by Tony Horwitz
This letter was dated August 16, 1859. By the time it reached northern Ohio, where Dangerfield Newby had met some of John Brown’s men and decided to join their cause, he had already set off, leaving his bank deposits behind. Money or no money, he was coming to Virginia that fall.
SEPTEMBER AT THE KENNEDY farm brought cooler weather, the arrival of the pikes from Connecticut, and a sobering atmosphere as the mission drew near. On the first of the month, in a letter from a place he identified only as “Post of Duty,” Aaron Stevens declared his love for the Ohio music teacher, Jennie Dunbar: “if I live to get through with this and you live I hope I shall have the pleasure of hearing you play and sing again if nothing more.” In a postscript, he added: “you may not get a letter from me for some time … hoping to meet you again in this world.”
A few days later, Dauphin Thompson wrote his brother and sister from “Parts unknown.” He described sitting in the door of a small cabin on the Kennedy farm, where four of the men took up residence once the pikes had arrived and been stored in the outbuilding’s loft. “Probably you will hear from us about the first of october if not before,” he wrote, referring to the “operations” that would soon commence. “I suppose the folk think we are a set of fools but they will find out we know what we are about.”
Watson Brown wrote to his wife, Belle, who was back in North Elba with Frederick, a newborn named for the uncle killed in Kansas. “I think of you all day, and dream of you at night,” Watson wrote. “I would gladly come home and stay with you always but for the cause which brought me here,—a desire to do something for others, and not live wholly for my own happiness.”
Other men confided their growing apprehension to the two young women at the farm. “They nearly all seemed to be impressed with the idea that they were going to their death,” Annie wrote. One man, Steward Taylor, described his own end for her, having seen it in a vision or dream. “He knew he would be shot at the taking of Harper’s Ferry, and be one of the first ones too.”
With the arrival of Osborne Anderson from Canada in September, Brown had seventeen soldiers on hand, still fewer than the twenty-five or so he believed was the minimum needed. Desperately short of funds, he had to borrow $40 from one of his men. Even so, as the end of the month approached, Brown took a step that signaled the attack was imminent. He sent Martha and Annie home to North Elba.
For the women as well as the men, it was a difficult parting. Martha, now several months pregnant, would be separated from her husband. Annie, though homesick, had become “very intimate” with her invisibles, she later wrote. She shared with the men not only the extremely close quarters, but also faith in their cause and the secret of their mission. This was a heady and romantic experience for a teenaged farm girl. So was the attention of so many young men, most of whom were striking in appearance, at least to judge by their photographs and Annie’s descriptions of them as “tall,” “fine-looking,” “gentlemanly,” “very attractive,” or “really handsome.”
Her sister Ruth later said that Annie’s “first lover” was one of the men at the Kennedy farm, though she didn’t say which. If Ruth was correct, then the likeliest candidates were Annie’s young neighbor from North Elba, Dauphin Thompson (“a perfect blond,” she called him, “good size, well-proportioned—a handsome young man”); the darkly attractive Jeremiah Anderson (to whom, Annie’s family later hinted, she “took a fancy”); and the passionate Kansas fighter Charles Tidd, of whom Annie later wrote to Franklin Sanborn, “I know your sister thought we were ‘lovers.’” Annie denied this. “A soldier could understand the tie that bound us without explanation.”
Whether these ties were soldierly, sisterly, or otherwise, the women’s presence at the Kennedy farm had been a great solace to the men. They enjoyed teasing Martha and Oliver as “Mother and Father,” played pranks on Annie, and confided in her about “mothers, sisters, friends, and homes.” The women also brightened the men’s confinement by gathering flowers, wild fruit, and nuts. “We were, while the ladies remained, often relieved of much of the dullness,” Osborne Anderson wrote.
Charles Tidd
Jeremiah Anderson
On the afternoon before their departure, Annie gave Mrs. Huffmaster a crock of bacon grease to cook with, saying she and Martha were going to see relatives in Pennsylvania and would be away several weeks. “Of course you will not want to come here while we are gone,” Annie told her, “as the men are going to ‘keep bachelors hall.’”
