by Tony Horwitz
John Henry Kagi
WHILE KAGI QUIETLY SETTLED in southern Pennsylvania, and Brown planted himself at the Kennedy farm in Maryland, another agent operated inside Virginia—albeit in very different style. Since going ahead to Harpers Ferry the year before, John Cook had kept his own name and utilized rather than cloaked his expansive personality. He worked as a teacher, as a book peddler, and as a canal lock keeper; he published poetry in a local paper; and he gained entrée to homes, workplaces, and outlying plantations.
He also charmed his landlady’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Virginia, whom he married on April 18, 1859, atop Jefferson’s Rock, a scenic perch overlooking Harpers Ferry. There is no evidence that Cook wed Virginia to deepen his local cover; the bride was five months pregnant. But he did use the occasion to gather intelligence, asking the clerk who issued their marriage license how many slaves lived in the county. Cook said he had a bet with a friend about the total and the clerk gave him the official figure.
By the time Brown arrived in Harpers Ferry on July 3, his high-spirited spy was bursting to make use of the information he’d collected over the past twelve months. “Tomorrow is the Fourth! The glorious day which gave our Freedom birth—but left sad hearts beneath the Slave Lash,” Cook wrote an Iowa family he’d befriended the year before. “Oh! How I wish I could be with you once again. But that’s a joy I may never know, till I have filled the humble post allotted to me, in the great mission now before us.”
Cook wasn’t alone in believing action to be imminent. Brown had intimated to the Secret Six that he might open his “wool business” on July 4, a date Harriet Tubman had suggested “as a good time to ‘raise the mill.’” In the event, he reached Harpers Ferry too late to make this happen. Even so, he hoped to launch his campaign quickly and wanted to “have the freight sent” as soon as possible.
There was, however, a hitch in the supply chain—“John Smith,” head of Smith & Sons’ Ohio branch and the eldest son of its founder, “Isaac.” At thirty-eight, John Brown, Jr., was an erudite and erratic man who had abandoned careers as a teacher and lecturer. He had never fully recovered from his breakdown in Kansas; in 1858, he described himself as so melancholic that he was “almost disqualified for anything which is engrossing in its nature.”
But he remained dedicated to his father’s cause and eager for his approval. “Please say to Mr. S———I am still ready to serve,” he wrote Kagi in the early summer of 1859. Brown didn’t call on his fragile son to come south, but he did entrust him with a critical behind-the-lines role. Brown’s rifles, pistols, and other supplies were now stored in a hay barn near John junior’s home in a rural district east of Cleveland. This staunchly abolitionist area also served as a hideout and muster station for many of Brown’s scattered men. On July 5, the day after finding quarters at the Kennedy farm, Brown sent word for all “hands” and “freight” to be collected and forwarded south, “as near together as possible,” so he wouldn’t have to conceal them for long.
Instead, Brown’s men and arms dribbled in piecemeal over the course of months rather than weeks. John junior took his time shipping heavy boxes labeled “Hardware + Castings,” which traveled a circuitous route via wagon, canal, and rail to Kagi in Chambersburg. He also fumbled the forwarding of men, having somehow misunderstood his father’s “mining” schedule. “I had supposed you would not think it best to commence opening the coal banks before spring,” John junior wrote Kagi in late summer, in response to yet another urgent call for manpower. “Shall strain every nerve to accomplish this.”
Brown’s supply problems weren’t entirely his son’s fault. He could be too cryptic in his communiqués, and the many false starts in his mission had made some recruits lose heart—and money. “I expected to have joined in the dance long before this,” Luke Parsons wrote Kagi upon receiving the call to come south. “Were I to see Uncle John now & he to ask me to go, I should tell him that I owed $230, & must pay that first.” Parsons, who had joined Brown in Iowa and gone with him to Canada, was on his way to dig gold at Pike’s Peak. Though he considered rejoining the band, his mother helped dissuade him. “Don’t you do it,” she wrote her son. “They are bad men; you have got away from them keep away from them.”
