In forty-five minutes, the jury returned a guilty verdict. No one spoke after the verdict was read.
At his sentencing on November 2, Brown rose from his cot in the courtroom, and what he had to say transfixed the nation. “I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, I did no wrong but right,” he said. “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 millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.” Gritty to the end, he reminded the country that while it might readily dispose of him, “this question is still to be settled.” He had not given up; the slaves were not free.
In New York, George Templeton Strong observed, “The supporters of any institution are apt to be staggered and startled when they find that any one man, wise or foolish, is so convicted of its wrong and injustices as to acquiesce in being hanged by way of protest against it.”
Brown also refused to name the names of his coconspirators. Papers found in his possession pointed in the direction of the Secret Six, and the U.S. Senate was issuing warrants for several of them and their colleagues, including Frederick Douglass, who hadn’t been involved in the least. Aware that he, as a black man, could be summarily hanged, Douglass left the country once again. His white compeers did the same, more or less. Franklin Sanborn took off for Canada, and Gerrit Smith committed himself to an insane asylum in Utica, New York, after methodically destroying all incriminating documents. Stearns and Howe also ran, and Howe went so far as to publish a public letter distancing himself from Brown. “Gerrit Smith’s insanity—& your letter,” Higginson chided Howe, “—are to me the all too sad results of the whole affair.”
Yet Howe, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Higginson, had signed a circular soliciting funds for Brown’s defense. Higginson, for his part, was proud of his involvement with Brown’s raid, and his pride turned into sympathy. He traveled to the Adirondacks to escort Brown’s wife to Boston, in case she wanted to go there, and he planned to accompany her all the way to Virginia, where he hoped she would urge her jailed husband to escape; sympathy had its calculated side, of course. The latter scheme was part of Higginson’s dubious plot to rescue Brown and his raiders. Brown was unwilling to participate. He knew he was far more effective as a martyr than as a fugitive.
As a passionate Northern sympathizer and a woman, the writer Lydia Maria Child could not bear what had happened. By 1859, Child was well known not just in the world of letters but in the world of politics—and though she was beloved as a writer for children, she was also despised as an abolitionist, the one who had the audacity to write, as early as 1833, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, which called for immediate, uncompensated emancipation of the slaves. An Appeal influenced a number of abolitionists, including Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, and Higginson himself. No doubt Brown had read it too. On its publication, the Boston Athenaeum, which had supplied the popular author with a free library card, rescinded her privileges.
Born in 1802, Child was prolific and daring and conventional, all at the same time, in her quiet but devastating way. She had written a novel about racial intermarriage (Hobomok) and about homemaking (The Frugal Housewife), both published in the 1820s. In the 1830s, she had compiled a History of the Condition of Women, having already edited a magazine for children, and in the 1840s, she had produced a weekly column about life in New York for the National Anti-Slavery, which she also edited for two years. That made perfect sense: the well-known phrenologist Lorenzo Fowler, after rubbing her skull, declared that the woman could not be satisfied with the world as it is.
Unhappily married to a man who had served in the Massachusetts legislature (and had supported John Quincy Adams), this contradictory and childless woman wrote often for or about children; she represented domestic virtues but left her husband to move to New York where she apparently fell in love with another man. While in New York, she visited Barnum’s American Museum—and, not at all amused, she protested his use of Native Americans for cheap display, along with monkeys and flamingos. In the 1850s, she wrote a didactic novella, “The Kansas Emigrants,” which Greeley serialized in the November 1856 Tribune—interrupting Charles Dickens’s serial Little Dorrit to do so.
Having reconciled with David Child, she tucked them both into her elderly father’s house, which she had inherited, in Wayland, Massachusetts, west of Boston and out of the fray, for the Childs had little money, little ability to travel, and they were aging. But one thing had never changed: Lydia Maria Child hated slavery. “If the monster had one head,” she said, “assuredly I should be a Charlotte Corday.” Perhaps for that reason, in the twentieth century and later, she would be remembered, if remembered at all, only for the Thanksgiving Day jingle “Over the river, and through the wood, / To Grandfather’s house we go.”
In 1859, with John Brown lying on his blood-soaked pallet in a Virginia jail, the fifty-seven-year-old Lydia Maria Child decided to contact Governor Wise and request permission to travel to Virginia to nurse him. It was an odd request by any standards—and it was of course a political one, which Wise immediately understood. Child did not mince words. Introducing herself as an “uncompromising abolitionist” who admired Brown, though she preferred peace to violence, she said she wanted simply to comfort him.
Governor Wise answered with pointed civility. “Virginia and Massachusetts are involved in no civil war,” he said, “and the Constitution which unites them in confederacy guarantees to you the privileges and immunities of a citizen of the United Sates in the State of Virginia.” But he knew who Mrs. Child was; the country knew who Mrs. Child was, and he held her responsible, in part, for what Brown had done: it was a “natural consequence,” he said, “of your sympathy.” Mrs. Child took umbrage. “Your constitutional obligation, for which you profess so much respect,” she replied, “has never proved any protection to citizens of the Free States, who happened to have a black, brown, or yellow complexion; nor to any white citizen whom you even suspected of entertaining opinions opposite to your own.”
