by Tony Horwitz
Stevens and Watson walked out of the gate behind Kitzmiller, who waved his handkerchief at armory workers he saw posted by the Potomac bridge. The three men then proceeded down a narrow street that formed a sort of canyon between tall commercial buildings on either side. This lane dead-ended at a raised railroad trestle, above which loomed the Gault House saloon. As Kitzmiller and his two escorts neared it, the saloonkeeper, George Chambers, smashed an upper-story window so he could shoot unobstructed. Then he and a fellow gunman opened fire.
Their first volley hit Watson Brown. A moment later, Stevens was also struck. He swore and fired back; hit again and again, he finally collapsed. Lying bloodied on the pavement, Stevens called out to Kitzmiller, who had urged him to attempt a peaceful negotiation. “I have been cruelly deceived,” Stevens said.
Kitzmiller, who had been dragged from his bed before dawn and then taken hostage, replied: “I wish I had remained at home.”
Watson Brown, meanwhile, had staggered back to the armory, vomiting blood from a stomach wound. He hoisted his rifle and for a time resumed his post at the engine house, until he became too weak and lay down on the floor. His father could do little except give him water and fume over the barbarity of his assailants. He began to “show temper,” one of the hostages later testified, and “said he had it in his power to destroy that place in half an hour.”
Brown regarded himself as a soldier, subject to traditional rules of battlefield conduct. His hostages, for the most part, abided by this canon, and not only because they were terrified. A number of them later testified to Brown’s sincere and respectful treatment of them. Virginians prided themselves on their code of honor, and Brown seemed a man whose word was his bond. Hostages who left the armory as emissaries pledged to return—and did so. Archibald Kitzmiller was a rare exception. Caught in the firefight that felled Aaron Stevens, he “did not consider” his pledge to return “binding under the circumstances,” as he later put it. Instead, he took cover in the Wager House.
The bullet-riddled Stevens was left crumpled on the pavement outside, exposed to a hard rain and the horrified gaze of onlookers. “I seen big beefs killed and they did not lose more blood,” Patrick Higgins, the bridge watchman, later stated.
But the strapping warrior wasn’t yet dead. After lying still for a few minutes, Stevens began to move and groan. Brown, having now lost three men under flags of truce, couldn’t risk sending out another to assist his wounded lieutenant. But a hostage volunteered to go to Stevens’s aid. Joseph Brua had served earlier as a peace envoy. Now he went into the bullet-raked street, helped Stevens into the Wager House, and returned once again to captivity. In an extraordinary day that mixed cruelty and kindness, dishonor and courage, Brua’s act was among the most remarkable.
Also astonishing was the fortitude of the man Brua rescued. Stevens had already commanded notice from townspeople for his fearsome and unflinching defense of an exposed position at the armory gate. Now, lying half naked on a bed in the Wager House, where a doctor dressed the wounds to his face, chest, and limbs, Stevens became a figure of awe for his majestic physique. “A large, exceedingly athletic man, a perfect Samson in appearance,” one person wrote. Another described his “brawny shoulders and large sinewy limbs, all the muscles finely developed and hard.”
His manner was just as imposing. Though shot six times and surrounded by armed interrogators, he remained composed and defiant. Stevens told his captors, as Thompson had, that Brown believed “the Negroes would flock to them by the thousands, and they would soon have force enough for their purposes.” Stevens now realized that Brown “had been greatly deceived,” but he expressed no regret and was fully prepared to die for the cause of freedom. “One life for many,” he said. Believing himself close to death, Stevens gazed at a picture he wore around his neck, an image of his beloved Jennie Dunbar posing with a little girl in Ohio they both adored.
NOT ALL OF BROWN’S men behaved quite so staunchly on the afternoon of October 17, as their position grew ever more perilous. Earlier in the day, the Maryland farmer Terence Byrne had sensed doubt and apprehension in his guard, William Leeman, the youngest of Brown’s men. Just twenty, the former shoe factory worker was tall and lean, regarded by his peers as a “Devil may care kind of fellow,” hard to control but a tough fighter. He was one of the Kansas veterans who’d teased Dauphin Thompson at the Kennedy farm, questioning whether the baby-faced novice was suited for combat.