BROWN, WHILE TRYING TO mobilize his troops, also realized that he needed recruits of another sort at the Kennedy farm—not guerrilla fighters, but innocent-seeming civilians. Otherwise, his Maryland neighbors might grow suspicious of the young men and wagon loads of freight arriving at the all-male compound. “I find it will be indispensable to have some women of our own family with us,” Brown wrote his wife, urging her to come for a “short visit” with their teenaged daughter, Annie. “It will be likely to prove the most valuable service you can ever render in the world.”
At the time, Mary Brown still had four children living at home, the youngest of whom was four. Two of her three sons, Oliver and Watson, and a stepson, Owen, were already pledged to her husband’s dangerous cause. She was evidently unhappy at his request for still more family sacrifice. “Mother would not go,” Annie later wrote. But she herself was eager to do so, and her sister-in-law, Martha Brown, was willing to join her in Mary’s stead.
In mid-July, Oliver Brown—Martha’s husband and Annie’s older brother—escorted the young women by boat down the Hudson River to New York and then by rail to Harpers Ferry. Annie was just fifteen, Martha only a year older. A dignified teenager with pale brown hair and blue-gray eyes, Martha had married Oliver despite her family’s strong dislike of abolitionists. Her twenty-year-old husband was a sensitive, bookish man who had hoped to study natural philosophy in New York City. But he felt obligated to help provide for the North Elba clan—and, now, to serve beside his father as he’d done in Kansas.
Oliver doted on his young bride; he carried a lock of her hair and a piece of her wedding dress, and he sent her soulful letters when he was away. The couple was so enraptured “in the enjoyment of each other,” Annie Brown wrote, “that they did not feel the need of much of this world’s goods.”
Oliver and Martha Brown
They would have very few such goods during their time together at the Kennedy farm. To furnish the tiny room the couple shared with Annie, the women made bed ticks from coarse cotton filled with straw and laid them on the floor, without pillows. “Sometimes in the night I could hear Oliver and Martha up stirring and beating their bed,” Annie wrote, “and would ask them what they were doing. Martha would say, ‘We are just trying to stir a little soft into our bed.’” She would give birth to a daughter early the next year.
By day at the Kennedy farm, Annie and Martha kept house, though theirs was no ordinary domestic duty. While cooking and cleaning, they watched constantly for neighbors or passersby who might cast a curious eye on the “Smith” household and its comings and goings that summer. If anyone stopped in, the women were instructed to be sociable and act like ordinary farm folk.
Martha, as the elder of the pair, anointed herself mistress of the household, except when it came to company. “I always blush and act like I was guilty of something,” she told Annie, “while you can chatter and talk nonsense so that no one would ever suspect that you know anything.”
Annie mildly resented Martha’s pulling rank on the basis of a mere year in age. But she took to her role as lookout and decoy, and came to think of herself as “the outlaw girl.” She washed dishes by the window or by the open door of the kitchen so she could keep watch; she sat sewing on the farmhouse’s high front porch, which overlooked the yard, garden, and road. She occupied this post in the evening, too, enjoying the southern fireflies. And when the landlady’s son stopped by and asked about Mr. Smith’s absent wife, Annie blithely lied that her mother had stayed behind in New York to sell their property.
The Smiths’ closest neighbors, a poor family named Huffmaster, presented more of a problem. They had rented a garden just behind the Kennedy farmhouse. As a result, Annie wrote, Mrs. Huffmaster and her four young children, the whole f
amily barefoot, “had a good excuse for coming at all times to look at the garden—and at us.” As the summer wore on and the Kennedy farm filled with “freight” and “hands,” Mrs. Huffmaster and her frequent visits became the “plague and torment” of Annie’s existence.
The Kennedy farmhouse, 1859
A FEW WEEKS AFTER Annie and Martha arrived in Maryland, they were joined by another contingent from North Elba. Watson Brown was the only male member of the family who hadn’t fought along with his father in Kansas, having stayed behind to manage the farm. He’d also married into the neighboring Thompson clan, like his older sister Ruth, whose husband, Henry, had fought with Brown on the frontier. Henry still resisted his father-in-law’s pleas to rejoin him, but two of his brothers, William and Dauphin, had been inspired by Brown to take up the cause and they traveled south with Watson.
