by Tony Horwitz
The shooter couldn’t anticipate the havoc his single bullet would unleash, either. At first, the response was shock, as Shepherd lay slowly dying in the railroad office and the train crew and passengers struggled to make sense of the attack. Then, a few minutes after the shooting, one of Brown’s sentries came off the bridge and headed toward the armory. “There he goes now!” someone shouted. The hotel clerk, Throckmorton, who had succeeded in borrowing a pistol, fired several shots. The sentry fired back, as did two men by the armory gate. No one was hit in the exchange.
But the gunfire turned what was already a tense and confused situation into wholesale panic. “Passengers were at this time running around in excitement and women and children screaming in the cars,” Throckmorton said. Many of them crowded into the Wager House, where the doors were barricaded and the lights put out. From the upper windows of the tall hotel, observers could easily see armed men stationed in the lamplit yard of the armory, just across the road.
“It was filled with Men that had helped themselves to arms,” S. F. Seely, an Ohio storekeeper on the train, wrote his wife later that day. Those around Seely offered “a thousand conjectures who they were or what they wanted.”
One rumor suggested that the men were disgruntled armory workers launching a strike. Others believed they were angry laborers who’d been working on a government dam, a troubled project whose contractor had recently absconded with money due his employees. Or they were robbers who had come after $15,000 believed to be in the armory paymaster’s safe. No one yet guessed that the midnight raiders were abolitionists.
The gunfire in the night also awoke a young and intrepid doctor, John Starry, who lived at the Point. After examining Heyward Shepherd’s wound, Starry took it upon himself to learn all he could about the armed strangers. He spent the rest of the night in close surveillance, creeping as near the insurgents as he could, even questioning Brown’s sentinels on the bridge and at the armory gate, asking what they were doing. “Never mind, you will find out in a day or two,” one told him.
Starry also observed the traffic in and out of the armory. Shortly before dawn, he saw a heavy wagon roll out of the gate and head across the Potomac bridge toward Maryland. Several men stood in the bed of the wagon holding spears, while others walked beside, carrying rifles. Starry decided to get on his horse and raise the alarm, which hadn’t yet spread beyond the Wager House and train platform, some distance from where most of the townspeople lived.
ON A NORMAL MONDAY morning in Harpers Ferry, the armory bell rang at six thirty to mark the beginning of the work week. But on October 17, 1859, the armory bell didn’t sound. The man whose job it was to ring the bell had been taken prisoner, along with a number of other employees who showed up early for work only to be seized by armed strangers at the gate. In the night, Brown’s sentinels had also detained several passersby, including two men returning late from a church meeting and another man coming home after putting a lady friend on the canal boat to Washington. By dawn, about forty men were being held under guard in the armory.
Brown made it clear to his hostages that he meant them no harm. His object, he assured Armistead Ball, the armory’s master machinist, “was to free the slaves—not to make war on the people.” He even let Ball, escorted by two guards, to go home to tell his family he was safe, and to eat breakfast. Breakfast wasn’t yet ready, so Ball was permitted to return home again later. The wives and daughters of other hostages were allowed to bring them food at the armory.
Brown also provided victuals for the rest of his prisoners, sending an early-morning note to the Wager House: “You will furnish forty-five men with a good breakfast.” This request astonished the hotel clerk, William Throckmorton, who had exchanged gunfire with the insurgents just a few hours before. He told Brown that breakfast would “have to be rather rough, as we had not expected anything like this, and were not prepared.” After delivering pots of coffee and baskets of rolls and butter, Throckmorton asked about pay. Brown told him he would want another meal that afternoon, “for perhaps 200 men, and he would pay for the whole then.”
Early that morning, Brown also met with Andrew Phelps, the conductor of the B & O train, and assured him it was safe to cross the Potomac. Phelps wasn’t convinced. To guarantee safe passage, he asked Brown—whom townspeople at this point knew only as “Smith” or “the Captain”—to walk with him ahead of the train as it went over the bridge. Brown complied, and as the two men reached the Maryland shore, he said something that stuck with Phelps.
