APPENDIX II:
The Harper’s Ferry Mystery
The most remarkable thing about John Brown’s raid is that it was allowed to happen at all. Months beforehand it was known in Washington’s corridors of power that he intended to invade Virginia, and that his first target would be Harper’s Ferry. At least eighty people in the country, including the Secretary for War and two U.S. Senators, had been told of the plan; how many others had picked up the rumours, or had reason to believe that some great stroke was imminent, it is impossible to say. Yet nothing was done to stop him. No defensive measures were taken.
This should be one of those great historical mysteries that scholars love to debate; when one considers the oceans of ink that have been spilled over Little Big Horn and the Alamo, the comparative neglect of the question: “Why wasn’t Brown stopped?” is almost as baffling as the mystery itself.
Brown had invasion in mind as early as 1847, when he described to Frederick Douglass how he would use a small picked band to run off the most restless and daring slaves and wage a guerrilla campaign in the Alleghenies. In late 1854 or early 1855 he proposed a raid on Harper’s Ferry to Colonel Daniel Woodruff, a veteran of the War of 1812; Brown’s daughter Annie, the sentry of Kennedy Farm, remembered the Ferry being specifically mentioned at the time. Hugh Forbes knew about the plan in some detail in 1857, and revealed it to Senators Wilson and Seward in 1858, at which time the Secret Six also knew of it, and the scheme was postponed. Early in 1859, James Redpath, who had met Brown and was to become his first biographer, published a book dedicated to “John Brown, senior, of Kansas”, citing him as a believer in slave insurrection, advocating revolt, and hinting at future “servile and civil wars” – not hard information, but a significant straw in a wind that had been blowing for some time.
Secret intelligence-gathering was fairly makeshift in the U.S. before the Civil War, and it is possible that the government had no substantial knowledge of Brown’s intentions before 1859, or, if they had, that they did not take him seriously. The wild schemes of a crazy farmer might well be dismissed as moonshine, although given the growth of abolitionist feeling in the North, and Southern anxiety about slave unrest, it seems odd that no one thought them worthy of any inquiry at all.
But “odd” is not the word for the behaviour of John Floyd, Secretary of War, when he received a detailed and (one would have thought) compelling warning of the raid on August 25, 1859 – seven weeks before it took place. It came in a letter, admittedly anonymous* but obviously the work of a responsible person, who named “Old John Brown” of Kansas, stated that he intended to liberate the slaves of the South by general insurrection, gave particulars of his preparation and armament, identified Harper’s Ferry as the point of invasion, and predicted that the slaves would be armed and the blow struck within a few weeks.
Nothing could have been clearer, but Floyd, whom Bruce Catton generously describes as a bumbling incompetent, ignored the letter because, among its wealth of cogent information, it contained one trifling error – the writer stated that Brown had an agent “in an armoury in Maryland”. Floyd apparently had not the wit to connect “Old John Brown” of the letter with the notorious John Brown on whose head President Buchanan and the State of Missouri had put a price, but like a good little bureaucrat he knew that there was no armoury in Maryland – that there was a large undefended armoury within a stone’s throw of Maryland, just across the river in Virginia, did not occur to him. He decided, incredibly, that the rest of the letter must be untrue; according to Sanborn, he did not even bother to read it twice. Explaining himself later to the Mason Committee investigating the raid, Floyd said that he was satisfied that “a scheme of such wickedness and outrage could not be entertained by any citizens of the United States”. And the committee decided that no one apart from Brown’s gang had “any suspicion of [the raid’s] existence or design”.
Committees know their own business best, and there is no reason why a senior minister should not be an ill-informed idiot; such things have been known. But even if Floyd was guilty of nothing worse than stupidity and negligence, it is still remarkable that despite all the advance publicity John Brown and his projected raid had received, from the halls of Congress to the Kansas border and from the drawing-rooms of Boston to the saloons of Ohio, no one in Washington took any notice or apparently felt a moment’s unease.
