably because by February 1860 Mason's resolve to uncover a northern conspiracy had weakened, and he did not want to give Higginson a national platform to proclaim his sentiments. Perhaps for the same reason, Howe and Stearns found the committee's questions "so unskillfully framed that they could, without literal falsehood," deny prior knowledge of Brown's plan to attack Harper's Ferry. A historian reading their testimony, however, will be convinced that they told several falsehoods. In any event, the Mason committee found no conspiracy, and no one except the men actually present with Brown at Harper's Ferry was ever indicted.8

  Reaction in the South to Brown's raid brought to the surface a paradox that lay near the heart of slavery. On the one hand, many whites

  7. Tilden G. Edelstein, Strange Enthusiasm: A Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New Haven, 1968), 232, 226.

  8. C. Vann Woodward, "John Brown's Private War," in Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge, 1960), 51–52; Jeffrey S. Rossbach, Ambivalent Conspirators: John Brown, the Secret Six, and a Theory of Slave Violence (Philadelphia, 1982), 236–66.

  lived in fear of slave insurrections. On the other, southern whites insisted that slaves were well treated and cheerful in their bondage. The news of Harper's Ferry sent an initial wave of shock and rage through the South, especially when newspapers reported that among the papers found in Brown's carpetbag were maps of seven southern states designating additional targets. For several weeks wild rumors circulated of black uprisings and of armed abolitionists marching from the North to aid them. By the time of Brown's execution, however, many in the South uttered a sigh of relief. Not only had the rumors proved false, but southerners also gradually realized that not a single slave had voluntarily joined Brown. The South's professed belief in the slaves' tran-quility was right after all! It was only Yankee fanatics who wanted to stir up trouble.

  The problem of those Yankee fanatics would soon cause southern opinion to evolve into a third phase of unreasoning fury, but not until the antislavery reaction to Harper's Ferry had itself gone through two phases. The first northern response was a kind of baffled reproach. The Worcester Spy, an antislavery paper in Higginson's home town, characterized the raid as "one of the rashest and maddest enterprises ever." To William Lloyd Garrison the raid, "though disinterested and well intended," seemed "misguided, wild, and apparently insane."9 But such opinions soon changed into a perception of Brown as a martyr to a noble cause. His behavior during and after his trial had much to do with this transformation. In testimony, letters, interviews, and above all in his closing speech to the court he exhibited a dignity and fortitude that impressed even Virginia's Governor Henry Wise and the fire-eater Edmund Ruffin. Throughout the trial Brown insisted that his object had not been to incite insurrection but only to free slaves and arm them in self-defense. This was disingenuous, to say the least. In southern eyes it was also a distinction without a difference. In his closing speech prior to sentencing, Brown rose to a surpassing eloquence that has echoed down the years:

  I deny everything but what I have all along admitted: of a design on my part to free slaves. . . . Had I interfered in the manner which I admit . . . in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the socalled great . . . every man in this Court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.

  9. Worcester Spy, Oct. 20, 27, 1859, quoted in Edelstein, Strange Enthusiasm, 222; Liberator, Oct. 21, 1859.

  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. . . . 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.10

  These words moved Theodore Parker to pronounce Brown "not only a martyr . . . but also a SAINT."They inspired Ralph Waldo Emerson to prophesy that the old warrior would "make the gallows as glorious as the cross."11 Brown understood his martyr role, and cultivated it. "I have been whipped as the saying is," he wrote his wife, "but am sure I can recover all the lost capital occasioned by that disaster; by only hanging a few moments by the neck; and I feel quite determined to make the utmost possible out of a defeat." Like Christ, to whom Brown unabashedly compared himself, he would accomplish in death the salvation of the poor he had failed while living to save. Brown spurned all schemes to cheat the hangman's rope by rescue or by pleading insanity. "I am worth inconceivably more to hang," he told his brother, "than for any other purpose."12

  Extraordinary events took place in many northern communities on the day of Brown's execution. Church bells tolled; minute guns fired solemn salutes; ministers preached sermons of commemoration; thousands bowed in silent reverence for the martyr to liberty. "I have seen nothing like it," wrote Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard. More than a thousand miles away in Lawrence, Kansas, the editor of the Republican wrote that "the death of no man in America has ever produced so profound a sensation. A feeling of deep and sorrowful indignation seems to possess the masses."13 A clergyman in Roxbury, Massachusetts, declared

  10. From the report of Brown's speech in the New York Herald, Nov. 3, 1859, printed in Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800–1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (Boston, 1910), 498–99.