That night, the men sang “Home Again” to Martha and Annie, and in the morning the young women rode off in Brown’s wagon to a train depot in Pennsylvania. Annie said goodbye to her father on a railway platform. The next day, he wrote a letter to his family with particular words for his daughter: “I want you, first of all, to become a sincere, humble, earnest, and consistent Christian; and then acquire good and efficient business habits. Save this letter to remember your father by, Anne.”
He also addressed practical matters, saying he hoped to send the family $50, adding, “Perhaps you can keep your animals in good condition through the winter on potatoes mostly, much cheaper than any other feed.” In closing, he told them to read the newspaper carefully and to send any future correspondence to John junior in Ohio. “God Almighty bless and save you all!”
IN EARLY OCTOBER, THE men began preparing for their mission in earnest. They browned the barrels of their rifles, readied belts and holsters, and assembled the pikes from Connecticut—these had arrived with the shafts separate from the heads, so as to pass off the shafts as hayfork handles. The men also studied Hugh Forbes’s manual—“Sharp’s rifle loads from the breech by drawing back a lever, which causes the bottom of the breech to slide down so that the cartridge can be put in”—and went through quiet drills under the instruction of Aaron Stevens.
Brown, meanwhile, went over his plans with Kagi at the Ritner boardinghouse in Chambersburg, as he’d done throughout the summer. Their conferences led one of the Ritner girls and a playmate to suspect the men were counterfeiters. One day, the girls peeked through the keyhole of an upstairs bedroom where the men were quietly conversing; to the girls’ disappointment, the two were only studying a map.
As the date neared for the assault, Kagi drafted a document headed “General Orders,” which laid out the organization of the “Provisional Army” that Brown envisioned would arise once his operation was under way. Each company was to consist of fifty-six privates, fifteen officers, and a surgeon. Four such companies would constitute a battalion, and so on, to the regiment and brigade level, with the largest units entitled to a commissary and musician. These orders were dated October 10, when Brown could not yet muster three “bands” of eight men each.
Equally ambitious was Brown’s political manifesto, a fiery companion piece to his constitution entitled “A Declaration of Liberty By the Representatives of the Slave Population of the United States of America.” Loosely modeled on “that Sacred Instrument” signed in 1776, the declaration proclaimed a new revolution, to “secure equal rights, privileges, & Justice to all,” black and white, slave and free, “Irrespective of Sex.” It also called for punishing those guilty of “oppressing their fellow Men,” condemned “Our President and other Leeches,” and repudiated allegiance to a government that had betrayed the original Declaration of Independence by protecting slave owners and traffickers.
The declaration was written in large letters on sheets of foolscap, with each page pasted onto white cloth. The fabric was then rolled around a stick and tied with a string, like a Torah scroll. This was Brown’s Sacred Instrument, which he would bring down from the mountains to fulfill God’s will and the destiny of his chosen nation.
The commencement of this second American Revolution, originally planned for the Fourth of July, was finally set for the third week of October. In a letter to John junior, Kagi explained why this was “just the right time” to attack. Crops had been harvested and stored, meaning food would be available to a roving army. Slaves, having w
orked hardest in late summer and early fall, “are discontented at this season more than at any other.” And an autumn church revival was in progress, which Kagi believed made whites more open to questioning the morality of slavery.
A more urgent impetus to action was financial. “We have not $5 left, and the men must be given work or they will find it themselves,” Kagi wrote. Brown’s penniless and restive recruits were also at growing risk of exposure. Kagi informed John junior on October 10 that he was leaving Chambersburg “for good” and closed his letter: “This must be our last for a time.”