To be sure, governments can be uncommonly blind, deaf, and lazy – to which the last survivor of John Brown’s band would certainly add: “Aye, especially when they don’t want to see, hear, or move.” There were many in the North, and doubtless some in the South, who wanted the raid to happen; Crixus and Atropos were not alone; but probably only a cynic like Flashman would speculate that there were those in authority who, knowing of the plot and having the power to prevent it, allowed it to go ahead, for their own inscrutable ends. Since there is no evidence to support this view, we can only accept the alternative: that it was just monumental bad luck that no responsible person got wind of the plot, or took it seriously, or bothered to investigate it, or thought it worth posting even a couple of armed sentries on an unguarded arsenal at a time when talk of slave insurrection was in the air, or decided to keep an eye on the most violent and ruthless abolitionist in the country, the butcher of Pottawatomie, who was stumping the sticks and cities preaching the invasion of Virginia …
Bad luck indeed, for the upshot was that against all the odds, and in spite of all his follies and hesitations and mismanagement, John Brown was given what he had no right to expect: a clear run at Harper’s Ferry.
* * *
* The writer of the letter was one David Gue, who had learned of the plot from a Quaker named Varney. Many years later Gue claimed that he had written out of no ill will to Brown, but “to protect [him] from the consequences of his own rashness and devotion” by alerting the authorities who, Gue hoped, would deter the raid by setting a guard on the arsenal. Two copies of the letter were sent to Floyd, but only one reached him.
APPENDIX III:
John Brown’s Men
John Brown’s knapsack is strapped upon his back,
He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord,
His pet lambs will meet him on the way,
And they’ll go marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah …
John Henry Kagi, 24, killed
Aaron Dwight Stevens, 28, hanged
Owen Brown, 34, escaped
Watson Brown, 24, killed
Oliver Brown, 20, killed
Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson, 26, killed
John Cook, 29, hanged
Albert Hazlett, 22, hanged
Charles Plummer Tidd, 25, escaped
William Thompson, 26, killed
Dauphin Osgood Thompson, 21, killed
Edwin Coppoc, 24, hanged
Barclay Coppoc, 20, escaped
John Anthony Copeland, 25, hanged
William Leeman, 20, killed
Stewart Taylor, 22, killed
Osborn Perry Anderson, 29, escaped
Dangerfield Newby, 44, killed
Lewis Sheridan Leary, 24, killed
Shields Green, 23, hanged
Francis Jackson Meriam, 21, escaped
John Brown, 59, hanged
To which may now be added the names of
Beauchamp Millward Comber, 37, escaped
Joseph Simmons, 23, killed.
Fourteen persons were killed or wounded by the raiders at Harper’s Ferry. No slaves were liberated.
Notes
1. John Arthur (Jack) Johnson (1878–1946), the first black boxer to win the world heavyweight title, was the most unpopular of champions and, in the opinion of the most respected ring historians, the best. He won the title in 1908 by beating Tommy Burns of Canada, having pursued him from America to England and finally to Australia, and lost it in 1915 to Jess Willard of the U.S.A. In the intervening years he was the object of a campaign of race hatred unique in sport; in t
hat colour-conscious age Johnson’s arrogance in and out of the ring, his cruelty to opponents, his white wives, his complacent smile showing gold-capped teeth, his skipping bail to Paris to avoid a prison sentence in America (he had violated the Mann Act by taking a woman with whom he was having an affair across a State line), and above all, his undoubted supremacy in a game which had always been a peculiar source of white pride, brought out the very worst in the sporting public. None was more vicious than the novelist Jack London, who had covered Burns’s “funeral” as he called it, for the New York Herald, and who conducted the notorious “Whip the Nigger” campaign to “remove the golden smile from Johnson’s face”. He and others persuaded Jim Jeffries, a former champion, to come out of retirement to challenge for the title. The fight took place in Reno, Nevada, in 1910, and so highly charged was the atmosphere beforehand (fatal race riots had followed some of Johnson’s previous victories) that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was invited to act as referee; it was felt, rightly, that no sportsman on earth was so universally respected, or more likely to exert a calming influence. Doyle wanted to accept, but his own campaign against the atrocities in the Belgian Congo was demanding all his attention, and after a week’s hesitation he reluctantly declined. In the event, Johnson won easily, there were no disturbances, and the quest for a “White Hope” lasted another five years, until Johnson succumbed (voluntarily, in the opinion of many) to the gigantic but undistinguished Willard.