This was a children’s versifier who would not be trifled with. Because slaveholders had “recklessly sowed the wind in Kansas,” Child continued her argument, “they reaped a whirlwind at Harper’s Ferry.” Child did not go to Virginia—Brown had replied that he’d rather she raise money for his family than tend to him—but instead entered a heated and public exchange of letters with Governor Wise and then with Senator James M. Mason’s wife, Margaretta. Sparring with Governor Wise, she outlined the events of the past decade—the filibustering and fraud, as she called it, the pretense of “squatter sovereignty,” which allowed slavery in the territories, the near murder of Charles Sumner. Then Mrs. Mason, enraged, sent her own letter to Child, lambasting her. Did Mrs. Child read her Bible? Wasn’t she a hypocrite more concerned about slaves, who were well treated, than the workers up North? Child seemed to relish the argument. Abolitionists were not ignorant fanatics—not fanatics at all, she said—and then after listing the abuses of slavery, which included rape, torture, and murder, Child lectured Mrs. Mason. “In this enlightened age, all despotisms ought to come to an end by the agency of moral and rational minds. But if they resist such agencies, it is the order of Providence that they must come to an end by violence. History is full of such lessons.”
That was the lesson of John Brown.
For in the North, as Child tartly noted, “after we have helped the mothers, we do not sell the babies.”
The letters were published the next year as a twenty-eight-page pamphlet, The Correspondence between Lydia Maria Child and Governor Wise and Mrs. Mason, of Virginia. It sold 300,000 copies, and made for as good a story as John Brown’s.
ON DECEMBER 2, 1859, the morning of his execution, John Brown wore re
d carpet slippers, white socks, a black frock coat, and a black slouch hat. He pressed a note into the hand of the guard: “I John Brown am not 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 rode out to the gallows in an open wagon, and, seated on his own coffin, he looked out toward the field and observed, “This is a beautiful country. I never had the pleasure of seeing it before.”
“JOHN BROWN MAY be a lunatic,” commented The Boston Post, but if so “then one-fourth of the people of Massachusetts are madmen.” Garrison’s Liberator, which initially had distanced itself from Brown, now embraced him. “In firing his gun, he has merely told us what time of day it is. It is high noon, thank God!” And on the day of Brown’s execution, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his diary, “This will be a great day in our history; the date of a new Revolution.”
“I believe John Brown to be the representative man of this century, as Washington was of the last,” said George Stearns. Ralph Waldo Emerson went even further. Brown’s death, he supposedly said, “will make the gallows as glorious as the cross.”
Many were able to defend Brown’s position and his courage—even Governor Wise said he admired Brown’s integrity—but they roundly condemned his violence. Courage and violence were two separate things. Yet it’s hard not to suppose that some of the fascination with Brown and admiration for him implied a tacit acceptance of his violence, though many people refused to entertain or fathom or even hear of the violence in their own rhetoric. Nonetheless, when the church bells tolled on the day of Brown’s execution, they did not toll “because the acts of Brown are generally approved, for they are not,” explained Samuel Bowles, the editor of the powerful Springfield Republican. “It is because the nature and the spirit of the man are seen to be great and noble.” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife, the woman who had cringed when forced to dine with a black woman at Horace Mann’s table, said she admired Brown. And she noted with pleasure that a clairvoyant had recently talked with the dead Brown, who had said he “condemned his past course saying that violence will never abolish slavery. The noble man is wiser now.” Such contortions of logic were not unique.
But Hawthorne drily noted that “Nobody was ever more justly hanged . . . if only in requital of his preposterous miscalculation of possibilities.” Hawthorne hit on an insight few contemporaries cared to see: Brown may have secretly wanted his raid to fail. True, he was more visionary than strategist, but friends such as Frederick Douglass had told him outright that the raid would fail, and Douglass’s reasoning was as sound as Brown’s was flawed. Brown had to have heard Douglass, but he had not listened. He had not wanted to listen. Instead, he had faced the court neither as a fanatic nor a madman but as a law abider who, by respecting the rule of law, was cultivating for the first time the wide audience he wanted. Thus, Brown’s raid wasn’t necessarily the preposterous tactical failure Hawthorne had observed, but in the long term Brown had foreseen a far more strategic victory.
To W. E. B. DuBois and several biographers, John Brown “sparked the Civil War and seeded civil rights.” Brown did kindle in the South a shock and an anger that bordered on the irrational. “People of Virginia are still making themselves ridiculous by panic and bluster,” George Templeton Strong commented. “Charlestown thrown into consternation by the mistake of a sentinel in taking a cow for an invading Abolitionist contemplating a rescue.”