“You no doubt wonder that a man of my age should be here with a band of armed men,” he told the conductor, “but if you knew my past history you would not wonder at it so much.”
Brown also disclosed his purpose in coming to Harpers Ferry, which Phelps conveyed to his superiors as soon as his train reached a station with telegraph lines intact. At 7:05 A.M., from Monocacy, Maryland, Phelps wired a message that began: “Express train bound east, under my charge, was stopped this morning at Harper’s Ferry by armed abolitionists. They say they have come to free the slaves and intend to do it at all hazards.”
Phelps reported the insurgents’ possession of the bridge and armory, the shooting of Shepherd, and the size of the occupying force, which he estimated at 150. “The leader of those men requested me to say to you that this is the last train that shall pass the bridge either East or West,” Phelps reported. “It has been suggested you had better notify the Secretary of War at once.”
Who “suggested” this to Phelps wasn’t made clear. It might have been a crewman or passenger. But Brown knew his words would be widely disseminated, and he had tailored them for maximum effect. In a second telegram, Phelps reported that “the Captain” had said “he expected a reinforcement of 1500 men.”
Brown made the same claim to his armory prisoners, and told one hostage that he had a picket line eighteen miles wide, extending all the way to the Mississippi. By keeping his eighteen men in constant motion, he also masked the size of the force he’d brought to Harpers Ferry. In the dark, as shawl-clad gunmen patrolled the streets, bridges, and government works, and as wagons rumbled in and out of the armory yard, estimates of the raiding party’s numbers grew, until rumors spread that Brown’s men were no fewer than 750.
The presence of armed blacks added to the confusion and panic. Some witnesses claimed they had seen hundreds of blacks in the night, including “strapping negroes who occasionally shouted out that they longed for liberty, as they had been in bondage long enough.” Others believed the blacks were actually white robbers in disguise, feigning a slave uprising so they could more easily “escape with their booty.”
The terrified train passengers carried these wild rumors east on Monday morning, flinging notes out the train windows to alert residents of the Maryland countryside. By the time they reached Baltimore, a little after noon, a throng had gathered at the station, including journalists who quickly telegraphed the news to papers in New York and other cities. The headlines given these first dispatches reflected the sensation Brown had caused in just twelve hours, and with only eighteen men.
FEARFUL AND EXCITING INTELLIGENCE …
INSURRECTION AT HARPER’S FERRY …
EXTENSIVE NEGRO CONSPIRACY IN VIRGINIA AND MARYLAND …
GENERAL STAMPEDE OF SLAVES …
As Brown had told Frederick Douglass at the Chambersburg quarry two months before, he thought “something startling” was just what the nation needed. By releasing the B & O train early on the morning of October 17, he delivered this shock treatment with extraordinary speed and impact. Brown had also spoken to Douglass and others of the military counterattack he anticipated. This, too, was certain to be hastened by his decision to use Phelps and his passengers as messenger pigeons.
But Brown had done enough research to know that the peacetime military of 1859 was far from a swift or well-oiled machine. The nation’s standing army had fewer than twenty thousand men—three-quarters of them posted west of the Mississippi, the other
s scattered across forts, barracks, and other installations. It would almost certainly take the better part of a day, if not longer, for federal troops to mobilize and make their way to Harpers Ferry.
In the meantime, Brown had little to fear, or so it appeared at daybreak on Monday morning when he let the train continue its trip east. No local opposition had surfaced, apart from the potshots fired by the Wager House clerk hours earlier. The situation was now calm and Brown and his men were in control, with most townspeople still unaware of the trouble down by the armory and railroad bridge. Even some of those who had been awakened by gunfire thought little of it and went back to sleep. This was, after all, a community accustomed to factory hammers, locomotive whistles, “canal rowdies,” and other disturbances. A few bangs in the night weren’t necessarily cause for alarm.
