Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price

by Tony Horwitz

  The last two members of the Secret Six were already close associates of Brown: his upstate New York patron, Gerrit Smith, and the Concord teacher Franklin Sanborn. It was to them, at Smith’s estate in late February, that Brown first unveiled the nature of his “secret service.” Sanborn immediately scribbled a note to Higginson, filled with the aliases and coded language that Brown so often employed.

  “Our friend Hawkins,” he wrote, is “entering largely into the wool business, in which he has been more or less engaged all his life. He now has a plan—the result of many years’ study.” On the back of the letter were Brown’s penciled sketches of his mountain forts, labeled “Woollen machinery.”

  A month later, in March 1858, the “secret committee” of six was established, its mission to raise money and other aid for Brown and his men. But the alliance was delicate from the start. The Secret Six shared Brown’s seething hatred of slavery and his scorn for pacifist remedies. In most other respects, they were poles apart. Brown was a religious conservative, whose faith differed greatly from the unorthodox theology that Parker and Higginson espoused. A man of very modest means, he resented begging in Brahmin parlors, amid what he called the “wealth, luxury, and extravagance of this ‘Heaven exalted’ people.” And he resisted his backers’ strategic advice, instead relying on his own judgment and the “unseen Hand” of Providence.

  This obstinacy became evident when Brown first shared his “wool business” plans at Gerrit Smith’s home in Peterboro. Sanborn and Smith immediately raised concerns about the “manifest hopelessness” of defeating slavery with a small band. To which Brown confidently replied: “If God be for us, who can be against us?”

  Sanborn and Smith mulled the matter during a walk through the snowy fields of the Peterboro estate. They regarded Brown’s mission as “dangerous, and even desperate,” Sanborn wrote. Most of the other members of the Secret Six also harbored doubts about Brown’s chances of success. But it was obvious that nothing would deter him from going ahead. “We cannot give him up to die alone; we must support him,” Smith declared.

  This humane sentiment wasn’t the only motive for backing Brown. The danger and desperation of his plan appealed to the Secret Six, as did his faith that he was God’s instrument. Brown was no “milk-and-water” abolitionist, believing in talk and moral suasion. He was a blunt and righteous weapon, like Higginson’s battering ram. Even if he failed, Brown’s assault on the Slave Power might bring on the great conflict necessary to vanquish it.

  “He is of the stuff of which martyrs are made,” Samuel Gridley Howe wrote a wealthy associate he hoped would give money to Brown. “Under his natural and unaffected simplicity and modesty there is an irresistible propensity to war upon injustice and wrong.”

  Gerrit Smith, least secret of the Six, was more explicit. In March, as the conspirators formed their committee, he wrote an abolitionist congressman: “The slave will be delivered by the shedding of blood, and the signs are multiplying that his deliverance is at hand.”

  CHAPTER 6

  This Spark of Fire

  In April 1858, Brown returned to Iowa to collect the volunteers he’d recruited for his “wool business,” as Sanborn continued to call it. The “flock of sheep” in Springdale had grown by two during Brown’s absence, but was still too small to put the “mill” into operation. Brown hoped to find more men, and another asset he deemed essential, by taking a detour north—to Canada.

  Before traveling back to Iowa, he’d scouted across the border and chosen the town of Chatham, for “a very quiet convention.” Fifty miles east of Detroit, Chatham was a terminus of the Underground Railroad and home to more than a thousand blacks, many of them former slaves. Brown distributed a circular seeking “true friends of freedom.” In early May, he returned to Canada, this time with his “flock”; about thirty-five men joined them at a Baptist church for a gathering disguised as a meeting to establish a black Masonic lodge.

  In reality, Brown had convened a latter-day Constitutional Convention: the secret creation of a new American government. The delegates—all black, apart from Brown and eleven of his Iowa cohort—included a printer, a gunsmith, a schoolmaster, a minister, a poet, and the pioneering black nationalist Martin Delany, a physician and editor who was soon to lead the “Niger Valley Exploring Party” to found a colony of American blacks in Africa.

