by Tony Horwitz
Nine men agreed to follow him back to his training base in Iowa. Only then did he reveal the mission that would cost most of them their lives. As one of the recruits later stated in a jailhouse confession, “Here we found that Capt. Brown’s ultimate destination was the State of Virginia.”
BROWN HAD LONG PLANNED to carry his crusade against slavery into “Africa,” and his efforts to raise a Kansas defense force were one means to that end—a way to acquire arms, train a crack unit, and make trial incursions into neighboring Missouri. But in the summer of 1857, marooned without money or men, he had refined his scheme and resolved to accelerate its execution.
Brown also homed in on a specific target. Over the years, he canvassed a number of possible sites for a first strike, considering locales as distant as New Orleans. But with characteristic “fixedness,” he kept returning to a terrain that had long enchanted him: the rugged mountain corridor linking Pennsylvania to the South.
Brown’s preoccupation with the Alleghenies may have dated to 1840, when he surveyed Oberlin’s landholdings in western Virginia and briefly considered settling there. He returned to the region as a wool merchant, and he had mentioned the Alleghenies to Frederick Douglass in the winter of 1847–48, when he disclosed his nascent plan for launching raids to free slaves and funnel them north along the mountains.
Brown’s thinking had since grown far bolder. A student of military history and slave revolts, he took time during his wool-selling trip to Europe to tour battlefields and fortifications on the Continent. By the summer of 1857, he was poring over maps of the South, listing strategic locations and making notes on historical examples of small, mountain-based units successfully battling conventional armies. “Guerrilla warfare See Life of Lord Wellington Page 71 to Page 75,” he wrote in his pocket diary, referring to a passage about Spanish partisans in the Napoleonic Wars.
Brown’s years in Springfield also exposed him to an industry for which that city was renowned: gun manufacturing. Most of the weapons were produced for the government at a massive federal factory in the city. There was only one other such facility in the nation, to which Springfield had close ties: the U.S. Armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
In the 1790s, as the United States sought to free itself from dependence on foreign and privately made arms, President George Washington had determined that his young country needed to establish at least two armories. Springfield, an early milling center with a preexisting arsenal, seemed an obvious choice. But Harpers Ferry was quite the opposite, a frontier hamlet in the Blue Ridge Mountains, located at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers. This water gap, known to early pioneers as the Hole, was so dramatic and untamed that Thomas Jefferson judged it “one of the most stupendous scenes in nature,” a vista “worth a voyage across the Atlantic.”
Washington took a more utilitarian view. A man of many parts, he was among other things a land speculator and transportation booster with grand visions for the river that ran past his plantation at Mount Vernon. He had long dreamed of making the Potomac a busy corridor between the Atlantic Seaboard and the Ohio Valley; upon becoming president, he touted Harpers Ferry as an ideal site for a national armory.
“This spot affords every advantage that could be wished for,” Washington wrote his secretary of war in 1795. The Shenandoah and Potomac provided endless water power; the surrounding hills abounded with timber and iron ore for gunstocks and barrels. And Harpers Ferry was just sixty miles from the new nation’s capital, roughly in the middle of the country as it then existed.
As a military strategist, Washington was also mindful of defense. Harpers Ferry—well inland, walled by mountains, and moated by rivers—was the most secure place imaginable to manufacture and store the nation’s guns.
“There is not a spot in the United States, which combines more or greater requisites,” Washington wrote, “considered either as a place of immense strength,” or as “inaccessible by an enemy.”
U.S. armory at Harpers Ferry, 1803
The nation’s first president had in mind a European threat: soldiers arriving by sea, as they’d done in the Revolutionary War and would do again during the War of 1812. In Washington’s day, it was impossible to imagine that the attack on the armory, when it came, would be launched by an enemy within.
