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

by Tony Horwitz

  The ill-organized gunmen besieging the armory also came under fire from an unexpected direction. All that afternoon, John Cook had listened to the gunshots in Harpers Ferry from his post at the Maryland schoolhouse, a mile or so away. He had strict orders to remain there, guarding the arms with one of Lewis Washington’s freed slaves. He also kept watch on the schoolteacher, Lind Currie, who later said that Cook initially showed no anxiety about the sound of battle from across the river. Whenever gunfire erupted, Currie testified, Cook would turn to his fellow guard and say, “There, that’s another one of your oppressors gone.”

  But as the day went on and the firing became “very rapid and continuous,” Cook couldn’t sit still any longer. On the promise that the teacher would say nothing of what he’d seen, Cook released Currie and then headed down to the Potomac. From two women he spoke to at a canal lock, Cook learned that “our men were hemmed in, and that several of them had been shot.” Determined to do what he could to help them, Cook scrambled up the precipitous ridge rising behind the Potomac’s Maryland bank.

  From there, he could see that Brown’s force was encircled and that gunmen on the high ground in Harpers Ferry, directly opposite him, were firing down at his comrades in the armory. Raising his rifle, he took aim across the river. “I thought I would draw their fire on myself,” he later explained.

  The men he targeted were about half a mile distant. They quickly returned fire. Several rounds were exchanged across the river until smoke from Cook’s gun helped his foes locate him. A bullet cut the tree limb Cook was clutching for balance, pitching him down the steep ridge, “by which I was severely bruised and my flesh somewhat lacerated.”

  But his ploy had worked. Cook not only drew fire away from the armory, he spooked the Virginians, who knew little about Brown’s overall force and feared he might yet command a large body of men in Maryland. In the drizzly late-day gloom, townspeople also worried that continued assaults on the engine house would endanger the hostages inside. The Martinsburg men and the other attackers drew back. Eight of them had been wounded in the fray, including two shot in the face and two others permanently disabled.

  Brown’s much smaller force had also sustained casualties. His men fired most of their shots while kneeling and aiming through a crack in the engine-house doors. This presented a narrow but predictable target to gunmen outside. During the battle that afternoon, one hostage reported, a man crouching at the door was shot in the chest and tumbled back, exclaiming “It’s all up with me.” Another man was also hit while shooting from the same position.

  “We could not administer to their needs,” wrote one of their comrades, Edwin Coppoc, “for we were surrounded by the troops who were firing volley after volley, so that we had to keep up a brisk fire in return to keep them from charging upon us.”

  One of the men shot by the door was twenty-three-year-old Steward Taylor, who had told Annie Brown about visions of his death at Harpers Ferry. Before meeting it, Coppoc wrote, “he suffered very much and begged us to kill him.” Coppoc also described the second casualty: Brown’s youngest son, Oliver, who, in the minutes after being shot, “spoke no word, but yielded calmly to his fate.”

  Oliver was just twenty, and in early October he had escorted his pregnant wife, Martha, part of the way home from the Kennedy farm. “You can hardly think how I want to see you, or how lonesome I was the day I left you,” he wrote her upon his return to the Maryland hideout. But he took solace in her picture. “I have made a morocco case for it and carry it close to my body.” He would doubtless have been carrying Martha’s picture a week later, as he lay dying on the floor of the engine house.

  Their child, born early the following year, was named Olive in memory of her father. But the baby lived only two days, and Martha soon fell ill with childbed fever. “She had been a wife, a mother, and a childless widow at seventeen,” Annie Brown wrote. Martha now declared she had nothing more to live for; she gave away her few possessions, and died a month after giving birth. “She was willing to go,” Mary Brown wrote, “said she wanted to go where Oliver & her baby was.”

  BY FOUR THIRTY OR five o’clock on that Monday afternoon, the firing at Harpers Ferry had petered out. As it did so, the antagonists cautiously opened negotiations. Despite the day’s vicious fighting, the two sides now parleyed in a decorous and formal manner. One emissary approached the engine house carrying an old umbrella with a white handkerchief tied to the ferrule. “Who commands this fortification?” he demanded. Another appeal, this one written, came from Colonel Robert Baylor, a Virginia officer who had taken overall command of the troops that had converged on the town. Addressing Brown as “Captain,” the note discussed “terms of capitulation” and the release of prisoners. “Sir,” Colonel Baylor wrote, “I say to you, if you will set at liberty our citizens, we will leave the government to deal with you concerning their property, as it may think most advisable.”

