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

by Tony Horwitz

  This dispatch was delivered at about eleven o’clock on Monday morning. A short time later, Cook received a fresh report from the Ferry, though this one was not delivered in person. “I heard a good deal of firing,” Cook said, “and became anxious to know the cause.”

  FROM THE MOMENT HE arrived in Harpers Ferry, Brown had sought to assure the townspeople that he did not regard them as his enemy. He had come to free slaves and intended to hurt no one, unless he met with resistance. Following the gunfire that broke out in the night, Brown repeatedly sent peace emissaries to frightened train passengers and citizens at the Wager House. He expressed regret for the shooting of the railroad porter, Heyward Shepherd, blaming it on “bad management” by his sentinels on the bridge and telling Conductor Phelps, “It was not his intention that any blood be spilled.”

  He’d also indicated to his band that he anticipated some support from white townspeople. “From Brown,” one of them later stated, “I understood that there were laboring men at Harper’s Ferry who wished to get rid of slaves and would aid in running them off.” At the least, Brown appears to have believed that most whites would stay out of the fray rather than take up arms in defense of the slaveholding gentry.

  This belief was bolstered by the intelligence he had received from Cook, who found the community welcoming, even to a Northerner who sometimes told his acquaintances of his sympathy for the free-state cause in Kansas. Relatively few townspeople owned slaves, and they seemed to live and work peaceably alongside free blacks. Thomas Boerly, for instance, rented part of his property to a black family. The black baggage master, Heyward Shepherd, was employed at the B & O depot by the town’s mayor, who had also helped another free man buy his wife and children out of slavery.

  But this interracial cooperation didn’t translate into sympathy for Brown’s cause. Nor were many people in Harpers Ferry aware of his intentions, at least initially. The shooting of a free black man confused matters, as did the mixed signals Brown seemed to convey. He said he meant no harm to citizens—yet seized their town at night, took hostages, claimed command of a vast army, and brought with him barrels of gunpowder and torches that one hostage described as “sticks wrapped with cotton waste and dipped in burning fluid.” His men also carried Sharps rifles, a new kind of carbine named for a gunsmith who had once worked at Harpers Ferry. Compact, quick-loading, and renowned for its range and accuracy, the Sharps was the deadliest firearm of its day, and the origin of the word “sharpshooter.”

  Unsurprisingly, townspeople doubted Brown’s peaceful overtures—particularly after the shooting of Shepherd and then Boerly, news of which quickly reached the locals who had convened that morning on Camp Hill. As John Starry rode off to seek aid in the county seat, townsmen set about arming themselves.

  First, someone realized that not all the government weapons were under the watch of the invaders. A few weeks earlier, when flooding threatened the low ground by the Shenandoah, scores of rifles had been moved from the arsenal to a storeroom on the armory grounds, which stretched for half a mile beyond Brown’s headquarters by the gate. Two townsmen succeeded in reaching the storeroom and they returned with rifles, percussion caps, and a few bullet molds.

  Meanwhile, women and children helped gather all the lead they could find, including pewter plates and spoons, to melt on stoves and form into ammunition. “Father and the others were putting bullets into their pockets, hot from the moulds,” recalled Jennie Chambers, a fifteen-year-old armorer’s daughter and schoolgirl in Harpers Ferry.

  Another relative of Jennie’s, George Chambers, was the proprietor of the Gault House, a wooden saloon near the Wager House that overlooked both the arsenal and the armory grounds. Chambers posted himself in an upper story of the ramshackle building and began delivering sporadic harassing fire. A few others followed suit.

  Though no one was hit, this sniping forced Brown’s men to take cover and dodge between their separate posts at the bridges, armory, arsenal, and the more distant Hall’s Rifle Works, where John Kagi was posted. As local opposition emerged, Brown’s second-in-command sent a messenger to the armory, urging that Brown and his force withdraw from Harpers Ferry before it was too late. Kagi received no answer.

  TEN MILES WEST OF Harpers Ferry, James Hooff was working in a field that morning, supervising slaves as they seeded and harrowed, when John Starry “rode out in haste.” The doctor told him “whites and Negroes had possession of the Ferry & were killing the citizens,” Hooff wrote in his diary. The farmer immediately mounted his horse, gathered “all the arms I could get,” and rode off to nearby Charlestown, the seat of Jefferson County.

