The Insurrectionist

by Herb Karl

  On the platform—suspended from a crossbeam between two posts—was an iron hook. Attached to the hook was the thin hemp rope forming a noose. Under the noose was the trapdoor, held in place by a strand of rope looped over the crossbeam and tied to the base of a post.

  Brown waited as Avis removed a length of cloth from his coat and tied the old man’s legs together at the knees. It was imperative that the legs—like the arms—be bound in order that they not inhibit the fall through the trapdoor.

  In the field in front of the scaffold, General Taliaferro’s men were engaged in a series of movements integrating them into the formation. Wise had told Taliaferro that the people who witnessed the execution—especially the reporters from Northern newspapers—should have impressed upon them the pride Virginia took in the discipline and precision of her military units.

  Avis, meanwhile, reached up to remove Brown’s hat before producing yet another item from a pocket in his coat: a white hood.

  “I have no words to thank you for your kindness,” the old man said.

  The jailer nodded.

  Brown bowed slightly so the hood could be slipped over his head.

  “You must step forward,” Avis said, once the hood was in place.

  “You shall have to help me,” Brown said, “as I cannot see.”

  When the old man was positioned over the trapdoor, Avis asked if he was ready.

  “Ready,” Brown said calmly. “Do not keep me any longer than is necessary.”

  Avis guided the hooded head into the noose, made certain the rope was firm but not taut at the neck.

  Though Brown was ready, Virginia wasn’t. For several more minutes the old man was compelled to listen to the shouting of commands as Taliaferro’s soldiers paraded in close order to prescribed locations. When they were finally in place, the shouting ceased.

  Sheriff Campbell’s hatchet cut the rope cleanly. The trapdoor fell and Brown plummeted through the opening.

  Forty minutes later, the undertaker, Mr. Sadler, saw to it that the body was taken from the gallows and placed in the coffin in the bed of the furniture wagon. Sadler drove the wagon to the Winchester and Potomac railroad depot in Charles Town, where the coffin was loaded onto a special two-car train destined for Harpers Ferry. From there, Mary would arrange for transportation to North Elba.

  The militant abolitionist John Brown was dead, but his war on slavery was not yet over.

  Epilogue

  John Brown was laid to rest at his farm in the Adirondack Mountains of New York on Thursday, December 8, 1859. But his ghost continued to spread fear throughout the slaveholding South. Hardly a week went by that Southern newspapers weren’t reporting the aftershocks of the Harpers Ferry invasion, warning of more slave insurrections, turning up the heat on the simmering cauldron of secession.

  In early July 1860, a series of fires swept through Dallas and neighboring Texas communities. Editors of the Texas State Gazette, the Houston Weekly Tribune, and the Texas Republican blamed the deadly fires on Yankee abolitionists inspired by Brown. The papers carried stories accusing abolitionists of poisoning wells and inciting slaves to kill masters and rape their wives. In South Carolina, the Savannah Republican called the Texas troubles a “re-enactment of the John Brown affair.” As the specter of another Nat Turner rebellion loomed, editors across the South leaped at the opportunity to tell their readers that what happened in Dallas could happen to them and that the time had come to leave the Union and create a separate Southern nation.

  Even after his death, the newspapers continued to be Brown’s greatest ally.

  The Southern press wasn’t alone in judging the effects of Brown’s invasion on the nation’s fragile condition. In the North, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley followed with great interest the extraordinary volume of commentary appearing in Southern newspapers—most of it castigating abolitionists and Republicans. He also noted the gradual change in attitude adopted by editors in the North. To some of them, the old man was indeed a hero.

  The more Greeley pondered the fiery rhetoric that filled the newspapers in the weeks following Brown’s execution, the more he came to view what happened at Harpers Ferry as the latest act in a national drama whose climax would be the civil war New York senator William Seward had hinted at in a speech he’d given in 1858. Seward declared that the North and the South were engaged in an “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it meant the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation or entirely a free-labor nation.”

  Fearing the irrepressible conflict was closer than many suspected, Greeley wrote to one of his correspondents in Indiana that Brown’s “so-called insurrection” would “drive the slave power to new outrages.” He concluded the letter with: “I think the end of slavery in Virginia is ten years nearer than it seemed a few weeks ago.”

  As it turned out, Greeley’s prediction was too conservative.

  In the predawn hours of April 12, 1861—one year, four months, and eleven days after Brown’s body was carted away from a Virginia cornfield—artillery batteries from South Carolina’s newly formed provisional forces began shelling federal troops garrisoned at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. South Carolina was the first of eleven states to secede from the Union.

