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

by Tony Horwitz

  Some of those rowdy workmen were not happy. Many were skilled craftsmen who had once controlled the pace of their work; now they toiled through ten-hour shifts beneath factory clocks. In the 1840s, they went on strike and sent a delegation to the White House, complaining of being turned into “mere machines of labor.”

  One disgruntled workman shot an armory superintendent who tried to curtail drinking and gambling on the job. The victim was found in his office “with a ghastly wound in the stomach, through which protruded portions of the dinner he had eaten a few minutes before.” Though the murderer was hanged, he lived on in local memory, a symbol of resistance to anyone who challenged the proud and fiercely independent workmen of Harpers Ferry.

  The town’s rough-and-tumble atmosphere had calmed somewhat by the summer of 1858, when Cook arrived. But Harpers Ferry remained a fluid and heterogeneous place, accustomed to strangers from the North and abroad. Cook, a versatile and well-schooled young man, soon found employment at a variety of jobs, joined a debating society, and acquainted himself with a wide range of locals, from Irish canal workers to patrician slave owners. He also worked his considerable charms on women, including the wives of leading armory employees, none of whom suspected an underground abolitionist cell was taking root in their midst.

  “I was really pleased with him, he spoke so fluently and intelligently and had all the nice little graces of a gentleman,” one woman wrote her daughter, whose beauty Cook had complimented. “He seems to have made a favorable impression upon every one.”

  AS COOK EMBARKED ON his covert operation that summer, Brown’s western mission was going less well. He returned to Kansas with a fresh alias—Shubel Morgan, the first name meaning “captive of God”—and a flowing white beard, which a journalist called “his patriarchal disguise.” The beard made Brown look older than his fifty-eight years, as did his deepening stoop. Decades of hardship had taken a toll on him.

  A few years earlier, planning the house he wanted built in North Elba, Brown had written that he meant to place it very close to a stream to avoid lugging water uphill: “I have done a great deal of that.” Since then, he’d lived rough for long stretches and suffered frequent bouts of “ague,” a recurrent fever that was probably malarial. On returning west in the summer of 1858, he was incapacitated for weeks by severe shakes and other symptoms; he wrote to John junior that he “was never more sick” in his life.

  As he recovered, though, Brown became impatient to resume his Virginia work. In August, Kansas voters had overwhelmingly rejected a pro-slavery constitution and thus guaranteed the territory’s eventual entry into the Union as a free state. Though violence continued near the border with Missouri, Brown once again lacked a clear purpose other than to dispel any rumors that Hugh Forbes might spread regarding his secret plans.

  Then, in December, a new mission suddenly presented itself. A Missouri slave named Jim Daniels crossed into Kansas, on the pretext of selling brooms. Meeting one of Brown’s men on patrol near the border, Daniels said that he and other slaves were about to be sold and desperately needed help.

  Brown answered this appeal by leading eighteen guerrillas into Missouri the next night. One party under his command raided the farmhouse of Daniels’s master, liberating five slaves at gunpoint. They then freed five more slaves at a neighboring property. A separate party burst into another home and freed a slave, but in so doing shot her owner dead. The two groups of raiders also carried off oxen, horses, food, clothes, and other material, as well as two white hostages, before crossing back into Kansas.

  This daring midnight strike caused an immediate sensation, much like the one following Brown’s Pottawatomie attack two years earlier. Proslavery posses quickly formed and as the identity of the raid’s instigator became known, both the governor of Missouri and President Buchanan offered rewards for Brown’s capture. The cross-border rescue also met with opprobrium from many in the antislavery camp. Defending free-state Kansans was one thing; it was quite another to invade a southern state, steal property, and kill a civilian.

  Brown, ever the propagandist, mocked his critics in a letter to the New York Tribune. The previous May, he observed, a proslavery band had massacred five free-state settlers in Kansas, and authorities had done nothing. Yet when “eleven persons are forcibly restored to their ‘natural and inalienable rights,’” the government and much of the public “are filled with holy horror.”