  Others did the same, alerted by Starry, by an overseer at Lewis Washington’s plantation, and by tolling bells in Charlestown, a sound that on non-church days normally signified an emergency such as a fire. The town was also the base for a modestly equipped and trained militia. One of its principal roles was to act as a slave patrol and guard against revolt—a source of keen anxiety following Nat Turner’s insurrection, when many such civilian units were organized and the Virginia Military Institute established.

  While Brown anticipated sympathy from some factory workers in Harpers Ferry, he could expect none from the farming heartland of Jefferson County, centered on Charlestown. Just three months before Brown’s attack, the town had enacted a new ordinance forbidding “any negro” to be on the street after nine P.M. In addition: “Not more than five negroes shall at any one time stand together on a sidewalk, or at or near the corner of a street, and negroes shall never stand on a sidewalk, to the inconvenience of white persons having to pass by, and any negro who shall violate this order will be punished by stripes not exceeding fifteen.” Slaves were regularly auctioned at the door of the county courthouse in Charlestown. So were free blacks, sold into slavery “for remaining in the Commonwealth contrary to law.” (Freed blacks were required to leave Virginia within a year, unless granted a special permit.)

  By ten A.M. on the morning of October 17, about a hundred volunteers had gathered in Charlestown, some of them militiamen, many not. All were ready to oppose the shadowy interracial mob that had kidnapped their neighbor Lewis Washington and taken hold of Harpers Ferry. Boarding a train, they disembarked at a rail spur halfway to their destination, so the cars could be sent to bring additional militia from Winchester, a short distance west. Couriers were also dispatched to other Virginia towns.

  When the Charlestown contingent marched into Harpers Ferry, at about eleven thirty A.M., they joined a group of local men on Camp Hill who had found enough guns and bullets to fight. Officers in the Charlestown militia took charge of this combined force, now numbering about 150, and divided it into five units. One squad was sent on a flanking maneuver and ordered to cross the Potomac a mile above the Ferry so it could attack the B & O bridge from the Maryland side. Another snaked down through town to slip into the Gault House and reinforce its saloonkeeper turned sniper, George Chambers. A third party occupied other tall buildings near the government works. The remainder went to secure the Shenandoah bridge and the road leading to Hall’s Rifle Works, half a mile from Brown’s headquarters at the armory.

  These maneuvers were executed in heavy mist and rain by men who—except for a handful of Mexican War veterans—had never seen combat. They were haphazardly armed and knew nothing of their foes, apart from wild rumors that suggested the insurgents numbered in the hundreds, including “armed bands of maddened blacks.”

  The twenty men sent to flank Brown’s force had to work their way north of town and pole across the shallow Potomac in flatboats. Reaching the Maryland bank, they then crept along a towpath toward the railroad bridge, unable to see the Virginia shore because of the mist. To their left loomed a cloud-shrouded cliff; they feared that insurgents stood atop it, waiting to shower down boulders or bullets.

  “Every man,” one of the Charlestown volunteers later wrote, “felt when he reached the Maryland end of the Potomac Bridge that he had literally ‘run the gauntlet,’
and we were all glad to be alive.”

  The Virginians then poured onto the bridge, firing wildly. Brown’s sentinels, badly outnumbered and caught by surprise, quickly fell back across the Potomac toward Harpers Ferry. Spilling out of the covered bridge on the Virginia side, they ran for the armory, only sixty yards away. The last stretch was open pavement, exposed to the fire of gunmen who had occupied the upper stories of buildings overlooking the street.

  Some of Brown’s men at the armory and arsenal rushed from their sheltered posts to defend their retreating comrades. In the confused moments that followed, one of the insurgents raced down Shenandoah Street, between the arsenal and armory. From a window high above, a gunman fired down at him, apparently having loaded his rifle with a crude slug or spike instead of a bullet. The steeply angled shot tore through the running man’s neck and throat, dropping him dead on the pavement.

