by Tony Horwitz
“I begin to be apprehensive of getting into a tight spot for want of a little more funds,” he wrote John junior, sounding very much like the cash-strapped businessman of old. He told his son that he had only $180 still on hand, and wondered “how I can keep my little wheels in motion for a few days more.” Though Brown found it “terribly humiliating” to seek funds yet again, he asked John junior to “solicit for me a little more assistance while attending to your other business.”
This “other business” referred to Brown’s continuing effort to make up his shortfall of men. And so, having at last shipped the stored weapons, the hapless John junior embarked on a final recruitment and fund-raising drive that was notable mainly for its self-congratulation. In Boston he called on members of the Secret Six and crowed in a letter to Kagi: “They were all in short, very much gratified, and have had their Faith & Hopes much strengthened.” His solicitations, however, yielded only $50 from Brown’s increasingly anxious backers.
John junior went on to Canada, where he attempted to mobilize troops with the assistance of a black recruiter, who, he wrote, was “too fat” to be of much use. He nonetheless boasted of forming “associations” in several Canadian towns, to “hunt up good workmen.” At Chatham, site of Brown’s constitutional convention, “I met with a hearty response,” John junior said. But only one workman proved willing to set off for Chambersburg—Osborne Anderson, whom Brown had recruited the year before.
John junior forged on to Detroit, where he met with even less success and shed his fat companion, regretting that “I spent so much money in transporting so much inert adipose matter.” Turning toward his home in Ohio, he wrote Kagi that he was still eager “to devote my whole time if I can to the work,” adding, however: “If friend ‘Isaac’ wishes me to go any where else, I shall need more means, as I have only enough to get back with.”
WHILE JOHN JUNIOR CONDUCTED his futile and expensive “Northern tour,” Brown confronted a near mutiny at his Maryland hideout. The crisis, this time, wasn’t precipitated by money or delays or the danger of exposure; it was ignited by the nature of the mission itself.
Most of the men gathered at the Kennedy farm were well acquainted with Brown; five were his sons or neighbors, and the others had joined him in Kansas or Iowa. They were accustomed to his secretive ways and had come south with dedication and few questions asked. “It is my chief desire to add fuel to the fire,” a recruit named Steward Taylor wrote, upon receiving the summons in early July at the wheat farm where he worked in Illinois. “My ardent passion for the gold field is my thoughts by day and my dreams by night.”
Apart from Kagi, none of the members of Brown’s band knew exactly what he planned, and the clues the men had received were mixed. In the summer of 1858, Kagi had told one Kansas fighter that the Virginia mission would start small and “seem a slave stampede, or local outbreak at most,” with the guerrillas pulling back to the mountains, accompanied by freed slaves. “Harper’s Ferry was mentioned as a point to be seized—but not held.” A few months after this parley, Brown launched his Missouri raid. “It seemed to be the impression of most of the men,” Annie Brown wrote of the Kennedy farm tenants, “that they had come there to make another such a raid, only on a larger scale.”
Instead, in late summer, Brown revealed that Harpers Ferry itself would be the first and primary target. Only after seizing the town and its sprawling weapons works would the raiders begin freeing slaves and moving through the mountains.
This news did not go over well. Almost “all of our men,” Owen Brown said of those present, “were opposed to striking the first blow” at Harpers Ferry. Brown’s sons were among the loudest critics. Owen, Oliver, and Watson were known locally as the offspring of “Mr. Smith,” and they were freer than the others to move about and see the challenges Harpers Ferry presented as a target. Owen at one point likened his father’s plan to Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow.
Charles Tidd was another determined foe. A hotheaded Kansas veteran, he’d once smashed the tobacco pipes of his fellow recruits while he was trying to quit smoking in the cramped quarters the band shared in Iowa. Now, he expressed his ire by storming out of the farmhouse and going to stay with John Cook, who lived with his wife in Harpers Ferry. “It nearly broke up the camp,” Tidd later said of the dissent over Brown’s plan.