WHEN, PRECISELY, BROWN FIXED on Harpers Ferry as a target isn’t clear, but he first mentioned it in 1857, during his sojourn in Tabor, Iowa. Though he had no one for Hugh Forbes to drill, Brown used the former Garibaldi partisan as a sounding board for his military plotting when Forbes arrived in Iowa. The plan of attack he disclosed was similar in its opening to his original scheme: a party of twenty-five to fifty guerrillas would strike a slave district in Virginia, inducing hundreds of slaves to join his mountain band. But what Brown expected would come after this was novel.
Brown planned to give mounts to eighty or a hundred of the freed slaves and “make a dash” at the Harpers Ferry armory, destroying whatever guns he couldn’t carry off. Other parties would conduct additional raids on slave districts, which in turn would swell the guerrillas’ ranks. Brown thought he “could easily maintain himself in the Alleghanies” against the U.S. troops that would likely arrive within a few days. Finally, and most grandiosely, Brown believed his New England allies “would in the meantime call a Northern Convention to restore tranquility and overthrow the pro-Slavery Administration.”
This was a very different scheme from the Subterranean Pass Way to freedom Brown had described to Frederick Douglass a decade earlier. In some respects, his new strategy resembled that of the proslavery “filibusters” who invaded Latin America in the 1850s. Like them, he envisioned leading a small private army with the ultimate goal of toppling the government. The obvious difference was that he sought to destroy slavery in his own country, while filibusters aimed to expand it beyond the nation’s borders.
Hugh Forbes—whose letters are the only documentation of the Tabor strategy session—raised a number of objections to Brown’s plan. Unless slaves were forewarned of the plot, he told Brown, the “invitation to rise” would “meet with no response or a feeble one.” If an uprising did occur, it would be “either a flash in the pan, or would leap beyond his control or any control.” Forbes had even less faith in a Northern Convention. “Brown’s New-England friends would not have the courage to show themselves, so long as the issue was doubtful,” he wrote.
Forbes also proposed an alternative plan, close to Brown’s earlier scheme: hit-and-run raids along slavery’s frontier, to “stampede” slaves to Canada and make the institution untenable in border regions. This battle line could then be pushed slowly southward, further destabilizing the peculiar institution.
After days of debate, the two men forged a “mixed plan” and agreed that its execution would be overseen by a “Committee of Management.” Or so Forbes claimed to believe. He was first and foremost an opportunist, intent on using the intelligence he gathered at Tabor to enrich himself. And he was shrewd enough to know that compromise and shared leadership were anathema to Brown, a man whose plans were never “mixed” or managed by committee.
Forbes also grasped that Brown’s zeal was impervious to military doubts. “He was very pious, and had been deeply impressed for years with the Bible story of Gideon,” Forbes wrote, “believing that he with a handful of men could strike down slavery.”
THE NINE RECRUITS WHO followed Brown back to Tabor in the autumn of 1857, just after Forbes’s departure, were cut from very different cloth than their leader. One was an English poet, who styled himself a “protégé” of Lord Byron’s widow. Another was an Army bugler who had been sentenced to death for “drunken riot and mutiny.” Several were Spiritualists who rejected traditional Christianity. None was married, and most had migrated west seeking work or adventure before getting caught up in the Kansas struggle.
This experience had imbued them with a militant commitment to fighting slavery—the quality Brown most sought. “The persons I have with me a
re mostly well tried men,” he wrote Mary, “& all of them are pledged to stand by the work.”
But they weren’t in thrall to Brown or to his strategy. In fact, several of the men voiced strong objections upon learning that Brown’s mysterious strike against slavery was aimed at Virginia. “Some warm words passed between him and myself in regard to the plan, which I had supposed was to be confined entirely to Kansas and Missouri,” one of the men later wrote. At this point, there was no mention of Harpers Ferry; Brown said only that the men would go east to prepare for their mission. Only “after a good deal of wrangling,” one of the dissidents wrote, did the nine men agree to go ahead.