Among the town’s unsuspecting residents was Thomas Boerly, an Irish tavern keeper and grocer who went to open his shop as usual at about seven o’clock that Monday morning. As he did so, a neighbor ran up and told Boerly he had just escaped several armed men who tried to seize him down by the armory. The two townsmen grabbed shotguns and went to confront them.
Boerly was a large and combative man. On reaching Shenandoah Street, the main thoroughfare by the river, he blasted buckshot at sentinels posted by the arsenal gate. One of Brown’s men returned fire with his much more accurate rifle, hitting the two-hundred-pound Boerly in the groin. Mortally wounded, the grocer staggered into a jewelry shop and lay bleeding on the floor, living long enough to receive last rites from a local priest. Boerly was forty-five. He left a wife, three children, and an orphaned niece he’d adopted.
News of the shooting circulated just as townspeople awoke to the trouble in Harpers Ferry. The alert was thanks largely to John Starry, the young doctor who had jumped on his horse to sound the alarm. He had roused armory officials and workmen and asked one of them to ring the bells at the Lutheran church, “to get the citizens together to see what sort of arms they had and to see what we could do to get rid of these fellows.” By seven A.M., a number of people had gathered on Camp Hill, a steep rise overlooking the industrial and commercial areas by the rivers.
What Starry learned was disheartening. Per capita, Harpers Ferry housed more weapons than just about anyplace in America—roughly a hundred guns for every adult white male. But almost all these arms were housed in the arsenal and the gun factories, which were now in the hands of mysterious attackers. All the citizenry could muster was a handful of squirrel rifles and shotguns like the one Boerly had died firing.
After the conference on Camp Hill, Starry concluded that he had better get on his horse again, and he rode off to seek reinforcements in the county seat of Charlestown, eight miles away.
EARLY THAT SAME MORNING, another rider headed toward Harpers Ferry, unaware of the turmoil in town. Terence Byrne lived in Maryland, not far from the Kennedy farm, and he’d ridden about a mile from his home when he encountered a heavy farm wagon coming the other way. As the Marylander passed it, a voice called out, “Mr. Byrne, stop.”
Reining in his horse, Byrne turned and saw John Cook, a familiar figure in the neighborhood. “I am very sorry to inform you that you are my prisoner,” Cook told him.
“You are certainly joking,” Byrne replied.
“I am not.”
Byrne glimpsed a rifle poking from beneath Cook’s coat. Another man came up and also pointed his gun at Byrne. “You must go with us to your place,” he said. “We want your Negroes.”
This was Charles Tidd, whom Brown had sent across the Potomac with Cook, William Leeman, and about five of the slaves liberated from the plantations in Virginia. Brown’s men and the newly freed slaves rode in Lewis Washington’s wagon; one of the slaves carried the colonel’s fowling piece, while the others carried pikes. This was the well-armed party that John Starry had seen leave the armory at about five A.M. before he rode off to rouse other townspeople.
The men had been sent to Maryland on a dual mission: to start bringing forward weapons from the Kennedy farm and to collect more slaves and take their masters hostage. Byrne, who with his brother owned a farm and a number of slaves, had ridden right into their hands.
Unlike Lewis Washington, Byrne took the men at their word when they said they’d come to free slaves. He also worried about what this might portend. As he returned home in his captors’ custody, Byrne saw his brother standing on the porch and tried to warn him. “I whispered to him, ‘civil war,’” Byrne later testified. “Perhaps I said ‘servile war.’”
Brown’s men entered the house and seated themselves, uninvited, while Byrne nervously paced. “Cook commenced making a kind of speech,” Byrne later testified. “He said that all men were created equal” and went on at some length. Byrne was too rattled to take much of it in. He also summoned a visiting cousin, “as she was a lady of considerable nerve.” Indeed, upon coming downstairs, she told Byrne he should “cowhide those scoundrels out of the house.”