  Brown’s other men dodged to safety but were unable to retrieve their fallen compatriot, who was left exposed on the street for townspeople to gawk at. Locals didn’t know his name, but recognized him as a tall mulatto who had been seen earlier at the arsenal gate, firing his Sharps rifle. No one dared to collect his body, which lay in a gutter near the center of the fighting that now raged around the armory.

  Later that day, hogs came to root in the slain man’s gaping neck wound. Angry and inebriated townspeople poked sticks in the wound and used pocket knives to cut off pieces of the dead man’s ears as gruesome souvenirs. By the time the mutilated body was finally taken away and dumped in an unmarked pit, little remained to identify the deceased as Dangerfield Newby, the former slave who had hoped to free his family still in bondage in Virginia.

  Remarkably, the desperate letters Newby had received from his wife survived, having been taken from his pockets or from among his possessions found later. “if I thought I shoul never see you this earth would have no charms for me,” Harriett had written Dangerfield in her last message, begging him to rescue her before she was sold south. “Do all you Can for me, witch I have no doubt you will.”

  Her determined husband fell just inside Virginia, fifty miles from Harriett, and his death extinguished her dream of freedom. A few months later, she was sold to a new master, in Louisiana. Her husband’s estate—including the $741 he’d saved to free her—was distributed among his relatives in Ohio.

  NEWBY’S DEATH ALSO MARKED a turn in the broader campaign of liberation he’d joined. He was shot just as Brown’s men lost control of the Potomac bridge, a setback that isolated the small invasion force and exposed the deep flaws in its commander’s plan.

  Among Brown’s idiosyncrasies as a military thinker were some curious notions regarding topography. On a carriage ride with Franklin Sanborn in 1857, he surveyed the New England landscape and told the Concord teacher that the strongest positions weren’t hilltops, as usually supposed. Rather, a ravine “well guarded on the flanks, was often a better military post,” he said.

  This “strange doctrine,” as Sanborn called it, also turned up in the notes Brown took on his military reading. “Some valuable hints,” he wrote in his diary, listing book passages on guerrilla warfare, including one that mentioned “deep and narrow defiles where 300 men would suffise to check an army.”

  Harpers Ferry fit Brown’s belief that ravines could serve as ideal redoubts. Occupying a point of land at the bottom of a gorge, the town was enclosed by rivers and steep mountains. Brown believed he could choke off the few approach points and defend what he considered an impregnable fortress against a much larger force. But if this doubtful strategy had any merit, it vanished the moment Virginians flanked Brown at midday on October 17.

  The loss of the Potomac bridge cut Brown off from his men and material in Maryland. Having retreated from the Shenandoah bridge at about the same time, the band in Harpers Ferry now had no clear avenue of escape. Brown and his men also became vulnerable to attack from above. Since buildable land was scarce in the hilly, flood-prone town, most of the structures stood close together and were generally tall, three stories or more. Those on the steep hill behind the armory and arsenal loomed much higher. Once gunmen occupied buildings overlooking the “Lower Town,” as the riverside area was known, Harpers Ferry became a virtual shooting gallery.

  Badly exposed, Brown’s men in the town were also isolated from one another. Instead of one mobile unit, they now constituted three separated squads: at the armory, arsenal, and rifle works. Anyone who tried to move between these outposts risked the fate that had befallen Dangerfield Newby.

  Late the previous night, Brown had sent a party under John Kagi to secure and hold Hall’s Rifle Works, half a mile from the armory. Kagi and his men stayed there through the night and morning, patrolling the factory grounds and awaiting further orders. None came, nor did Brown respond to Kagi’s message urging a withdrawal. Kagi and his men were left stranded and in the dark as gunmen mobilized on the ridge overlooking their position.

  Also waiting anxiously for Brown’s orders was Charles Tidd, who had spent most of the day in Maryland, transporting weapons from the Kennedy farm to the log schoolhouse. That summer, when Tidd had angrily left the farm upon learning of his commander’s plan to seize Harpers Ferry, he had been mollified by Brown’s agreement to send men “in each direction to burn RR bridges & return with slaves,” as Tidd later described the revised plan. These measures would presumably give the band much-needed reinforcement and make it harder for counterattacking troops to reach the scene. But if Brown did in fact make such a promise to Tidd, he didn’t follow through on it. Instead, he stayed put in Harpers Ferry all morning, until the “steel trap” Frederick Douglass had warned of began to close, leaving his men to wonder: What was the old man up to?