None of the three young men fit the mold of tough guerrilla fighter. Twenty-three-year-old Watson was tall and slender, with “earnest, kind-looking blue eyes,” Annie wrote, and “as good and mild as he looked.” He’d once tried to set off for California, only to be sold a bogus ticket in New York City, losing all his money. Watson had delayed traveling south to Harpers Ferry until his wife, Isabella, gave birth to their first child. “After bidding us good bye,” Ruth Brown wrote of her brother’s departure, “he rushed out of the house crying as though his heart would break.”
Watson Brown
William Thompson
Dauphin Thompson
William Thompson, who also left behind a young wife, was a gentle jokester, “a sort of merry Andrew,” Annie Brown wrote. She described William’s younger brother, Dauphin, just twenty, as “much more like a girl than a warrior, with his light yellow, curly hair and innocent blue eyes and face as smooth as a baby’s.” Dauphin found himself at the Kennedy farm among much harder men, some of whom considered the baby-faced farm boy “too womanish and tenderhearted to go on such an expedition.”
One of these doubters was Albert Hazlett, a hardscrabble Kansas veteran who had eagerly answered the call back to service. “i Received your letter a few minuets ago,” he wrote Kagi on July 14 from a farm in Pennsylvania. “i Will Bee Ready When you Want mee.” The day after he arrived, Annie Brown found pools of tobacco spit under the table where the men played cards. When she complained, Hazlett confessed that the spit was his and told her “that he had nearly always lived in camp or amongst rough men.”
Another arrival that summer was Aaron Stevens, the most fearsome and physically striking of Brown’s fighters. A “chronic roamer” from Connecticut, he’d volunteered at sixteen to serve in the Mexican War and later returned west, writing his sister that New England was “no place for a young man,” despite the allure of his mother’s baked beans and hot apple pie. He became a bugler and Indian-fighting dragoon, until his hot temper derailed his military career. In Taos, in the New Mexico Territory, he drew a gun on a major; court-martialed for “drunken riot” and mutiny, he was sentenced to die before a firing squad.
The penalty was commuted to three years’ hard labor with ball and chain at Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas. Stevens served less than six months before escaping and becoming a free-state guerrilla under the alias Colonel Whipple. “The grate battle is begun,” he wrote his brother shortly before joining Brown, “you will alwase find me on the side of human freedom.” It was Stevens who had served as drillmaster at Brown’s “military college” in Iowa, and he who had shot a slave owner dead during the raid to free slaves in Missouri.
Tall, dark, extremely muscular and broad-shouldered—“the finest specimen of physical manhood I have ever seen in my life,” a reporter later called him—Stevens was Brown’s third-in-command, a brawny warrior to Kagi’s brainy strategist. He also had a beautiful singing voice and wrote passionate letters to Jennie Dunbar, a music teacher he’d fallen for in Ohio while awaiting the call to Virginia.
“Jenny if I thought you loved me as I do you, it would be the happyes moment in my life,” Stevens wrote soon after reaching Maryland. “I mean what I say, no soft sope about me.”
THE MAIN HOUSE AT the Kennedy farm had just four small rooms: a kitchen, a room for eating and sitting, the bedroom used by Martha, Oliver, and Annie, and a low, slope-ceilinged attic where the men slept side by side on the floor. By late August, about fifteen men had gathered. “We are rather thick here,” Stevens told Jennie Dunbar, blaming his poor writing on there being “so much noys.”
The men also had to make room for large crates of “freight,” which finally began reaching Chambersburg from Ohio on August 11 and were moved by covered wagon to Maryland. Boxes of rifles, marked “furniture,” served as benches in the eating area. A box of pistols became Martha Brown’s dressing table. If visitors asked about the unopened crates, Annie told them her mother was “very particular” and had asked “us to not unpack her furniture until she arrived.”