  Brown also kept himself in the news by embarking on a dramatic midwinter trek. He escorted the liberated slaves north, with posses and federal marshals in hot pursuit. Near Lawrence, Kansas, he eluded capture by switching getaway wagons, from an oxcart he’d taken in Missouri to a wagon drawn by horses. A few days later, an eighty-man posse intercepted his convoy at a ford. With just twenty-two men of his own, Brown marched straight at his foes, causing them to fall back in panic. “The closer we got to the ford the farther they got from it,” one of his men wrote. Brown’s band gave chase, capturing horses and taking several prisoners.

  In February 1859, Brown left Kansas territory, leading his caravan across Iowa. At the eastern end of the state, the liberated slaves were secreted onto a boxcar bound for Chicago, then taken from there to Detroit, where they boarded a ferry. BROWN’S RESCUED NEGROES LANDED IN CANADA, read the March 18 headline in the New York Tribune. The long journey from bondage to freedom had taken eighty-two days and covered eleven hundred miles, mostly by wagon. One of the formerly enslaved women, the Tribune reported, had been owned by six different masters. Another had given birth since being freed in Missouri. “The child has been christened John Brown,” the newspaper said.

  The infant’s white namesake could hardly have composed a more laudatory narrative. “Osawatomie Brown” had hugely enlarged his celebrity as a bold and seemingly invincible warrior who took the fight to his enemies. Best of all, he had turned the hated Fugitive Slave Act on its head. Instead of slave catchers trespassing on free territory, Northerners had invaded a slave state to liberate bondspeople. Brown had acted, he wrote a newspaper editor that March, because the “most ready and effectual way” to fight for freedom was “to meddle directly with the peculiar institution.”

  THE MISSOURI RESCUE ALSO reinvigorated the Secret Six, whose faith had flagged due to delays in Brown’s mission and his ceaseless demands for money. “He has begun the work in earnest,” Sanborn wrote Higginson. “I think we may look for great results from this spark of fire.” Gerrit Smith, who had completely lost his nerve the year before, was now exultant, seeing the Missouri raid as a rehearsal for the plan Brown intended “to pursue elsewhere.”

  Brown’s thoughts ran along a parallel track. He resumed his preparations even before completing the trek from Kansas. On reaching Iowa, he wrote the Secret Six that he was now ready with new men to “set his mill in operation,” and wanted the cash promised him the year before. “The entire success of our experiment ought (I think) to convince every capitalist.”

  In mid-March, immediately after putting the fugitives on a ferry to Canada, Brown rushed to Cleveland. There he delivered a fund-raising lecture and theatrically auctioned off horses he’d “liberated” from Missouri. He also scoffed at posters in Cleveland advertising the president’s reward for his arrest, saying he “would give two dollars and fifty cents for the safe delivery of the body of James Buchanan in any jail of the Free States.”

  Continuing east, Brown collected fresh funds from Gerrit Smith and stayed with Franklin Sanborn in Concord, where he spoke at the town hall before Emerson, Thoreau, and other luminaries. “The Captain leaves us much in the dark concerning his destination and designs for the coming months,” Bronson Alcott wrote in his diary. “Yet he does not conceal his hatred of slavery, nor his readiness to strike a blow for freedom … . I think him equal to anything he dares,—the man to do the deed, if it must be done.”

  John Brown in Boston, May 1859

  Alcott also noted Brown’s changed appearance, writing that his long white beard gave him a “soldi
erly air, and the port of an apostle.” Others who saw him that spring were struck not only by his facial hair but by his fevered manner. John Forbes, a Boston businessman at whose home Brown stayed, thought his guest’s “glittering gray-blue eyes” had “a little touch of insanity.” Amos Lawrence, another businessman, wrote in his diary that Brown exhibited a “monomania” about “stealing negroes.”

  These impressions may have been influenced by Lawrence’s disapproval of the Missouri raid, and by Brown’s ague, which continued to trouble him. But one of the men closest to Brown during the 1859 slave rescue also questioned the abolitionist’s state of mind. George Gill was a young adventurer and former whaler who had joined Brown’s band in Iowa and become secretary of the treasury in his provisional government. At the Chatham Convention, Gill wrote, a preacher kept exclaiming of Brown, “This is the Moses, whom God has sent to conduct the children of Israel through the Red Sea.” Other blacks often hailed Brown in similar terms; “it would elate him through and through.”