In the third week of August, Brown convened an emergency meeting at the Kennedy farm, with Kagi coming down from Chambersburg and Cook from Harpers Ferry. Kagi stood by his commander’s plan, as did Cook (who further bolstered Brown’s confidence with optimistic reports on his contacts with locals). Brown also turned the debate into a test of loyalty: since so many opposed him, he insisted on resigning as commander so the men could choose another.
Within five minutes, he was reinstated as leader. Shortly thereafter, the dissidents reluctantly consented to his plan—on condition, Tidd later said, that railroad bridges near the town would be burned, making it much more difficult for anyone to come to its defense. On August 18, Owen, who often acted as intermediary between his father and the other men, drafted a formal if rather strained endorsement of Brown’s continued leadership.
Dear Sir,
We have all agreed to sustain your decisions, untill you have proved incompetent, & many of us will adhere to your decisions as long as you will.
Your Friend,
OWEN SMITH.
BY THE NEXT DAY, Brown was in Chambersburg, wooing another reluctant ally. Ever since conceiving his war on slavery, Brown had courted black support, believing it both critical to his success and morally imperative. Though the sin of slavery weighed heavily on white Americans, it could be expunged only if blacks took part in their own liberation. “Give a slave a pike and you make him a man,” he said. “Deprive him of the means of resistance, and you keep him down.”
This belief had always set Brown apart from the mainstream of white abolitionists, many of whom regarded blacks as too pitiable and submissive to fight. He was also exceptional in practicing what he preached. Brown took blacks into his home and stayed at theirs; sought blacks’ financial and logistical support; recruited them into his army; and communicated his egalitarian and tough-minded ethos to all those under his command.
“There was no milk and water sentimentality—no offensive contempt for the negro, while working in his cause,” wrote Osborne Anderson, the black printer who attended the Chatham Convention and made his way to the Kennedy farm in the fall of 1859. “In John Brown’s house, and in John Brown’s presence, men from widely different parts of the continent met and united in one company, wherein no hateful prejudice dared intrude its ugly self—no ghost of a distinction found space to enter.”
Brown’s ardor in the cause of racial justice was a powerful source of his ability to inspire others. But it may have clouded his strategic judgment. As a fiery crusader, he naturally appealed to black militants such as Charles Langston, an Oberlin-educated abolitionist who forcibly freed a fugitive slave from a federal marshal and hailed Brown for trying to “put to death” those “who steal men and sell them.” He also drew support from a shadowy self-defense group in Detroit called African Mysteries and an allied organization in Ohio whose leader showed one of Brown’s men an impressive arsenal and claimed, “they were only waiting for Brown or someone else to make a successful initiative move when their forces would be put in motion.”
This was the message Brown most wanted to hear: blacks were not only desperate for freedom but ready and able to fight. All they needed was a spark. But the militants who urged him on weren’t much more representative of blacks than Brown was of whites. Brown’s limited experience of the slaveholding South wasn’t a reliable guide, either. He’d visited only the region’s borderlands while working as a surveyor and wool merchant in far western Virginia—where many whites had little stake in the institution—and along the raw frontier of Missouri and Kansas. The whites he’d battled there were minimally trained and loosely organized.
; Brown, in short, was ill equipped to gauge how either blacks or whites might react to a full-scale assault on a system of property and social control that had been entrenched and brutally enforced for generations. “He thought the slaves would flock to him,” Annie Brown wrote, “and that the masters would be so paralyzed with fear that they would make no resistance.”
Her father had also convinced himself that black leaders would join him in Virginia and be there to guide the liberated slaves. Throughout the summer of 1859, he and his backers tried to contact Harriet Tubman and bring her south. When she was finally located, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, she was evidently too ill to travel.