  Front gate of the U.S. armory; the engine house is the first building on the left

  TO THOSE AT HIS side early that afternoon, Brown betrayed no sign of panic or indecision over his deteriorating military position. In Kansas, he’d earned a reputation for coolness under fire; here too he seemed in control, even as militiamen and armed citizens seized the bridge, killed one of his men, and began directing steady fire at his small force holed up in the armory.

  As the shooting commenced, Brown put his hand on Terence Byrne, one of the forty or so prisoners held in the armory guard room. “I want you, sir,” he said, also selecting nine other men, including prominent armory officials and Byrne’s fellow farmers and slaveholders, Lewis Washington and John Allstadt. The ten prisoners were taken to a larger space adjoining the guardroom. This stablelike chamber had thick brick walls, heavy wooden doors, and very high windows. Designed to house the armory’s two fire engines, it would now become Brown’s command post and the holding cell for his most valuable hostages.

  The prisoners were positioned at the rear of the engine house, behind the fire carts. Their captors manned the doors, which opened inward and could be pulled back a few inches to peer or shoot out of. Brown also put one of Allstadt’s freed slaves, Phil Luckum, to work drilling at the building’s brick walls to create openings for rifles. “You are a pretty stout looking fellow,” he said to Luckum, “can’t you knock a hole through there for me?” Using mason’s tools, Luckum worked until a bullet sent brick and mortar flying back in his face. “It’s getting too hot,” he declared, leaving Brown to finish the job.

  With bullets thudding against the engine house and crashing through the high windows, Brown’s hostages agreed to help broker a cease-fire. A leading citizen was sent out with a flag of truce, escorted by William Thompson, who had buoyantly told John Cook a short while ago that “everything was all right” at the Ferry.

  Earlier in the day, Brown had sent out emissaries without incident. But the gunmen now surrounding the armory were in no mood to negotiate. They promptly seized Thompson and dragged him into the Wager House, tying his hands and feet to an armchair in the parlor. As the first of Brown’s men to be captured, Thompson was set upon by interrogators who asked about his motivation and the meaning of the atta
ck.

  “His answers were invariably the same,” said Christine Fouke, the sister of the hotel’s proprietor. Thompson told his captors he had been “taught to believe the Negroes were cruelly treated and would gladly avail themselves of the first opportunity to obtain their freedom.” He’d also been led to believe that once Brown and his men took possession of the armory, “the colored people would come in a mass, backed by the non-slaveholders of the Valley of Virginia.”

  THOMPSON’S SEIZURE, UNDER A flag of truce, angered Brown and enraged his second-in-command at the armory, Aaron Stevens. Tender in his lovelorn letters to the Ohio music teacher Jennie Dunbar, Stevens was a ferocious fighter and dangerously hotheaded when crossed. His court-martial, five years before, was due to Stevens having felt insulted by a superior officer, which prompted him to draw his gun, declare “I am as good a man as you,” and threaten to blow out the officer’s “damned brains.” Since arriving in Harpers Ferry, he’d spoken sharply to Lewis Washington, the patrician plantation master, and told another hostage who expressed support of slavery, “You would be the first fellow I would hang.” Now, he wanted violent retribution against Thompson’s captors.

  Stevens was dissuaded from this course of action by the most prominent of the local hostages, Archibald Kitzmiller, the acting superintendent of the armory. (His superior was away on business.) Kitzmiller had been the first man awakened by John Starry, who had alerted him that the armory “was in possession of an armed band.” Going to investigate, Kitzmiller had been seized and held ever since.

  As Brown and Stevens mulled how to respond to Thompson’s capture, Kitzmiller said, “I can possibly accommodate matters.” He then offered to go out as a peace broker himself, with Stevens as escort. Despite what had happened to Thompson, Brown agreed, sending not only Stevens but also his son Watson as a second bodyguard.