  A secretary took notes as Dr. Delany made a motion for Brown “to state the object of the convention,” which he did “at length.” For many years, Brown said, the idea of freeing the slaves “had possessed him like a passion,” and he’d “read all the books upon insurrectionary warfare which he could lay his hands upon.” The mountain-based guerrilla action he now planned, and which he outlined, would cause slaves to “immediately rise all over the Southern States.” As they did so, a new social order would emerge, with its own schools, churches, and government.

  Brown then presented “a plan for organization” for this new society, entitled “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States.” In many respects, it mimicked the existing U.S. Constitution, including a preamble and articles ordered by Roman numerals. But the language was more John Brown than James Madison.

  “Whereas, Slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable War of one portion of its citizens upon another portion,” the preamble began, “WE, CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES, AND THE OPPRESSED PEOPLE … ORDAIN AND ESTABLISH FOR OURSELVES, THE FOLLOWING PROVISIONAL CONSTITUTION.”

  Brown’s redrafting of one of the nation’s founding documents wasn’t in itself bizarre. Antebellum reformers and Utopians did so routinely; a statement of women’s rights, for instance, was modeled on the Declaration of Independence. Abolitionists were especially prone to challenging the sanctity of the Constitution, and never more so than in the late 1850s, following the Supreme Court’s notorious ruling in the Dred Scott case, a year before the Chatham Convention.

  Dred Scott, a Missouri slave, sued for his freedom on the basis of living for many years in free territory, where he had been taken by an owner who was posted in the North as a military officer. Not only did the Court rule against Scott, it also declared that the Founders had never intended for blacks—free or slave—to have any of the privileges of U.S. citizens. As the staunchly proslavery chief justice, Roger Taney, wrote in his opinion, blacks had “no rights that white men were bound to respect.”

  John Brown cited this infamous ruling in his constitution’s preamble, which explained why a new government was needed “to protect our persons, property, lives, and liberties.” But the forty-eight articles that followed were less concerned with rights than with the command structure of Brown’s highly militarized state. The role of its weak president and Congress was mainly to advise a powerful commander-in-chief, who could tap the treasury as needed for money and valuables “captured by honorable warfare.” Article XL was directed toward another preoccupation of Brown’s. It forbade “filthy conversation,” “indecent behavior,” “intoxication,” and “unlawful intercourse.”

  The constitution was read aloud at Chatham, debated, and signed the same day. “Every man was anxious to have his name at the head,” wrote one of Brown’s Iowa party. But the delegates showed distinctly less enthusiasm two days later, when they reconvened to elect officials. The black men nominated for the presidency declined to stand; the post was left vacant, along with many others. Only two congressmen were appointed, and the cabinet was filled by Iowa recruits. Brown, unsurprisingly, was “elected by acclamation” as commander-in-chief.

  “Had a good Abolition convention here,” he wrote his wife two days later. “Great unanimity prevailed.” In a narrow sense, this was true. He’d sought black approval for his war on slavery and received it, with the delegates enthusiastically signing his constitution. But he’d hoped for much fuller participation in his campaign, writing upon his arrival in Canada: “There is the most abundant ma
terial; & of the right quality: in this quarter.”

  Brown was also keen to enlist one woman: Harriet Tubman, who had escaped slavery in Maryland and courageously slipped back into the South many times to guide other fugitives to freedom. She lived in Canada part of the year and seemed to Brown an ideal partner, able to recruit foot soldiers and advise him on infiltrating the northern borderlands of slavery. After meeting with her on his reconnaissance trip to Canada, Brown felt certain of her support.

  “Hariet Tubman hooked on his whole team at once,” he exulted in a letter to John junior, referring to Tubman in masculine terms as a mark of his respect. “He Hariet is the most of a man naturally; that I ever met with.”