But in the midst of battle, it was Leeman who faltered. From his many letters, it appeared that he’d joined Brown out of a youthful mix of idealism, ambition, and adventure-seeking. As he’d written his impoverished mother just before the attack, he expected the Harpers Ferry mission to bring such fame and fortune that “we will not want anymore.”
The prospects for this success were fading fast on the afternoon of October 17. At about one o’clock, while the combatants’ attention was focused on the engine house and the street outside the armory gate, Leeman slipped away, dodging between buildings in the vast armory yard that stretched behind the engine house and ran parallel to the Potomac. Crossing the railroad tracks, he ducked through a culvert and into the river, wading about sixty yards before being spotted. Gunmen on the bridge and on shore opened fire, while two others scrambled down to the riverbank and splashed in after Leeman.
William Leeman
As usual in autumn, the Potomac was low, its bed filled with rocks. Midway across, Leeman slipped and fell, losing his rifle in the water. He plunged on until he reached a large rock, where he drew a bowie knife and cut the straps holding his cartridge box and pistols, probably so he could swim more easily. But his two pursuers were closing fast.
“Don’t shoot!” he cried, throwing up his hands. One of the men approached the rock, raised his gun, and shot Leeman in the face.
Before returning to shore, the gunman went through Leeman’s pockets, finding his two-day-old commission as a captain in Brown’s army and a letter from his teenaged sister, Lizzie. She told of the family’s poverty and pleaded with him to come home to Maine. “Oh my dear brother,” she wrote, “I hope you are as good as you were when you went from your home, and I know you are, for you would not do anything wrong.”
Leeman, like Dangerfield Newby, was left where he fell. Sprawled on a large rock in the middle of the Potomac, his body lay in plain sight of gunmen on the bridge and in buildings overlooking the river. They pumped dozens of bullets into the corpse until finally, an observer wrote, the body slipped from the rock and drifted in the shallow river, Leeman’s black hair “floating upon the surface and waving with every ripple.”
FROM THE TIME BROWN’S men first crossed the Potomac late on Sunday night, the fighting at Harpers Ferry had been confined to a tiny geographic area near the armory and arsenal. Townspeople were aware that insurgents also held Hall’s Rifle Works. But it was hard for them to judge how many men were holed up in the factory, and where inside the walled nine-building complex they were headquartered. Not until two thirty in the afternoon on Monday did a local man succeed in sneaking up and spotting their hideout in one of the workshops. He and others immediately volunteered to form a party to flush the insurgents out.
The attack plan called for gunmen to occupy a bluff opposite, from which they would commence the assault with a barrage through the windows of the workshop. But as soon as they took up position, five men raced out of the targeted building. John Kagi had seen the attackers mobilizing and given the order to evacuate. As the men on the bluff opened fire, Kagi led a retreat out the back of the rifle works and toward the nearby Shenandoah.
In 1859, this stretch of the riverfront was crowded with mills, railroad tracks, and industrial waterways used to power factory turbines. Kagi may have hoped to follow the Potomac’s bank toward town and rejoin whatever he could find of Brown’s party. But the way was blocked by gunmen posted in buildings beside the rifle works. The only path open was straight ahead, into the Shenandoah.
Kagi waded into the
river, followed by two of his men. But gunmen quickly appeared on the far shore, while others ran down to the bank the insurgents had just fled. Some of them pursued Kagi and his men into the river. The rest unleashed a watery cross fire.
A local woman witnessed the scene from her house overlooking the Shenandoah and described it moments later in a letter to her daughter. “Our men chased them in the river just below here and I saw them shot down like dogs,” Mary Mauzy wrote of the “ruffians” who had fled the rifle works. “I saw one poor wrech rise above the water and some one strike him with a club he sank again and in a moment they dragged him out a Corpse.”
This was Kagi, who had struggled two-thirds of the way across the Shenandoah before he was shot and fell under the water. A diary found in his pocket told of final preparations the week before in Chambersburg, where he’d written a last letter to his family: “Be cheerful my dear father and sisters—dont imagine dangers, all will be well.”