  In reply, Baylor received an astonishing proposal, one that Brown had twice tried to deliver under flag of truce earlier that day. “In consideration of all my men, whether living or dead, or wounded, being soon safely in and delivered up to me at this point, with all their arms and ammunition, we will then take our prisoners and cross the Potomac bridge, a little beyond which we will set them at liberty.” This wasn’t all: “We require the delivery of our horse and harness at the hotel.”

  Brown elaborated on this proposal in a separate parley with two officers from a Maryland unit that had just reached town and been posted at the armory. He told them that once he reached the far side of the river and released the prisoners, the troops opposing him would be free to “take him if we could.” Brown also said, “He had fought Uncle Sam before, and was willing to do it again.” But he then added one final condition: “that he & his men should not be shot down instantly by a body of men posted for the purpose, but on being allowed a brief period for preparing for fight, he was willing to take his chances for death or escape.”

  Brown, in short, demanded that he be given a fighting chance—a duel, almost, on the opposite bank of the Potomac. He may have hoped to make a fighting retreat along the ravine leading up to the log schoolhouse, where he could expect to collect more arms and be reinforced by his men in Maryland. Brown believed he merited this chance not only because he held hostages, but also because he had fought honorably rather than massacring civilians or burning the town. As one of the Maryland officers reported: “He thought he was entitled to some terms.”

  In the view of Brown’s foes, this was preposterous: he deserved no concessions and was in no position to demand them. The armory was surrounded and reinforcements were en route. “The terms you propose I cannot accept,” Colonel Baylor wrote in a curt reply. But he decided to postpone any further action until morning, rather than risk an attack in the dark. In his official report, Baylor gave an additional reason for suspending operations: “Our troops by this time required some refreshment, having been on active duty, and exposed to a heavy fall of rain all day.”

  Baylor, however, had only loose command of the hundreds of armed men in Harpers Ferry, many of whom had long since sought refreshment on their own. By the time Captain John Sinn of the Frederick, Maryland, militia arrived on Monday evening, he found the town in a state of drunken mayhem. “Every man had a gun, and four-fifths of them were under no command,” he reported. “The military had ceased firing, but men who were intoxicated were firing their guns in the air, and others at the engine-house.”

  Still others were stumbling from the saloons to desecrate the corpse of Dangerfield Newby, or to taunt the wounded Aaron Stevens in his bed at the Wager House. Captain Sinn found young men threatening to shoot Stevens and shamed them by saying, “If the man could stand on his feet with a pistol in his hand they would all jump out of the window.”

  Sinn also arranged for a surgeon in his unit to go to the engine house and tend to Brown’s wounded son Watson. By the time the surgeon arrived, late Monday night, the scene inside the engine
house was ghastly. On one side of the cramped interior—a room just twenty foot square—stretched the bloodied corpses of Steward Taylor and Oliver Brown. Near them lay Watson, in such agony that he begged his comrades to shoot him. The surgeon could do little for his stomach wound, but promised to return in the morning.

  BROWN’S UNINJURED MEN, COOPED up in the engine house with the dead and wounded, were in poor shape as well. They had marched and fought with little or no food or sleep since leaving the Kennedy farm more than twenty-four hours before. With a drunken mob howling and firing potshots outside the armory’s gate, there wasn’t much prospect of rest during the long night ahead.

  The same was true for Brown’s hostages, some of whom had refused breakfast—the only meal that day—fearing it might be drugged. The engine house was cold and dark and the only place to lie down was the brick floor. Though the hostages occupied the safest part of the building, behind the fire engines, there was still the danger of bullets ricocheting through the doors or windows. Armistead Ball, the hostage who was a master machinist at the armory, sought shelter by wedging himself in a corner of the brick structure, but found he was too large. “For the first time in my life,” he later said, “I wished I was a thin man.”

  Even more uncomfortable was the situation of the black Virginians in the engine house. Though ostensibly liberated, they now had, in effect, three sets of masters. First, Brown and his men, who had thrust pikes into their hands and put them at great peril inside the engine house. Second, the white hostages sequestered with them, including their owners, who were alert to any sign of cooperation or complicity with the insurgents. And third, the mob outside, which was unlikely to show mercy toward armed slaves caught in the presence of abolitionists. To Armistead Ball, the black men in the engine house seemed, like himself, “badly scared.”

  Brown, on the other hand, appeared as cool and composed as he had been throughout the battle. At day’s end, when the firing subsided, he had straightened the limbs of his dead son Oliver and removed his gear. Then, through the night, he tried to comfort Watson, who kept crying out in pain and begging to be put out of his misery. “No, my son, have patience: I think you will get well,” one hostage heard Brown say. “If you die, you die in a glorious cause.” Another hostage heard Brown tell Watson “to endure a little longer and he might die as befitted a man.”