Frederick Douglass, however, responded to an August summons from Brown and traveled to southern Pennsylvania, accompanied by Shields Green, a fugitive slave he’d taken into his home and introduced to the white abolitionist. Reaching Chambersburg on August 19, Douglass contacted one of John Kagi’s local “friends,” a black barber who directed him to a secret meeting place: an abandoned stone quarry at the edge of town. Approaching the quarry, Douglass spotted Brown in an old hat, carrying a fishing rod as camouflage. “His face wore an anxious expression, and he was much worn by thought and exposure,” Douglass later wrote. The two men “sat down among the rocks” and resumed the debate they’d inaugurated a dozen years before, at their first meeting in Springfield.
Frederick Douglass
Douglass knew Brown’s plans had evolved, but up to this point, he had believed they were still aimed at siphoning off slaves in a gradual way that would alarm owners and undermine the institution. Now, during their conversation at the quarry, Brown instead unveiled his bold plan for seizing Harpers Ferry. Brown said this dramatic strike would “instantly rouse the country,” Douglass later wrote, serving as a “notice to the slaves that their friends had come, and a trumpet to rally them to his standard.”
Douglass, like the men at the Kennedy farm, “at once opposed the measure.” He argued that opening the campaign with an attack on a federal armory “would array the whole country against us,” rather than rallying Americans to the antislavery cause. Brown shrugged this off. “It seemed to him that something startling was just what the nation needed.”
Douglass raised military objections, too, arguing that Brown and his men would be easily surrounded in Harpers Ferry. Again, Brown seemed unperturbed. He said he could “find means for cutting his way out,” but wouldn’t need to, because he planned to take prominent citizens hostage. That way, if worse came to worst, he could “dictate terms” to his foes. This confidence astonished Douglass, who believed Virginians would blow Brown and his hostages “sky-high” rather than let abolitionists hold Harpers Ferry.
There in the old quarry, the two men debated through that day and part of the next, with Douglass, a formidable orator, mustering “all the arguments at my command.” None of them moved Brown. He was utterly fixed in his course. “Come with me, Douglass,” he finally said, wrapping his arms tightly around his friend. “I want you for a special purpose. When I strike the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them.”
But Douglass could see nothing but menace in Harpers Ferry. “All his arguments, and all his descriptions of the place, convinced me that he was going into a perfect steel trap,” Douglass wrote, “and that once in he would never get out alive.” Having escaped slavery as a young man, Douglass also had no illusions about his own prospects if he went along. “My discretion or my cowardice,” he admitted, “determined my course.” He would not go with Brown.
As he got up to leave the quarry, Douglass turned to his companion, Shields Green, who, along with Kagi, had sat in on the conference. In Rochester, the fugitive slave from South Carolina had been moved by Brown’s antislavery fervor and said he intended to join him. Now, Douglass told Green: “Shields, you have heard our discussion. If in view of it, you do not wish to stay, you have but to say so, and you can go back with me.”
To Douglass’s surprise, Green coolly replied, in his Lowcountry patois, “I b’leve I’ll go wid de ole man.”
THOUGH DISAPPOINTED IN DOUGLASS’S decision, Brown at last had his first black recruit at the Kennedy farm. Shields Green’s addition to the ranks, however, greatly increased the risk of exposure. The narrow, hilly borderland between Pennsylvania and the Potomac River made a natural highway for fugitives, and it was closely watched by southern patrols and slave catchers who collected bounties for apprehending runaways. Soon after the meeting in the quarry, as Owen Brown was escorting Green from Chambersburg to the farmhouse in Maryland, they encountered several men who became suspicious and gave chase with dogs. Owen and Green—who, reversing the usual pattern, was trying to slip back into the South—had to bushwhack through the woods and hills to elude their pursuers.
Green also became a conspicuous presence at the Kennedy farm, where Annie Brown was already struggling to keep her “invisibles” out of sight. Only her father, her brothers, and Jeremiah Anderson ventured out freely, traveling in the wagon to Chambersburg for “freight” or to Harpers Ferry to pick up provisions. They otherwise mixed little with locals, though Brown attended the nearby church of a small German sect and at one point performed minor surgery on a neighbor, lancing a “wen” on her neck. In gratitude, the family gave Brown a mongrel pup named Cuffee. The dog, along with a cow and horse and a few pigs, gave the Kennedy farm an air of rural normality.