Byrne didn’t take this advice: the men carried rifles and revolvers. But they were thwarted in their primary mission, since Byrne’s male slaves had gone off on Saturday night and not yet returned. Cook and the others nonetheless held to their orders to take Byrne hostage, loading him into the wagon beside a number of heavy boxes retrieved from the nearby Kennedy farm. The four-horse wagon then set off toward Harpers Ferry, pulling heavily in the damp morning air.
After traveling a mile or two, the wagon stopped beside a log schoolhouse, which Brown had chosen as a forward depot for his weapons. Perched near the head of a ravine running down to the Potomac, the secluded school was accessible to Harpers Ferry and also defensible, a potential redoubt for Brown’s men if they chose to pull back into the Maryland hills.
The Maryland schoolhouse and arsenal
But there was one complication: by the time the first wagonload of weapons arrived, about ten o’clock on Monday morning, school was already in session. There were some twenty-five pupils inside the one-room building, along with a young schoolteacher named Lind Currie.
Cook, nonchalant as always, walked in and informed the teacher that he needed part of the schoolroom to store boxes of weapons. Equally startling was Cook’s request that Currie continue with his lessons; the teacher, Cook said, “should not be interrupted.”
Cook carried a rifle and had a bowie knife and two revolvers stuck in his belt. Tidd and Leeman were similarly armed, while the black men carried pikes. When this party appeared, Currie’s students grew wide-eyed and “very much alarmed,” the teacher later testified. As he drily informed Cook, his pupils “were not in a condition to engage in their usual duties.”
After trying to calm the students himself, Cook agreed to let them go and allowed Currie to escort home a frightened little boy. When the teacher returned, the wagon had been unloaded and was on its way back to the Kennedy farm for more weapons, leaving Cook and one of Lewis Washington’s former slaves to guard the school. Currie found Cook “rather cooler” than before, and guessed this was because the insurgent had learned that the teacher, who lived just a mile from Colonel Washington, was a slaveholding farmer as well.
Currie also realized he was now “detained” and had no choice other than to stay. But Cook was incapable of sustaining a chill. “He became rather more communicative, and spoke of a great many things,” Currie testified. Over the hours that followed, the two young men from Connecticut and Virginia engaged in “long and varied” conversation, on topics such as “the feeling entertained towards the south by the north generally.”
A CURIOUS INTIMACY ALSO developed between Terence Byrne and twenty-year-old William Leeman, the man assigned to escort the Maryland slave owner the rest of the way to Harpers Ferry. The two men hadn’t walked far from the school when rain began to pour down. “I had an umbrella,” Byrne later testified, “and proposed to him to sit up close to me, and my umbrella would be some protection to him.” As the hostage and his armed guard huddled together by the road, Leeman disclosed t
hat his commander, “Captain Smith,” was actually the notorious John Brown of Kansas.
Byrne, already extremely anxious, now grew even more so. “I was fearful of a bloody civil war,” he said. “I was under the impression that, unless they were in great numbers, they would not be foolish enough to make an attack on the borders of two slaveholding States.”
But he also sensed that his young bodyguard had doubts about the mission. At Byrne’s house earlier that morning, while Cook speechified about the coming triumph of freedom, Byrne noticed that Leeman had hunched quietly by the fire, his head resting against the mantel and his cap drawn down. Now, as Leeman waited out the rain shower with his hostage, “he appeared to be very serious,” Byrne said. “I am inclined to think he was meditating his escape.”
The Marylander sensed no such anxiety in another member of Brown’s band he met that morning. When William Thompson, one of the Potomac bridge guards, passed Leeman and his captive on the road, he “came up smiling,” extended his hand, and said, “How are you, Byrne?” To which the Marylander replied with feigned heartiness: “Good morning, Mr. Thompson; I am well; how are you?”
The cheerful young man told Byrne about the situation in town, where a lull had prevailed since the early-morning gunfire. He had just given a similar message to the guards at the schoolhouse. “Thompson came up from the Ferry and reported that everything was all right,” Cook later stated. The courier then hurried back down to his post on the bridge.