  11. Woodward, "John Brown's Private War," 54.

  12. Robert Penn Warren, John Brown, The Making of a Martyr (New York, 1929), 428–29; Oates, To Purge This Land, 335.

  13. Nevins, Emergence, II, 99; Oates, To Purge This Land, 356.

  that Brown had made the word Treason "holy in the American language"; young William Dean Howells said that "Brown has become an idea, a thousand times purer and better and loftier than the Republican idea"; Henry David Thoreau pronounced Brown "a c
rucified hero."14

  What can explain this near-canonization of Brown? Some Yankees professed to admire Brown for daring to strike the slave power that was accustomed to pushing the North around with impunity. "This will be a great day in our history," wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his diary on the day of Brown's execution, "the date of a new Revolution,—quite as much needed as the old one." When the Virginians hanged Brown they were "sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon." This was the spirit that two years later made "John Brown's Body" the favorite marching song of the Union army. But there was more to it than that. Perhaps the words of Lafayette quoted at a commemoration meeting in Boston got to the crux of the matter: "I never would have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived that thereby I was helping to found a nation of slaves."15 John Brown had drawn his sword in an attempt to cut out this cancer of shame that tainted the promise of America. No matter that his method was misguided and doomed to failure. "History, forgetting the errors of his judgment in the contemplation of his unfaltering course . . . and of the nobleness of his aims," said William Cullen Bryant, "will record his name among those of its martyrs and heroes." Most of Brown's eulogists similarly distinguished between his "errors of judgment" and "the nobleness of his aims." Though "Harper's Ferry was insane," stated the religious weekly The Independent, "the controlling motive of his demonstration was sublime." It was "the work of a madman," conceded Horace Greeley even as he praised the "grandeur and nobility" of Brown and his men.16

  The distinction between act and motive was lost on southern whites. They saw only that millions of Yankees seemed to approve of a murderer who had tried to set the slaves at their throats. This perception provoked a paroxysm of anger more intense than the original reaction to the raid. The North "has sanctioned and applauded theft, murder,

  14. Woodward, "John Brown's Private War," 58; Nevins, Emergence, II, 99; Oates, To Purge This Land, 354.

  15. Warren, John Brown, 437; Villard, John Brown, 560.

  16. Nevins, Emergence, II, 99; Woodward, "John Brown's Private War," 48–49.

  treason," cried De Bow's Review. Could the South afford any longer "to live under a government, the majority of whose subjects or citizens regard John Brown as a martyr and a Christian hero?" asked a Baltimore newspaper.17 No! echoed from every corner of the South. "The Harper's Ferry invasion has advanced the cause of disunion more than any event that has happened since the formation of the government," agreed two rival Richmond newspapers. It had "wrought almost a complete revolution in the sentiments . . . of the oldest and steadiest conservatives. . . . Thousands of men . . . who, a month ago, scoffed at the idea of a dissolution of the Union . . . now hold the opinion that its days are numbered." A North Carolinian confirmed this observation. "I have always been a fervid Union man," he wrote privately in December 1859, "but I confess the endorsement of the Harper's Ferry outrage . . . has shaken my fidelity and . . . I am willing to take the chances of every possible evil that may arise from disunion, sooner than submit any longer to Northern insolence."18

  To reassure the South that sympathy for Brown was confined to a noisy minority, northern conservatives organized large anti-Brown meetings. They condemned "the recent outrage at Harper's Ferry" as a crime "not only against the State of Virginia, but against the Union itself. . . . [We] are ready to go as far as any Southern men in putting down all attempts of Northern fanatics to interfere with the constitutional rights of the South."19 Democrats saw an opportunity to rebuild their bridges to the South and to discredit Republicans by linking them to Brown. Harper's Ferry, said Stephen Douglas, was the "natural, logical, inevitable result of the doctrines and teachings of the Republican party." Democrats singled out Seward for special attack, for they expected him to win the Republican presidential nomination. Seward was the "arch agitator who is responsible for this insurrection," they asserted. His "bloody and brutal" irrepressible conflict speech had inspired Brown's bloody and brutal act.20

  17. Oates, To Purge This Land, 323; Villard, John Brown, 568.

  18. Richmond Enquirer and Richmond Whig, quoted in Henry T. Shanks, The Secession Movement in Virginia, 1847–1861 (Richmond, 1934), 90; William A. Walsh to L. O'B. Branch, Dec. 8, 1859, in Avery O. Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism 1848–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1953), 311.

  19. Villard, John Brown, 563; Philip S. Foner, Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict (Chapel Hill, 1941), 161–62.