Flashman’s view of Johnson was widely shared; his unquestioned brilliance as a ring mechanic apart, the black champion was not an endearing figure, but it is only fair to quote the opinion of another well-known Victorian, who had the rare distinction of meeting him in the ring and coming out on his feet. Victor McLaglen was an admired British heavyweight long before he became a film actor; he went six rounds to a draw in a “no-decision” bout with Johnson in 1909, and wrote afterwards that the champion “fought like a gentleman”, was “undoubtedly the hardest man to hit whom I ever met”, and was also “the most charming opponent”. (See Terry Leigh-Lye, In This Corner, 1963; Nat Fleischer and Sam Andre, Pictorial History of Boxing, 1959; M. and M. Hardwick, The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes, 1964; Jack London, in the New York Herald, 1908; Victor McLaglen, Express to Hollywood, 1934.)
2. Flashman was born in 1822, so the present memoir was presumably written in 1913, two years before his death.
3. The famous march, one of many John Brown songs sung in the U.S. Civil War, is said to have originated in “a sarcastic tune which men in a Massachusetts outfit made up as ‘a jibe’ against one Sergeant John Brown of Boston”. If so, it soon became associated with the famous abolitionist; a Union soldier, Private Warren Lee Goss, records that when the 12th Massachusetts Regiment marched down Broadway on July 24, 1861, they sang “the then new and always thrilling lyric, John Brown’s Body”. Five months later Mrs Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910), the author, reformer, and abolitionist, wrote new words to the old tune; they subsequently appeared in the Atlantic Monthly as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. One tradition (hinted at by Flashman) is that she had been scandalised by the words which she heard soldiers singing; the accepted story is that she and a party of friends were singing patriotic songs, and one of them suggested to her that new verses would be appropriate. (See Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood, 1970, quoting Boyd B. Stutler, “John Brown’s Body”; Warren Lee Goss, “Going to the Front”, in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. 1, ed. R. U. Johnson and C. C. Buel, 1887.)
4. For evidence that Benjamin Franklin (“Agent No. 72”) and his assistant, Edward Bancroft, were working for British Intelligence during their time at the American Embassy in Paris, and passed information to London which resulted in heavy American shipping losses, see Richard Deacon, A History of British Secret Service, 1980.
5. Flashman is habitually vague about dates, and it is impossible to say when he left Calcutta – it may have been late in 1858 or even early in 1859, but he was certainly at the Cape sometime in January or February of the new year. In that case, it seems probable that the stranded wreck was the Madagascar (351 tons), which ran ashore off Port Elizabeth on December 3, 1858. (See Marischal Murray, Ships and South Africa, 1933.)
6. The self-destruction of the ’Zoza tribe (more usually spelled Xhosa or Amaxosa) began late in 1856, when the belief arose that spirits of the dead, speaking through the medium of a girl of the tribe, had promised that if all cattle and crops were destroyed, these would be replaced in abundance on a certain day, and the hated white men driven from the land. In obedience to their chief, the Xhosas destroyed their food supplies entirely, and in the famine which followed more than 60,000 are believed to have died. (See sources to Note 9.)
7. In view of recent South African history, and the common belief that 1994 would be the milestone marking the introduction of universal suffrage, it is worth noting that in Cape Colony in the 1850s, under British rule, every man had the vote, regardless of race or colour. The only qualifications were birth in the Colony and financial condition set so low that many non-whites were enfranchised. Like many progressive features of the old British Empire, it is one that modern revisionists are either unaware of or choose to forget. (See sources to Note 9.)
8. The pollution of the Thames and the anti-smoking campaign were perennial topics; the Act of Parliament removing the disabilities of the Jews had passed in July, 1858, and Lionel de Rothschild had become the first Jewish M.P.