The presence of so many strange men was harder to explain. As much as possible, Annie and Martha tried to keep the recruits out of sight. If all seemed safe, the men would help with the wash or “skulk into the kitchen and stay and visit Martha awhile to relieve the monotony,” Annie wrote. Mostly, though, they stayed cloistered in the small eating/sitting room, or in the loft above, playing checkers and cards, or reading from a small library that included Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason and the manual on guerrilla warfare that Hugh Forbes had prepared for Brown. Annie came to think of the attic tenants as her personal secret and responsibility—“my invisibles,” she called them.
However invisible they might be, the men weren’t very good at keeping quiet, as revealed by the dozens of letters they sent and received via Kagi in Chambersburg. “Press nobly on,” a female admirer urged a recruit named Charles Tidd, who corresponded with women in several states, so “millions may have the pleasure of singing the song of liberty.” Another member of Brown’s small army, Edwin Coppoc, heard from a friend in Iowa: “all no where you was a going som of them glory in your spunk an others think you ar a gone boy.” The friend urged Coppoc to dodge bullets “like the d———l and show them you can come [home] without a hole in your hide.”
William Leeman, a third recruit, was only slightly more discreet in letters to his impoverished family. A shoe factory worker from Maine, he had joined Brown’s band in Kansas at the age of seventeen and often promised his family he would return home, where one sister worked in a cotton mill while the other looked after their frail parents. “I suppose you all think I am unworthy the Name of a son or Brother to stay away from you so long and not to render you some assistance,” he wrote that August, “but have Patience a little longer and you shall know all and then you will not Blame me for I am Engaged in a Cause that will make us above want if I succeed & I know we shall.” In a later letter, he confided that he belonged to “a Secret Asosiation” whose members were “privately gathered in a Slave State.”
When Brown caught wind of his men’s indiscretions, he was furious. “I do hope all corresponding except on business of the Co: will be droped for the present,” he wrote in a mid-August memorandum to Kagi, who acted as postmaster. “If every one must write some girl; or some other extra friend telling, or showing our location; & telling (as some have done) all about our matters; we might as well get the whole published at once, in the New York Herald. Any person is a stupid fool who expects his friends to keep for him; that which he cannot keep himself. All our friends have each got their special friends; and they again have theirs; and it would not be right to lay the burden of keeping a secret on any one; at the end of a long string.”
Brown had reason to be fearful. There was indeed a lengthening string of people aware of his plans, at least in general terms, and several were about to reveal what they knew. But the “fool” who had set this disclosure in motion was Brown himself.
In Springdale, Iowa, he’d confided in several Quakers who aided his band in the winter of 1857–58 and again the next year when Brown passed through with the slaves he’d fr
eed from Missouri. These Quaker confidants, in turn, talked to other Friends. Though fiercely opposed to slavery, they feared Brown’s mission would end in disaster and the death of him and his men. To forestall this tragedy, a few of them decided to compose an anonymous letter to the U.S. secretary of war, John Floyd.
“I have discovered the existence of a secret association, having for its object the liberation of the slaves at the South by a general insurrection. The leader of the movement is ‘old John Brown,’ late of Kansas.” The letter stated that small companies of men would “pass down through Pennsylvania and Maryland, and enter Virginia at Harper’s Ferry.” It also warned of a mountain rendezvous in Virginia and a spy placed at an armory in Maryland.
The letter reached the secretary of war in late August 1859, when Floyd had fled the Washington summer for Red Sweet Springs, a mountain spa in Virginia. He knew there was no armory in Maryland, and this small mistake in the letter led him to regard it as a hoax. “Besides, I was satisfied in my own mind that a scheme of such wickedness and outrage could not be entertained by any citizens of the United States,” Floyd later stated, in testimony before a Senate committee. “I put the letter away, and thought no more of it.”
THOUGH BROWN HAD NARROWLY avoided exposure thanks to an error of geography and the inattention of a vacationing official, he faced a number of other threats to his mission that August. The thousand pikes he’d ordered from Connecticut had yet to be shipped because of a problem finding parts. His other “freight” had begun arriving from Ohio, but the shipping bills were much higher than anticipated. This, and the cost of sustaining his men during the delay, had almost exhausted the money he’d raised that spring in expectation of quickly launching his campaign.