  But to Brown’s dismay, Tubman didn’t appear at the Chatham meeting. Nor did several other black leaders he’d invited. In the end, his Canadian sojourn yielded only one fully committed recruit: Osborne Anderson, a Pennsylvania-born printer who was named to Brown’s provisional congress and later joined him in the field.

  Many blacks in Chatham and the nearby towns would volunteer to fight in the Civil War. But they were painfully familiar with slavery, from their own experience or that of people close to them. Brown’s vision and ardor inspired more admiration for him than confidence in his chances of success—or in the chances of anyone who went with him.

  BROWN ENCOUNTERED SIMILAR RESISTANCE from his own family. Some were no longer fit for active duty, others reluctant. Jason, like his older brother, John, “had the blues very bad” after Kansas and needed to settle down or risk what he called “a crazy spell.” Salmon had healed from the gunshot wound he sustained in Kansas but felt he must “quit running around” and had married a North Elba woman. Brown hoped to enlist her brothers, but they also declined.

  “I should be most glad to have Three come on from North Elba at least,” he wrote, as the pool of possible recruits dwindled. Saying no to the “old man” wasn’t easy. Though his son-in-law, Henry Thompson, had three young children and a bullet still lodged in his back from the Battle of Black Jack, Brown pleaded with his wife. “O my daughter Ruth! Could any plan be devised whereby you could let Henry go ‘to school,’” he wrote, in his customary code. “I would rather now have him ‘for another term’ than to have a hundred average scholars.”

  “Dear father, you have asked me rather a hard question,” Ruth wrote back. “I cannot bear the thought of Henry leaving me again, yet I feel selfish. When I think of my poor, despised sisters, that are deprived of both husband and children, I feel deeply for them.”

  Brown kept pressing, until Henry replied himself. “My whole heart is in the work,” he wrote in late April, but he feared that if he joined Brown and failed to return, his family would be left destitute. “Nothing but three little helpless children keeps me at home.”

  Ruth appended an apologetic note of her own. “I hope you will not blame me,” she wrote. “I should like to have him go with you if I could feel that he would live to come back.” Lest her father think she lacked faith, Ruth added: “I do feel that God has been with you thus far, and will still be with you in your great and benevolent work.”

  But she undercut this vote of confidence in the letter’s last line: quoting her son, Ruth wrote, “Johnny says ‘tell Grandfather that I hope he will live to come back here again.’”

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, the issue became moot, at least for the time being. Brown had originally intended to launch his attack right after the Chatham Convention, which ended on May 10. But this plan was never realistic and it began to unravel even before he left Canada. The root cause, characteristically, was Brown’s money management, compounded by his poor judgment of personnel.

  Brown’s disgruntled drillmaster, Hugh Forbes, had turned to blackmail. After leaving Iowa, Forbes wrote to members of the Secret Six, demanding money, which he said Brown had promised was forthcoming from “New England humanitarians.” When these importunings failed, Forbes spread his net wider, even accosting an abolitionist congressman on the floor of the U.S. Senate. He disclosed elements of Brown’s plans and named several of the men who had provided him money and arms.

  This threw the Secret Six into a panic. They feared Forbes would go fully public, exposing Brown’s plans and their own complicity. Gerrit Smith, the most skittish of the Six, argued that they should abandon the plot altogether. Others suggested a delay. Thomas Wentworth Higginson wanted to plunge ahead regardless, as did Brown, who complained to the pugnacious minister that the others had lost their nerve because “they were not men of action.”

  But the majority won out. In mid-May, over Higginson’s objections, the Secret Six suspended funding of Brown’s mission until the following winter or spring. In the interim, Brown should return to Kansas, to “blind” Forbes and discredit any claims he might make about a southern attack. The Six also sought distance from the conspiracy itself. “I do not wish to know Captain Brown’s plans,” Smith wrote Sanborn. “I hope he will keep them to himself.”