AS IT HAPPENED, LAST-MINUTE aid arrived that same day, in the unlikely figure of a sickly, one-eyed Bostonian. Francis Jackson Meriam came from a prominent abolitionist family and had gone the previous year to Haiti, to investigate the condition of its formerly enslaved population. Upon hearing of Brown’s mission, he rushed to join the band—and also to report back to Brown’s worried backers. “He goes to look into matters a little for the stockholders,” Sanborn wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson on October 6.
Apart from his loathing of slavery, nothing recommended Meriam for service in the field. He was physically frail and had no experience as a fighter. Higginson thought him “half-crazy,” and Meriam looked it, with one glass eye and a face blotched by syphilis. But Meriam brought with him an asset that none of Brown’s other volunteers could supply. He carried $600 in gold coins, money he’d inherited and was eager to give to the cause. He spent about half of this fund buying percussion caps and other supplies for the men. The rest gave Brown a badly needed reservoir to draw on during the long campaign he anticipated.
Suddenly flush, the band was also bolstered by the arrival of two final volunteers, both of them free blacks born in North Carolina who had moved to the abolitionist hotbed of Oberlin, Ohio. Lewis Leary was a harness maker with a wife and baby daughter; he had left them without giving any hint of his mission. His nephew, John Copeland, had studied at Oberlin College and been indicted for helping rescue a captured fugitive. Like Brown, he took inspiration from the American Revolution. It wasn’t “white men alone who fought for the freedom of this country,” Copeland wrote his brother, “the very first blood that was spilt was that of a negro”—a reference to Crispus Attucks, killed by the British in the Boston Massacre.
Lewis Leary
John Copeland
Leary and Copeland had been delayed in departing Ohio by lack of money. Traveling in the dark from Chambersburg to avoid detection, they arrived at the Kennedy farm at daybreak on Saturday, October 15. This gave Brown twenty-one men; it was still fewer than he’d anticipated, but the risk of waiting any longer was too great. Brown may also have learned from Meriam of the impatience and anxiety of the Secret Six.
On October 13, Sanborn giddily reported to Higginson that he’d heard from Meriam that the “business operation” would commence within three days. “Though the mills of John grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small,” Sanborn wrote.
AS THE LAST PIECES of the operation fell into place that October, Brown’s men attended to final business of their own. Charles Tidd wrote his parents telling them where to find his possessions, since “this is perhaps the last letter you will ever receive from your son. The next time you hear from me, will probably be through the public prints. If we succeed the world will call us heroes; if we fail, we shall hang between the Heavens and earth.”
William Leeman used his last letter to unburden himself of the secret he’d kept from his poor family in Maine. “I am now in a Southern Slave State and before I leave it will be a free State Mother,” he wrote, revealing that for three years he’d belonged to a secret group dedicated to “the Extermination of Slavery.” This was why “I have staid away from you so long why I have never helped you when I knew you was in want and why I have not Explained to you before. I dared not divulge it before for fear of my Life now we are about to commence it does not make any diference.”
Last, like every son writing his mother, he urged her not “to worrie yourself.” Danger was “Natural to me,” he wrote, and should he die, it would be “in a good Cause” of which he knew she approved. “Beside Mother it will bring me a Name & Fortune. If we succeed we will not want anymore.”
Oliver Brown, in a letter datelined “Home,” fretted about Martha’s “peculiar condition” and urged his pregnant wife to get plenty of sleep and exercise. “Finally, Martha, do try to enjoy yourself; make the most of everything.” His brother Watson wasn’t quite so cheerful. He’d left North Elba in tears that summer, just after his son’s birth, and confided in a last letter to his wife, Belle, “I sometimes think perhaps we shall not meet again. If we should not, you have an object to live for,—to be a mother to our little Fred. He is not quite a reality to me yet.” He expected to leave the Kennedy farm for the last time that afternoon or the following day. “I can but commend you to yourself and your friends if I should never see you again. Believe me yours wholly and forever in love. Your husband, Watson Brown.”
Aaron Stevens also wrote “a few more lines” to his beloved, knowing that “it may be the last time.” Jennie Dunbar had yet to answer his sudden declaration of love from afar, and he regretted “that I did not get better acquainted with you” before leaving Ohio. “Jenny I doo long to see you so that I am allmost dead.”