In early December 1857, Brown, his son Owen, and the new volunteers loaded covered wagons with the weapons stored in a Tabor barn and began a slow trek east across Iowa. The “11 desperadoes,” as Owen referred to the band in his diary, walked beside the wagons, through heavy snow, and spent nights around a log fire, singing and picking at lice. They also held “Lyceums or discussions of some question,” one of the men wrote, usually a topic proposed by Brown and “he always presiding.”
Owen made notes on these extraordinary sessions in his journal. “Cold, wet and snowy; hot discussion upon the Bible and war,” he wrote. “Warm argument upon the effects of the abolition of Slavery upon the Southern States, Northern States, commerce and manufactures, also upon the British provinces and the civilized world; whence came our civilization and origin? talk about prejudices against color; question proposed for debate—greatest general, Washington or Napoleon. Very cold night; prairie wolves howl nobly.”
In late December, the band reached a railhead in eastern Iowa and shipped their arms to Ohio, where Brown planned to train his men before embarking for Virginia in the spring. But, unable to sell his horse and wagons to raise money for the onward journey, he swapped them for winter board at a farm near Springdale, a mostly Quaker community that was a well-traveled stop on the Underground Railroad.
Quartered in the farmhouse attic, the men commenced training at what Owen wryly called their “War College.” Since Hugh Forbes was no longer available, the job of drillmaster fell to the Army deserter in Brown’s ranks, who went by the alias Colonel Whipple. He oversaw maneuvers in a field behind the farmhouse, including drills with wooden swords, and calisthenics to harden the men for mountain operations. They also studied Forbes’s manual on guerrilla tactics.
Neighboring Iowans weren’t sure what to make of these paramilitary exercises. As Quakers, they disapproved of violence, but they also hated slavery. Most locals believed the men were preparing to return to Kansas; others, curiously, thought the strangers were a band of Mormon spies.
Over time, however, relations became closer. On snowbound days and long winter nights, the men grew restless. Some played chess, checkers, and cards; others were skilled debaters and began holding mock legislative sessions in a local schoolhouse. Following parliamentary rules of order, the men introduced and voted on bills related to slavery, women’s rights, temperance, and other questions. These “legislatures” became popular entertainment for neighboring Iowans.
The men, all bachelors, also started courting local women. This led to the mock “censure” of one of Brown’s men, “for hugging girls in Springdale Legislature.” Another man evidently took far greater liberties. Months later, a Quaker couple wrote to demand details of his relationship with their daughter and ask whether she was “the worse for their intimacy.”
BROWN STERNLY DISAPPROVED OF such licentious behavior, but he wasn’t present to monitor it. Within a few weeks of the band’s arrival in Springdale, he went east to raise money. This time, he went about his fund-raising very differently. Rather than speak in public venues, seeking aid from all quarters, he cloaked his movements and sought discreet support from the few men he believed willing to back his “secret service.”
One of his first stops, in late January 1858, was at the Rochester, New York, home of Frederick Douglass. He stayed three weeks and seemed possessed by his mission, drawing up plans and drafting a “constitution” for the revolutionary state he intended to found in the mountains of Virginia. “His whole time and thought were given to this subject,” Douglass wrote. “It was the first thing in the morning, and the last thing at night; till, I confess, it began to be something of a bore to me.”
Brown’s feverish planning included sketches of mountain redoubts. “These forts were to be so arranged as to connect one with the other by secret passages, so that if one was carried another could be easily fallen back upon,” Douglass said. “I was less interested in these drawings than my children were.”
Brown was on fire in his correspondence as well. “Courage, courage, courage!” he wrote his wife and children in North Elba, in a letter filled with exclamation points, urging them to be stalwart as he undertook “the great work of my life.” He also remobilized John junior, who, in an effort to calm his shattered nerves, had turned to a quiet life of farming in Ohio. “Kansas is daugerotyped upon my heart,” John junior wrote that February, “a stormy yet glorious picture.”
Though no longer fit for armed service, the son answered his father’s call to help with logistics. Brown gave him instructions about the weapons he’d shipped from Iowa, which were initially hidden beneath coffins in a furniture warehouse near John junior’s house. Brown also urged him to travel to Gettysburg, Chambersburg, and other towns in southern Pennsylvania to quietly seek out allies. “When you look at the location of those places you will readily perceive the advantage of getting up some acquaintances in those parts.”