  The Missouri rescue completed Brown’s identification with Moses: the long-bearded prophet leading slaves to freedom as Pharaoh’s legions gave chase. Gill was intimately involved in this latter-day Exodus. He was the man on patrol who first encountered Jim Daniels, bringing the desperate slave to Brown’s attention; he also took part in the Missouri raid and traveled by his commander’s side during much of the long journey north.

  “He seemed strangely attached to me,” Gill wrote. “I was a verdant innocent-looking fellow with but little to say to him.” But this quiet young follower came to wonder whether success had gone to his leader’s already swollen head. “In time he believed that he was Gods chosen instrument—and the only one,” Gill later wrote. “Whatever methods he used, God would be his guard and shield, rendering the most illogical movements into a grand success.”

  By the time the convoy reached eastern Iowa, Gill had fallen sick and was unable to continue. A few months later, the call came for him to mobilize for the long-delayed Virginia mission. To Brown’s great surprise and disappointment, his once-loyal lieutenant and treasury secretary never appeared.

  IN EARLY JUNE, AFTER raising money in New York and New England, Brown turned up at the door of the Connecticut forge master he’d long ago hired to manufacture a thousand pikes. “I have been unable, sir, to fulfill my contract with you up to this time,” Brown told Charles Blair, “now I am able to do so.”

  Blair was reluctant: his workmen were fully employed and he’d been disappointed by Brown two years earlier. He also couldn’t understand why the abolitionist wanted him to finish work on the pikes, which had been intended for free-state families. “Kansas matters are all settled,” he told Brown, “what earthly use can they be to you now?”

  Brown replied that the pikes were worth nothing unfinished, but that he “could dispose of them in some way” once they were fully assembled. And so, a week later, upon receipt of the $450 still outstanding, Blair wrote Brown that he would finish the job. “Wishing you peace and prosperity,” he said in closing.

  Brown by then was in North Elba, visiting his family; a daughter-in-law trimmed his extravagant beard. He stayed only a week before heading to Ohio, where most of his soldiers and guns were quartered. Then, accompanied by two sons and another man, he traveled to southern Pennsylvania. A fourth accomplice—John Kagi, a veteran of the partisan battles in Kansas—was to rendezvous with the advance party at its final destination.

  “We leave here to day for Harpers Ferry,” Brown wrote Kagi on June 30, 1859, from a town just north of the Mason-Dixon Line. “We shall be looking for cheap lands near the Rail Road in all probability.”

  He signed himself with a new alias: “Yours in truth I. Smith.”

  PART TWO

  Into Africa

  He was a stone, this man who lies so still,

  A stone flung from a sling against a wall,

  A sacrificial instrument of kill.

  STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT,

  “John Brown’s Body”

  CHAPTER 7

  My Invisibles

  On July 4, 1859, John Unseld was riding to Harpers Ferry from his farm in Maryland when he encountered four strangers on the road. “Good morning, gentlemen,” Unseld called out, “how do you do?”

  The eldest of the party introduced himself as Smith, without giving his first name. He said two of the young men with him were his sons, the other a Mr. Anderson. They’d arrived by rail in Harpers Ferry the evening before, inquired about cheap lodging, and been directed to the village of Sandy Hook, just across the Potomac River in Maryland.

  “I suppose you are out hunting mineral, gold, and silver?” Unseld asked.

  “No, we are not,” Smith replied, “we are out looking for land.” He said the weather in northern New York had recently been so severe that they’d decided to sell their farmland and try their luck farther south.

  Unseld rode on to Harpers Ferry and met the men again on his return trip. Smith told him he was impressed by the countryside he’d seen so far and asked about property for sale or rent. Unseld knew of a vacant farmhouse and guided Smith as far as his own home, where he invited the newcomer in for dinner. Smith declined, not even taking a drink.

  “If you follow up this road along the foot of the mountain,” Unseld told him, “it is shady and pleasant and you will come out at a church up here about three miles, and then you can see the house.”

  Smith saw the place and liked it, whereupon Unseld directed him to its owner, a widow named Kennedy who lived in Sharpsburg, Maryland, a short way north along Antietam Creek. When Unseld next saw Smith, the New Yorker said he’d rented the Kennedy farm until the following March and showed him the receipt. Unseld thought it odd that the man wanted him to see the piece of paper. “It is nothing to me,” he said.