Whatever happened now, Stevens believed, “we have not lived for naught,” since “insted of keeping our fellow beings back, we have healped them forward.” He also expressed hope that “I shall live to see thy lovly face wonce more.” But a hard fight lay ahead and he signed the letter using his old battle alias.
With meny good wishes I remain for ever your love.
C. Whipple
Good By
CHAPTER 8
Into the Breach
On October 15, the Kennedy farm, which had served Brown’s men as a barracks, arsenal, summer camp, and safe house, acquired a new status: “HEAD-QUARTERS WAR-DEPARTMENT, Near Harpers Ferry.”
These words were emblazoned on military papers issued the men before battle. “In pursuance of the authority vested in US,” one of the documents stated, “We do hereby Appoint and Commission the said Watson Brown a Captain.” The commission was signed by “Secretary of War” John Kagi and “Commander in Chief” John Brown.
On Sunday morning, October 16, another formal induction took place at the “War Department” headquarters. Some of the men were newcomers to Brown’s band and unfamiliar with the constitution adopted at Chatham. So Aaron Stevens read the document aloud, with Brown administering an oath of loyalty. Brown also read a Bible chapter “applicable to the condition of the slaves,” and “offered up a fervent prayer to God to assist in the liberation of the bondmen.”
In the afternoon, Brown gave final orders for the mission ahead. The three men least fit for hard fighting would stay at the farm to guard weapons and bring them forward at the appropriate time: Owen Brown, crippled in one arm; Francis Meriam, the sickly Bostonian; and Barclay Coppoc, an Iowa Quaker with bad lungs who was judged less energetic and determined than his brother Edwin.
The others would march to Harpers Ferry, with Charles Tidd and John Cook slipping ahead to cut down telegraph lines. Kagi and Stevens would seize the night watchman on the railroad bridge over the Potomac River, and the rest would follow, along the wagon road that ran beside the tracks and over the Potomac. Once in Harpers Ferry, the invaders would fan out, securing another bridge, the U.S. armory and arsenal, and several plantations outside town.
Having received their orders, the men had only to wait for dark. “Throughout the entire day,” Osborne Anderson wrote, “a deep solemnity pervaded the place.” Of Brown’s twenty-one followers, all but two were in their twenties and only a third of them had seen real fighting in Kansas. None had participated in an operation as complex and ambitious as the one they were about to undertake.
On Sunday evening, Brown offered a few last words to his men. “You all know how dear life is to you, and how dear your l
ife is to your friends,” he said. “Do not, therefore, take the life of any one if you can possibly avoid it; but if it is necessary to take life in order to save your own, then make sure work of it.”
Harpers Ferry in 1859, from a hill behind town, Potomac bridge at center
Finally, at eight o’clock, he gave the command: “Men, get on your arms; we will proceed to the Ferry.” As Brown climbed onto the horse-drawn wagon, Barclay Coppoc kissed and embraced his brother Edwin.
“Come, boys!” John Brown called out, leading the wagon away from the log house and onto the road to Harpers Ferry. The men walked in pairs, widely separated, keeping as quiet as possible. One of the men later told Annie Brown what this solemn procession had been like. “They all felt,” he said, “like they were marching to their own funeral.”
ON THE NIGHT OF October 16, Patrick Higgins was running late. A watchman on the B & O Railroad bridge across the Potomac, the Irishman was paid a dollar a day for twelve hours of guard duty. His shift was due to begin at midnight, at which time he would relieve a fellow guard, Bill Williams. But it was ten minutes after midnight when Higgins reached the Maryland end of the bridge; as he did, he noticed that the lamps hanging at the entrance had been extinguished. And there was no sign of Williams, who was supposed to stick a peg in a time clock every thirty minutes as he patrolled the bridge. Higgins saw that the last peg had been placed at ten thirty P.M., more than ninety minutes earlier.