Brown then spilled out another page of orders, asking John junior to visit Washington as well. “I want to get good maps, & State statistics of the different Southern States,” he wrote. Brown was sometimes scolding of John junior, but he closed this letter with encouraging words for his fragile son: “I have no doubt you would by diligence & patient perseverence fully succeed in raising the wind.”
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Theodore Parker
Brown deployed a similar mix of flattery and exhortation in his letters seeking financial support. To Thomas Wentworth Higginson—a militant minister who believed in breaking apart the Union to destroy slavery—Brown wrote: “I now want to get for the perfecting of by far the most important undertaking of my whole life from $500 to $800 within the next sixty days. Hope this is my last effort in the begging line.”
The fiery Higginson replied: “I am always ready to invest money in treason, but at present have none to invest.” He also pointed out that he was already attempting to raise money for the Underground Railroad.
“Rail Road business on a somewhat extended scale is the identical object for which I am trying to get means,” Brown shot back. He appealed to the minister’s considerable vanity as well. “I have been told you are both a true man & a true abolitionist,” he wrote, at the same time questioning whether this was so of others in their circle.
The same day, Brown sent a separate letter to Theodore Parker—one of the men named in his note to Higginson—and played the identical game. “I have written to some of our mutual friends,” Brown told Parker, “but none of them understand my views so well as you do.” Brown added that he wasn’t certain these other friends were “deeply-dyed Abolitionists,” as Parker most assuredly was.
THESE SLY, STROKING APPEALS had their intended effect. In early 1858, Higginson, Parker, and four other men agreed to form a cadre to support Brown’s mission. Though the group would later become known as the Secret Six, it was composed of very public and prominent figures. Four were Harvard graduates, the most distinguished of them Parker, a leading Transcendentalist and radical Boston minister. Among other bold acts, he had harbored and then married a fugitive slave couple, handing the groom a sword to guard against slave catchers. Parker was also an eloquent orator—his was the famous declaration that the arc of the moral universe “bends towards justice.”
Higginson, a protégé of Parker’s, was another Harv
ard Divinity School graduate and clergyman, as well as a writer (he later became the mentor of Emily Dickinson). But his literary and spiritual pursuits were coupled with a temperament that resembled Brown’s. Higginson was one of the abolitionists who had battered down the door of a Boston courthouse in 1854 to free the fugitive slave Anthony Burns. He was also a boxing and bodybuilding enthusiast, intolerant of weakness and impatient for muscular action. In one letter to Brown, he wrote: “I long to see you with adequate funds in your hands, set free from timid advisers, & able to act in your own way.”
Samuel Gridley Howe was another well-bred man of action. The grandson of a participant in the Boston Tea Party, he graduated from Harvard Medical School and was inspired by Lord Byron to join Greece’s revolution against Turkey as a soldier-surgeon. He later aided Polish insurgents fighting Russia. Returning to Boston, Howe became a pioneer in the care of the blind, deaf, and mentally disabled. He also married the poet Julia Ward Howe, who would immortalize Brown’s spirit in the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—and who was so dispirited by her dashing, unfaithful husband that she wrote, “Hope died as I was led, / Unto my marriage bed.”
Samuel Gridley Howe
George Luther Stearns
While Parker, Higginson, and Howe brought ideological fire to Brown’s cause, George Luther Stearns provided money and guns. A self-made magnate, enriched by the manufacture of linseed oil and lead pipe, he was the Kansas Committee chair who had paid on his own to send Brown two hundred revolvers, while also pledging thousands of dollars. On his doctor’s advice, Stearns wore an extravagant beard to warm his chest and throat and protect them from bronchial problems. In other respects, he was the most conventional and businesslike of the Secret Six—in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “no boaster or pretender, but a man for up-hill work.”