But maintaining this façade required constant vigilance. One day, while Annie and her father went to church, those left keeping watch weren’t careful enough. Green, a garrulous man who in Rochester had cleaned clothes for a living, came down from the loft to help Martha with the ironing. No one noticed the approach of their nosy neighbor, Mrs. Huffmaster. Coming to the door, she saw Green, as well as two unfamiliar white men, before Martha managed to hustle her out onto the porch.
When Brown returned from church, he immediately sent Annie to find out what their neighbor knew, and to “buy her off” with some milk. Mrs. Huffmaster told Annie she thought the black man was a fugitive, escaping with the aid of the white strangers she’d seen. Annie tried to convince her “they were some friends of ours, but that they had gone where she would not see them and asked her to not say anything.” The woman promised to do so, but “used her power over me every time she thought of anything she wanted, that we had,” Annie wrote. “We lived in constant fear and dread after that.”
The men also lived in even greater confinement to avoid another sighting. Most mornings, they gathered downstairs as Brown read from the Bible and led them in prayer. Then they would retreat to the loft and stay cooped up all day, coming down only for meals. If Mrs. Huffmaster approached the farmhouse as they were eating, Annie or Martha would intercept her on the porch while the men hurried upstairs, “taking the dishes, victuals, tablecloth and all with them.”
Only at night were the men free to roam outside. And only in certain weather did they feel safe enough to break the quiet. “When there was a thunderstorm they would jump about and play, making all kinds of noise,” Annie wrote, “as they thought no one could hear them.”
A WEEK OR TWO after the arrival of Shields Green, a second black volunteer came to the farm: Dangerfield Newby, who differed in several key respects from the other men. He was about forty, much older than his fellow recruits, and he hadn’t been with Brown in Kansas or Iowa or Canada. For Newby, the mission ahead was also unusually personal. Virginia-born, he’d been freed in 1858 after his owner moved to Ohio. But Newby’s wife and children remained enslaved in Virginia, some fifty miles from Harpers Ferry. “He was impatient to have operations commenced,” Annie wrote, “for he was anxious to get them.”
Newby had already gone to great lengths to try and free his family. A blacksmith and canal worker, he’d saved money and asked others for contributions so he could buy his wife and children from their owner. By the summer of 1859, he had certificates of deposit in an Ohio bank worth more than $700—a considerable sum for a former slave, eq
ual to about $17,000 today. But Harriett Newby’s owner, who had earlier agreed to a price, raised it or decided not to sell. Harriett responded with a series of wrenching letters to her husband.
Dangerfield Newby, ca. 1858
“Oh, Dear Dangerfield com this fall with out fail monny or no monney,” she wrote in April 1859. “I want to see you so much. That is the one bright hope I have before me.” A house slave, she had to care night and day for her mistress, who had just given birth. “Nothing more at present but remain Your affectionate wife, Harriett Newby.”
A few weeks later, she wrote again, this time to report that her own baby “commenced to Crall to-day; it is very delicate.” The infant, a girl, was their sixth child. “Dear Dangerfield, you cannot amagine how much I want to see you. It is the grates Comfort I have is thinking of the promist time when you will be here oh that bless hour when I shall see you once more.”
By summer, Harriett was desperate. “I want you to buy me as soon as possible, for if you do not get me some body else will,” she wrote. “It is said Master is in want of money. If so, I know not what time he may sell me an then all my bright hops of the futer are blasted, for their has ben one bright hope to cheer me in all my troubles, that is to be with you.” Their little girl, she added, wasn’t walking yet but could “step around” by holding on to things. Harriett closed: “you mus write soon and say when you think you can Come.”