  Over the next few months, the genial Marylander often stopped by the Kennedy farm, an isolated place with a log house set well back from the road and a separate cabin hidden by summer growth. Unseld never saw the interior. Since Smith always declined Unseld’s invitations to enter his own home, the Marylander did likewise. In any event, Smith told him they had no chairs to sit on, only boxes.

  So during his visits, Unseld remained on his horse in the yard, chatting with Smith or with two young women of the family who appeared that July. The newcomers cut some hay and acquired a few farm animals. Unseld also learned that Smith planned to buy fat cattle and drive them north to New York for sale.

  “There was nothing which induced me to suppose that his purpose was anything different from what he stated,” Unseld said, months later, in sworn testimony before the U.S. Senate. Nor did the slave-owning Marylander suspect that “Smith” was an assumed name, and that the reticent New York farmer he’d helped to find lodging on Independence Day was America’s most notorious abolitionist—“Old Ossawattomie Brown, from Kansas,” as Unseld called him.

  MR. ANDERSON, THE NONFAMILY member of the “Smith” party, was a midwestern farmer, first name Jeremiah, and he recorded his impression of Independence Day in the South in a letter he wrote on July 5 to his brother in Iowa.

  “Nothing going on here except drinking and dancing, and fighting,” he wrote. However, he praised the mountain scenery and the wild berries he’d collected by the road. “I am going to be on a farm about 5 miles from the Ferry up the Potomac engaged in agricultural pursuits,” he told his brother. “I am going to work on the farm for Mr. Smith who expects to rent until he finds land to buy.”

  His employer’s words were likewise anodyne. In a letter to “John Henrie Esquire,” an associate in Smith & Sons, a diversified firm that required workmen and the shipment of heavy boxes, Brown wrote: “Dear Sir, Please forward enclosed at once + write us on first arrival of freight or of hands to work on the job.” When the freight arrived, his associate formally replied: “I await your directions in the matter. Respectfully, John Henrie.”

  By the summer of 1859, “Mr. Smith” and “Mr. Henrie”—real name, John He
nry Kagi—were old hands at this sort of subterfuge. Since Brown’s recruitment of Kagi two years before, the two had worked closely together on covert missions and cycled through a number of aliases. Brown didn’t always choose his aides wisely—Hugh Forbes being a glaring example—but in John Kagi, his secretary of war, he’d found a loyal and versatile lieutenant.

  Born in Ohio to a blacksmith from Virginia, Kagi was a precocious youth who began teaching school at seventeen in the Shenandoah Valley, sixty miles from Harpers Ferry. A freethinker, vegetarian, and abolitionist, he was forced to leave his job because of his antislavery views. Kagi headed west, earning a law degree and becoming a newspaper correspondent and free-state partisan in Kansas. Before joining Brown’s band in Tabor, Iowa, he was twice imprisoned, and was badly wounded in a shootout with a proslavery judge.

  As Brown’s second-in-command, Kagi possessed attributes his leader did not. He was young, like most of the recruits, extremely personable, and deft at logistics and communication, traits that suited him well for the delicate task he undertook in the summer of 1859.

  Having chosen as a forward post the isolated Kennedy farm, five miles from Harpers Ferry, Brown needed a staging area where he could safely receive men and weapons from the North. He found it in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, a railroad hub just north of the Mason-Dixon Line. The town had a large population of free blacks who were active in the Underground Railroad, and it lay forty miles by country road from Brown’s Maryland hideout, allowing for the discreet forwarding of supplies and personnel.

  “John Henrie” found lodging by the railroad tracks in Chambersburg at the boardinghouse of an abolitionist sympathizer, Mary Ritner. He enlisted the help of local blacks “to receive company,” and coordinated the shipment of “freight” from agents in other states. Anyone who opened this correspondence would find opaque discussions of “prospecting,” “mining tools,” and “hands.” Kagi’s clerklike demeanor also gave nothing away. One man who shared his small Chambersburg boardinghouse that summer later remarked that the agreeable young fellow, who spent most of his time in his room writing, “had far more of the appearance of a Divinity student than of a Warrior.”