  And so began the war between the North and the South—the American Civil War.

  Like Greeley, Brown also had made a prediction, one he wrote on the scrap of paper he handed the guard who bound his arms before he boarded the wagon that took him to the gallows. It read as follows:

  Charlestown, Va. 2nd December 1859. 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, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.

  The guard had forgotten about the note. It didn’t surface until weeks later.

  Brown’s prediction, just as Greeley’s, was too conservative. The American Civil War required an unthinkable amount of blood to be shed before slavery was expunged and the nation again was made whole. According to the most recent estimates, the number of combatants from both sides who died in battle or from related causes stands at almost three quarters of a million.

  The Civil War was—and still is—the bloodiest war in America’s history.

  Acknowledgments

  A goal of mine in writing this novel was to capture the character of John Brown by absorbing what I discovered in the many relevant sources available on bookshelves and online. I drew on works—some more scholarly than others—from the past and present, all of them permitting me to understand a complex man living in a complex era. Among my most valuable sources were Oswald Garrison Villard’s classic biography John Brown: A Biography Fifty Years After, published in 1910, and David S. Reynolds’s impeccably researched and brilliantly constructed John Brown, Abolitionist (2005). I am also deeply indebted to Tony Horwitz’s Midnight Rising, Stephen B. Oates’s To Purge This Land with Blood, Evan Carton’s Patriotic Treason, T. Lloyd Benson’s The Caning of Senator Sumner, Janet Kemper Beck’s Creating the John Brown Legend, James Brewer Stewart’s Holy Warriors, David Donald’s Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, Richard Hinton’s John Brown and His Men, Robert E. McGlone’s John Brown’s War Against Slavery, Robert M. De Witt’s The Life, Trial and Execution of John Brown, W. E. B. DuBois’s John Brown, Osborne P. Anderson’s A Voice from Harper’s Ferry, Thomas Drew’s compilation The John Brown Invasion, Eric H. Walther’s The Fire-Eaters, John Stauffer’s The Black Hearts of Men and Stauffer and Zoe Trodd’s Meteor of War and The Tribunal, James Redpath’s The Public Life of Capt. John Brown, Frederick Douglass’s The Narrative and Selected Writings, Philip S. Foner’s The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (volume 2), Edward J. Renehan Jr.’s The Secret Six, Robert Penn Warren’s John Brown, Thomas Goodrich’s War to the Knife, Clinton Cox’s Fiery Vision, Nicole Etcheson’s Bleeding Kansas, Merrill D. Peterson’s John Brown, Frank Sanborn’
s The Life and Letters of John Brown, Liberator of Kansas and Martyr of Virginia, Elijah Avey’s The Capture and Execution of John Brown, Carl Bode’s The Portable Thoreau, Barrie Stavis’s John Brown: The Sword and the Word, Jean Libby’s Black Voices from Harper’s Ferry and “After Harpers Ferry” in the Californians, Hannah N. Geffert’s “John Brown and His Black Allies: An Ignored Alliance,” Louis DeCaro Jr.’s John Brown: The Cost of Freedom, Richard O. Boyer’s The Legend of John Brown, Fergus M. Bordewich’s “Day of Reckoning,” Stan Cohen’s John Brown, Robert A. Ferguson’s The Trial in American Life, Lacy K. Ford Jr.’s Origins of Southern Radicalism, C. Vann Woodward’s The Burden of Southern History, Philip F. Gura’s American Transcendentalism, and Ernest B. Furgurson’s Freedom Rising.

  Aside from acknowledging the foregoing, I owe a debt of gratitude to several people who provided much-needed information. They include Travis Westly from the Library of Congress, Gloria Beiter from the South Carolina Historical Society, and the most gracious staff of the Old Edgefield District Genealogical Society, Edgefield, South Carolina.

  Special thanks go to the Millers—Anita and Jordan—for seeing a future for what I’d written.

  To my editor, Devon Freeny, I can only express my deepest appreciation for his meticulous attention to detail in shepherding the manuscript to its conclusion.

  I’m also obliged to mention those folks who provided small acts of kindness during the writing: Richard F. Dietrich and Lawrence R. Broer, scholars and writers both, and my kinfolk, Sam and Steve Nichols.

  And finally there’s the person without whom the book would never have been begun, much less completed. The muse of Umatilla: Robert H. Miller (no relation to Anita and Jordan). Thank you, Harv.