Close behind Kagi in the river was Lewis Leary, the free black harness maker from Oberlin, who had arrived at the Kennedy farm only two days before. He climbed atop a rock in the Shenandoah and was shot in the back. Dragged ashore, Leary begged for warmth and was laid beside a stove in a workshop by the river, where he lingered in great pain for twelve hours.
Leary asked his captors to send word of his death to his young wife, Mary, back in Ohio with their baby daughter. Leary hadn’t told her of his plans; she thought he was going to see family in Pennsylvania. But Mary had wondered why he was so emotional on departing, having taken their baby in his arms and “wept like a child,” she later said.
Leary’s kinsman from Oberlin, John Copeland, was behind Leary and Kagi as they tried to cross the Shenandoah. After seeing his two comrades shot, Copeland floated down behind some rocks, hoping to hide there until the gunmen “thought that we were all killed,” he later wrote. Copeland was quickly discovered and hauled ashore, where men stood knotting handkerchiefs together and shouting for the young black man to be lynched. But John Starry, the ubiquitous doctor, happened to be on the scene and shielded Copeland with his horse until an officer arrived and took the captured insurgent to jail in Charlestown.
Also taken prisoner was a slave from John Allstadt’s estate named Ben, who had been sent to guard the rifle works with Kagi and the others. Rather than run into the river, he’d thrown down his pike and surrendered—only to be threatened, like Copeland, with summary execution. In Ben’s case, it was a local minister who intervened. “So enraged were the multitude,” the churchman wrote, “that it was with difficulty they were restrained from hanging & shooting several on the spot.”
One other slave had been posted at the rifle works: Jim, a young coachman hired by Lewis Washington from an owner in Winchester. Unlike Ben, Jim ran for the river, but he didn’t make it. He was found floating in a millrace; unable to swim, or weighed down by his gear, he’d drowned in the stone-lined channel. Jim was thus the fourth black man, and the first slave, to die in Brown’s war of liberation.
THAT AFTERNOON, THE ATMOSPHERE around Brown’s position in the armory also grew ugly and anarchic. During the course of the day, armed men had continued flowing into Harpers Ferry, most of them aligned with no organized unit but “fighting on my own hook,” as one man put it. Many fortified themselves at the Gault House and other bars in and around the Point. Emboldened by drink, they were further incited that afternoon by the deaths of three well-known individuals.
The first was George Turner, a West Point graduate, Seminole War veteran, prominent slave owner, and intimate of Lewis Washington’s. Upon riding into town, Turner had taken up a position on High Street, the main road climbing the hill above the armory and arsenal. He was taking aim when, before a number of onlookers, a shot to the neck struck him dead. Soon after, frenzied locals started seizing anyone who seemed the least bit suspicious, including a railroad director from Pennsylvania who had disembarked from his stalled train to see what was happening in Harpers Ferry. Though he carried only a train ticket, a diary, and a French novel, the Northerner was hauled off by drunken guards to the county jail.
Turner’s death, early in the afternoon, was followed by that of Heyward Shepherd, the black baggage master who had been shot in the back on the Potomac bridge the night before. He had lingered for more than twelve hours in the railroad office, begging for water and groaning in pain until his death at about three o’clock. This had a profound effect on his employer and patron, Fontaine Beckham, the B & O agent for Harpers Ferry who also served as mayor. Though free, Shepherd had needed white sponsorship to work and stay in the town, since his legal residence lay in another county. Beckham, a sixty-year-old slave owner, provided this legal guardianship.
“The old man had had him ten or twelve years, and liked him very much,” said William Throckmorton, the Wager House clerk, in a statement that spoke to the murky and insecure status of “free” blacks in Virginia. When Shepherd died, Throckmorton added, Beckham became “greatly excited” and went out on the railroad platform with a pistol in his pocket. Others pulled him back. But Beckham went out again, this time reaching a water pumping station directly across from the armory engine house. Brown’s men had taken fire from the direction of the pumping station and could now see a figure peering around it, about thirty yards off.