Not a few Southerners regarded the North’s ability to separate Brown’s action from his courage as specious and another instance of Northern arrogance. For on a rainy day in October, John Brown had demonstrated to many a Southerner what the upshot of Republicanism would be: invasion, insurrection, destruction. “This must open the eyes of the people of the South,” noted Edmund Ruffin of Virginia, an ardent secessionist. Dressed in a long, eye-catching overcoat, Ruffin proudly stood next to the Virginia Military Institute’s color guard during Brown’s execution. Among the crowd were two other Virginians: one, a civilian, was John Wilkes Booth, and the other was Major Thomas J. Jackson (later known as the famous “Stonewall”), who taught at the Virginia Military Institute. Jackson was slightly shaken. “Before me stood a man,” he said, “in the full vigor of health, who must in a few minutes be in eternity.” He had hoped Brown would not be executed.
Unlike Jackson, Ruffin was so excited that afterward he managed to get hold of John Brown’s pikes, which he distributed to various governors in the South. Those pikes, he declared, were the “abiding and impressive evidence of the fanatical hatred borne by the dominant Northern party to the institutions and the people of the Southern States.”
Robert Toombs accused Republicans of being in moral collusion with Brown and declared all Black Republicans—a race-baiting name—to be “Brown” Republicans. Senator James Chesnut of South Carolina blamed William Seward for Harpers Ferry. Seward may have said he repudiated John Brown, but Chesnut had gotten hold of a broadside that quoted Seward’s Rochester speech about the irrepressible conflict and then said, “John Brown has only practiced what William H. Seward preaches.”
Jefferson Davis was morose. Though he considered himself a moderate, he railed at his colleagues from the North. “You announce your determination to make war upon us; and in obedience to that declaration you have made war on us,” he charged. “You have invaded us.” Jefferson Davis also parsed every sentence of Seward’s Rochester speech. Seward had pledged war, John Brown had declared it, and Brown and a thousand more Browns might well march into the South with pikes and spears and Sharpe’s rifles should a Republican, any Republican, be elected president. “Thank God,” he said, “there is no point left on which compromise can arise!”
“We are arming,” Davis also said, “not against the Government. We are arming to put down rebellion against the Government.”
(7)
THE IMPENDING CRISIS
There’s a certain slant of light, late-winter afternoons. Heavy with the coming snow, the New England sky darkens at about four thirty. In the large mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, the lamps are being lit because employees won’t leave the premises for at least another hour. Outside, the streets are quiet. Inside, machinery is pounding, and the six-story brick Pemberton building actually rocks and sways while scutchers and spreaders and carders and huge looms turn cotton fiber into cambric, into denim, into flannel. Among the seven hundred or so workers, including machinists, seamstresses, and bobbin girls, many are likely now dreaming about what they’ll do that evening when they return home.
One of those young women, Harriet Brackett, was leaning out of the window of the Duck Mill around a quarter to five on January 10, 1860. Matthew Ryan, a spinner, was at one of the third-floor windows in the Pemberton, a few yards to the east. To amuse her, he had made a mustache and beard out of cotton and put it on his face. And probably no one but the two of them would ever have known about his pantomime if the Pemberton Mill had not then tumbled to the ground in what was soon called the worst industrial disaster in U.S. history.
Gruesome news moves quickly, almost as quickly as the huge building’s collapse. For in a matter of moments it was reported that the building had imploded, trapping most of its employees. Although the mill’s agent and its treasurer had managed somehow to run out, one woman had tossed her bonnet and shawl from the tall fifth-floor window before jumping, Harriet watched in horror as Matthew clambered onto the windowsill and vaulted to his death.
As many as half the workers hurled themselves out of the building. Most of them were immigrants from Ireland and Scotland. They raced down stairwells if they could before the oak floors gave way, the walls collapsed, and the iron struts and massive machines fell inward and on top of them. More than three hundred workers lay trapped, dead, or dying. Seventy percent of them were women and girls.
About two thousand rescue workers, including volunteers from the high school, rushed to the Pemberton Mill, or
what remained of it. Lugging ropes and picks, they lit huge bonfires so they might see through the tangled mess of machine, brick, and twisted metal. Fires were breaking out all over the place. The firefighters doused them with force pumps or carried whomever they could to safety: girls with missing arms, men with missing legs, women with faces mashed beyond recognition. Maurice Palmer, one of the foremen, managed to cut his own throat, assuming that a speedy death might spare him from knowing he was being roasted alive.
The mayor of Lawrence, meantime, had telegraphed the mayor in the nearby city of Lowell to ask for more firemen. The doctors had by then arrived, mostly to no avail. Freed from the rubble, workers were taken to the temporary hospital set up in City Hall, where part of the main room served as a makeshift morgue. At midnight, while rescue teams were still trying to put out the local fires and to pull women and men from the piles of debris, one man accidentally plunged his pick into a lantern, and a spark shot out, igniting the combustible piles of cotton and whooshing them into a wall of flame. Survivors screamed; one firefighter dropped dead; three young girls were later found incinerated, clutching one another. By daybreak, the place was a charred heap of black ash and bone.
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