9. Flashman’s summary of South African affairs in 1859, if characteristically sketchy, is accurate and perceptive, and his portrait of the Cape Governor is fair; if anything, he gives him more sympathetic treatment than he usually metes out to imperial proconsuls, a class of whom he tended to take a jaundiced view.
Sir George Grey (1812–98) was that peculiarly Victorian compound of the man of action, scholar, visionary, and maverick. His guiding principles were the welfare and progress of the people he was given to rule, and getting his own way, and he pursued them with an energy and impatience which frequently brought him into conflict with his superiors at home, and eventually brought his career to a premature close, which was his country’s loss, for he was one of the best. He left the army when he was twenty-three to explore north-western Australia, an adventure of extreme danger and hardship in which he skirmished with Aborigines, was wounded, lost his supplies, and finally tramped alone into Perth, so altered by suffering that he was unrecognisable. He was twenty-nine when he was appointed Governor of South Australia, and subsequently of New Zealand, where he defeated the Maoris, won their friendship, and established a popular and prosperous administration before being transferred to the Cape in 1854. There he prevented a Kaffir uprising, encouraged settlement, and acquired something rare, if not unique, in South African history – the trust and respect of Britons, Boers, and tribesmen alike. Foreseeing that the peaceful development of the country depended on recognising and balancing the interests of all three (particularly between the Boers and the black tribes) he worked tirelessly to bring about a confederation, won the support of the Boers of the Orange Free State and the British of the Cape, and would have succeeded but for the reluctance of the home government to assume further responsibility and expense in Southern Africa. His persistence caused offence at the Colonial Office (“a dangerous man”), and he was recalled in 1859, a few months after Flashman met him. Palmerston’s new administration reinstated him, but his plan of confederation was shelved. In 1861 he was again Governor of New Zealand, fought in the Maori wars (personally leading the attack and capture of their main stronghold), and was making progress towards a settlement between settlers and Maoris when, his highly individual style having given renewed offence in Whitehall, he was recalled. He was only fifty-five. The rest of his life was spent mostly in New Zealand. He left behind a standard work, Polynesian Mythology, and splendid libraries at Cape Town and Auckland, but his great achievement was that, whatever his chiefs at home thought, the people of all races and colours whom he governed
were invariably sorry to see him go.
A handsome, slightly-built man with a cold eye and a quiet voice, Grey seems to have been quite as assured and impatient of opposition as Flashman found him: an idealist, he had a strong ruthless streak, and his portraits do not suggest a man whom it would be safe to cross. During his final months at the Cape his health was poor, and his marital relations were approaching a crisis – something with which we may be sure Flashman had nothing to do, or he would certainly have told us about it. (See G. M. Theal, History of South Africa, vol. 3, “Cape Colony, 1846–60”, 1908; James Milne, Sir George Grey, the Romance of a Pro-consul, 1899; G. C. Henderson, Sir George Grey, 1907; James Collier, Life and Times of Sir George Grey, 1909; W. H. S. Bell, Bygone Days, reminiscences of pioneer life in Cape Colony from 1856, 1933; J. Noble, Descriptive Handbook of the Cape Colony, 1875.)
10. The first ministry of Lord Palmerston, who had sent Flashman on secret service to India shortly before the great mutiny of 1857, had ended in February, 1858, when he was succeeded as Prime Minister by the Earl of Derby. Palmerston regained office in June, 1859, a few months after the meeting of Flashman and Sir George Grey at the Cape.
11. The outdoor swimming pool was an occasional feature of private gardens at the Cape: the Constantia mansion, the first large country house in the Colony, dating from the seventeenth century, had one in its grounds. (See Alys Fane Trotter, Old Colonial Houses of the Cape of Good Hope, 1900.)
12. A native of New England, especially a typical seafarer from the coast of Maine, reputed to be unusually tough and reactionary, and supposedly so-called because the region lay east and downwind of the main American Atlantic ports. The term was also applied to ships.
13. There was no British Embassy in Washington at this time: H.M. Government was represented by a minister, not an ambassador – a diplomatic distinction which Flashman could not be expected to appreciate.
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