  20. Oates, To Purge This Land, 310; Villard, John Brown, 472; Nevins, Emergence, II, 104.

  Fearing political damage, Republican leaders hastened to disavow Brown. Seward condemned the old man's "sedition and treason" and pronounced his execution "necessary and just." Even though Brown "agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong," said Lincoln, "that cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason." Governor Samuel Kirkwood of Iowa decried Brown's "act of war" as "a greater crime" than even "the filibuster invaders of Cuba and Nicaragua were guilty of," though "in the minds of many" Brown's raid was "relieved to some extent of its guilt [because] the blow was struck for freedom, and not for slavery."21

  Southerners did not like this comparison of Brown with the filibusters. They also detected a sting in the tail of Lincoln's and Kirkwood's remarks ("agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong . . . blow was struck for freedom"). To southern people the line separating Lincoln's moral convictions from Brown's butchery was meaningless. "We regard every man," declared an Atlanta newspaper, "who does not boldly declare that he believes African slavery to be a social, moral, and political blessing" as "an enemy to the institutions of the South." As for the supportive resolutions of northern conservatives, they were so much "gas and vaporing." "Why have not the conservative men at the North frowned down the infamous black-republican party?" asked De Bow's Review. "They have foreborne to crush it, till now it overrides almost everything at the North." On the Senate floor Robert Toombs warned that the South would "never permit this Federal government to pass into the traitorous hands of the Black Republican party." "Defend yourselves!" Toombs thundered to the southern people. "The enemy is at your door, wait not to meet him at your hearthstone, meet him at the doorsill, and drive him from the temple of liberty, or pull down its pillars and involve him in a common ruin."22

  John Brown's ghost stalked the South as the election year of 1860 opened. Several historians have compared the region's mood to the "Great Fear" that seized the French countryside in the summer of 1789 when peasants believed that the "King's brigands are coming" to slaughter them.23 Keyed up to the highest pitch of tension, many slaveholders

  21. Seward and Kirkwood quoted in Villard, John Brown, 564–68; CWL, III, 502.

  22. Atlanta Confederacy, quoted in Nevins, Emergence, II, 108n; DeBow's Review, 29 (July 1860), reprinted in Paul F. Paskoff and Daniel J. Wilson, eds., The Cause ofthe South: Selections from DeBow's Review 1846–1867 (Baton Rouge, 1982), 219–20; CG, 36 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 93.

  23. Ollinger Crenshaw, The Slave States in the Presidential Election of 1860 (Baltimore, 1945), chap. 5; Woodward, "John Brown's Private War," 67–68; Oates, To Purge This Land, 322–23.

  and yeomen alike were ready for war to defend hearth and home against those Black Republican brigands. Thousands joined military companies; state legislatures appropriated funds for the purchase of arms. Every barn or cotton gin that burned down sparked new rumors of slave insurrections and abolitionist invaders. Every Yankee in the South became persona non grata. Some of them received a coat of tar and feathers and a ride out of town on a rail. A few were lynched. The citizens of Boggy Swamp, South Carolina, ran two northern tutors out of the district. "Nothing definite is known of their abolitionist or insurrectionary sentiments," commented a local newspaper, "but being from the North, and, therefore, necessarily imbued with doctrines hostile to our institutions, their presence in this section has been obnoxious." The northern-born president of an Alabama college had to flee for his life. In Kentucky
a mob drove thirty-nine people associated with an antislavery church and school at Berea out of the state. Thirty-two representatives in the South of New York and Boston firms arrived in Washington reporting "indignation so great against Northerners that they were compelled to return and abandon their business."24 In this climate of fear and hostility, Democrats prepared for their national convention at Charleston in April 1860.

  II

  Most southern Democrats went to Charleston with one overriding goal: to destroy Douglas. In this they were joined by a scattering of administration Democrats from the North. Memories of Lecompton and the Freeport doctrine thwarted all efforts to heal the breach. This "Demagogue of Illinois," explained an Alabama editor, "deserves to perish upon the gibbet of Democratic condemnation, and his loathsome carcass to be cast at the gate of the Federal City."25 Some lower-South Democrats even preferred a Republican president to Douglas in order to make the alternatives facing the South starkly clear: submission or secession. And they ensured this result by proceeding to cleave the Democratic party in two.

  24. Woodward, "John Brown's Private War," 62–66; Nevins, Emergence, II, 108n.

  25. Opelika Weekly Southern Era, April 18, 1860, quoted in Donald E. Reynolds, Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis (Nashville, 1970), 35.

  The Alabama Democratic convention took the first step in January 1860 by instructing its delegates to walk out of the national convention if the party refused to adopt a platform pledging a federal slave code for the territories. Other lower-South Democratic organizations followed suit. In February, Jefferson Davis presented the substance of southern demands to the Senate in resolutions affirming that neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could "impair the constitutional right of any citizen of the United States to take his slave property into the common territories. . . . It is the duty of the federal government there to afford, for that as for other species of property, the needful protection."26 The Senate Democratic caucus, dominated by southerners, endorsed the resolutions and thereby threw down the gauntlet to Douglas at Charleston.