  THIS POSTPONEMENT WAS A blow not only to Brown but to the dozen soldiers he’d thus far recruited. Following the Chatham Convention, most of them had holed up in a Cleveland boardinghouse, restlessly awaiting orders. In early June 1858, Brown informed them that Forbes’s betrayal had choked off funding. He had no choice but to disband the party and let the men find work where they could until he called them into service again.

  Some of the volunteers chose to follow Brown back to Kansas. Others became disillusioned and drifted off, never to rejoin the unit. But one man headed in a different direction. John Cook, born to a well-to-do family in Connecticut, was a reckless and romantic figure even by the standards of Brown’s extraordinary band. Earlier in life, Cook had trained for the law, but at twenty-five he fled his staid eastern roots for Kansas, where he gained renown as a crack shot and daring free-state fighter. When Brown went to Kansas in late 1857 to recruit soldiers for his secret mission, the Connecticut Yankee was the first man he sought.

  Cook was also a blond, blue-eyed charmer who sent his female admirers letters filled with flower petals and florid verse. “He would have a girl in a corner telling them stories or repeating poetry to them in such a high faluting manner that they would laugh to kill themselves,” Salmon Brown recalled. Another Kansas fighter described Cook as “suavity itself.”

  But his “rage for talking” became a source of unease for Brown’s clandestine band. As they hid out in Cleveland after the Chatham Convention, Cook behaved “in a manner well calculated to arouse suspicion,” one recruit warned Brown. He brandished his guns, boasted of being on a “secret expedition,” and “talked a great deal too much” to a “lady friend.”

  Cook was so impatient and gung-ho that he proposed to three of his companions that they head south on their own. This didn’t happen. But when Brown came to Cleveland in June and announced an indefinite postponement, he consented to a solo mission. Cook would go ahead alone to Harpers Ferry, “to see how things were there, and to gain information.”

  Brown had qualms about this plan, and cautioned his cocky and garrulous scout to say nothing of their ultimate objective. But Cook proved to be a talented spy. His large personality played better in Virginia than it did in the close confines of Brown’s secret army—in part because of the unusual territory he went to reconnoiter.

  CONTRARY TO STEREOTYPE, THE antebellum South wasn’t a uniformly agrarian and insular society. Its cities and industry, though smaller than the North’s, were growing rapidly, and the region’s economy was well integrated with national and global markets. Even so, Harpers Ferry stood out. It was a bustling crossroads of industry and innovation, and its history was emblematic of the nation’s development.

  In 1803, just a few years after George Washington established a federal armory in the Virginia village, President Jefferson concluded the Louisiana Purchase, more than doubling the geographic size of the United States. The man he dispatched to explore this vast territory, Meriwether Lewis, went first to Harpers Ferry to buy “Rifles, Tomahawks
& knives” for his expedition, as well as a collapsible iron boat frame that could be covered in hides—a vessel he called “the Experiment.”

  In 1819, an inventor named John Hall came to town and undertook a pioneering advance in America’s industrial revolution. Previously, muskets had been produced by highly skilled gunsmiths who made and assembled each part and weapon themselves—“lock, stock, and barrel.” Hall began manufacturing guns from interchangeable parts, employing “common hands,” even children, to run machines at his pilot factory.

  Harpers Ferry also became a hub of the transport revolution. In the 1820s, stagecoaches arrived, traveling on turnpikes that had been newly macadamized, or paved with small broken stones. The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal reached town in 1833; the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad came the next year. New industries arose along the water and rail lines, as did hotels, shops, and restaurants. George Washington’s dream of the Potomac becoming a corridor of commerce seemed close to fulfillment.

  But Harpers Ferry also offered a preview of the ills that afflicted the nation as it rapidly expanded and industrialized. In 1836, a visitor complained of the “coal smoke and clanking of hammers” that filled the “most abominable” town. Harpers Ferry officials urged citizens to clear piles of “offensive matter” from the streets, and struggled to rein in prostitution, cockfighting, brawling, “hallooing or rioting,” and “throwing stones.”

  Panorama of Harpers Ferry from the Maryland shore