“If he keeps on peeking I’m going to shoot,” said Edwin Coppoc, crouched behind the engine house’s folding doors, which had been pulled open a crack so Brown’s men could see out. When the figure behind the pumping station reappeared, Coppoc fired. After he fired a second shot, Brown declared, “That man is down.”
Brown and Coppoc had no way of knowing “that man” was the town’s mayor and one of Jefferson County’s most respected and well-connected citizens. Shot in the chest, Beckham fell dead on the railroad trestle, a site so exposed that no one was able to recover his body.
“When Beckham was shot our men became almost frantic,” Throckmorton said. Some of them rushed into the Wager House, where William Thompson was still tied to a chair. “Shoot him!” “Kill him!” they cried. The two men at the head of this mob were George Chambers, the saloonkeeper-sniper at the Gault House, and Henry Hunter, a nephew of Fontaine Beckham’s. They leveled cocked guns at Thompson’s head and were about to shoot when a woman intervened. According to Hunter’s court testimony, she sat in Thompson’s lap, “covered his face with her arms and shielded him,” crying out, “For God’s sake wait and let the law take its course.”
The woman who intervened was Christine Fouke, the sister of the Wager House’s proprietor, and she gave a slightly different version of events. At the time, she said, her sister-in-law was lying in the next room, afflicted by a “nervous chill, from sheer fright.” Fouke feared the shooting of Thompson so close by would prove “fatal to her.” Also, “I considered it a great outrage to kill the man in the house, however much he deserved to die.” But she denied having intervened in the intimate fashion Hunter described. Fouke shielded Thompson, “without touching him,” she said, until an officer came up and assured her the prisoner would “not be shot in the house. This was all I desired.”
Thompson’s assailants complied. Instead of shooting him in the parlor, they dragged him outside to the railroad bridge and began searching for a rope suitable for lynching. At first, Thompson begged for his life. Then he became defiant, telling Hunter: “You may kill me, but it will be revenged; there are eighty thousand persons sworn to carry this work.”
These were Thompson’s final words. Unable to find a rope, Hunter and Chambers raised their guns and fired. “Before he fell, a dozen or more balls were buried in him,” Hunter said. The gunmen then threw Thompson into the river, where he somehow managed to flail forward a few feet before another fusillade stilled him. Hunter expressed no regret for the killing, stating in court that he was “fired and excited by the cowardly, savage manner in which Mr. Beckham’s life had been taken.”
Nor were the vigilantes satisfied: they marched back into
the Wager House to take revenge on Aaron Stevens as well. Lying badly wounded in bed, Stevens folded his arms across his chest and stared in silent contempt at the men threatening to kill him. Since he was “probably dying,” Hunter testified, “we concluded to spare him, and start after others, and shoot all we could find.”
THE MAJORITY OF BROWN’S remaining men were sixty yards away, in and around the squat brick engine house, just behind the armory gate. From there, the armory complex stretched more than five hundred yards north, between raised railroad tracks and the Potomac on one side and a high wall on the other. If well-patrolled, the facility was hard to breach. But the armory’s northern end now lay far beyond Brown’s sight or reach, and late that afternoon, it was occupied by newly arrived volunteers from Martinsburg, a Virginia town twenty miles from Harpers Ferry. Most of the reinforcements were railroad men who worked on heavy-tonnage trains, and they were led by a Mexican War veteran, Captain Ephraim Alburtis.
At about four o’clock, Alburtis marched his force south through the armory yard until they came under fire from Brown’s men, a few of whom had taken up sheltered positions outside the engine house. The Martinsburg men returned fire and pressed forward, driving the defenders back inside their fortress.
At midday, Brown had moved his ten most prominent hostages into the engine house, leaving the other thirty or so prisoners in the adjoining guardroom. With the help of Alburtis’s men, these prisoners smashed a window and escaped around the side of the building as shooting continued at the front.
At this point, Alburtis later stated, he felt “we could have ended the business” with a coordinated assault by his men and those positioned outside the armory gate. But their efforts were piecemeal, and a brief charge at the gate in support of the Martinsburg men was repulsed.