  Brown also tried to hold together what remained of his shattered army. Of the eighteen men who had crossed the Potomac with him Sunday night, half were dead, dying, or captured, including his lead lieutenants, Kagi and Stevens. Two other tested fighters, Tidd and Cook, were in Maryland, while two men posted to the arsenal were unaccounted for. That left Brown in direct command of only one Kansas veteran, Jeremiah Anderson, and three novices, all in their early twenties: the fugitive slave Shields Green, the Iowa Quaker Edwin Coppoc, and the smooth-cheeked Dauphin Thompson, whose older brother, William, had been brutally slain within sight of the engine house that afternoon.

  Some of them lost heart in the course of the night. When the Maryland officer, Captain Sinn, brought a surgeon to the engine house, he also delivered the news that U.S. troops had arrived and occupied the armory yard. This prompted one of Brown’s men to ask if he would be committing “treason against his country in resisting” federal soldiers. Upon being told that this would be so, “the man then said, ‘I’ll fight no longer,’” one of the hostages testified. “He thought he was merely fighting to liberate slaves.” At least one of the other men also wanted to give up.

  But Brown refused to surrender. At one point late that night, Captain Sinn promised to provide the insurgents safe conduct to jail if they laid down their arms. Brown scorned the offer, the officer reported, “saying he knew his fate, and he preferred meeting it with his rifle in his hands to dying for the amusement of a crowd.” The machinist Armistead Ball also appealed to Brown, on grounds of humanity, to surrender rather than risk more bloodshed. Brown replied that he had already been “proclaimed an outlaw,” had a reward on his head, and knew the consequences of his actions.

  As he awaited daylight, Brown paced the brick floor carrying George Washington’s sword, which his men had taken from the president’s great-grandnephew. The sword’s owner, still hostage in the engine house, hated everything Brown stood for. But even Lewis Washington admired the abolitionist’s “extraordinary nerve,” he later acknowledged. Brown never quailed, Washington said, “though he admitted during the night that escape was impossible and he would have to die.”

  CHAPTER 9

  I Am Nearly Disposed of Now

  When word of trouble in Harpers Ferry first spread on the morning of October 17, the response of white Virginians nearby was swift and instinctive. Their neighbors were under attack, blacks were rumored to be rising up, and that was all any able-bodied man needed to know before grabbing a gun and rushing to the scene.

  But this wasn’t true of parties more distant from the fight. When Andrew Phelps telegraphed the B & O office in Baltimore at 7:05 and reported that “armed abolitionists” had seized the armory and the Potomac bridge, stopped his train, shot a railroad porter, and pledged to free the slaves “at all hazards,” the response was skeptical.

  “Your dispatch is evidently exaggerated and written under excitement,” the B & O master of transportation, W. P. Smith, wired Phelps two hours later. “Why should our trains be stopped by Abolitionists, and how do you know they are such and that they number one hundred or more? What is their object? Let me know at once before we proceed to extremities.”

  Phelps shot back: “My dispatch was not exaggerated, neither was it written under excitement as you suppose. I have not made it half as bad as it is.”

  Smith, whose sole concern was keeping trains running, remained unconvinced. He wired a railroad official in Wheeling, where Phelps had started his trip, to keep sending trains east. “Matter is probably much exaggerated and we fear it may injure us if prematurely published.”

  But Smith did inform his own superior of Phelps’s warning, and the B & O president began to notify state and federal authorities. He telegraphed a Maryland commander, the governor of Virginia, the U.S. secretary of war, and, finally, “His Excellency, James Buchanan, Pres’t U.S.,” informing him that the armory was “in the possession of rioters” and troops were needed “for the safety of Government property, and of the mails.”

  This message was sent at ten thirty A.M., more than three hours after the conductor’s first alert. The secretary of war responded by calling out three companies of federal artillery. These units, however, were posted at a coastal fort in the southeast corner of Virginia, hundreds of miles from Harpers Ferry. The only U.S. troops readily available were ninety marines barracked at the Navy Yard in Washington—a small, inexperienced force that hardly seemed adequate to quell an uprising by insurgents now rumored to number more than seven hundred.

  But the War Department was lucky: it so happened that two extraordinary soldiers were close at hand. One of them was a lieutenant from Virginia named James Ewell Brown Stuart, better known as Jeb, a fast-rising young cavalryman on leave from service in Kansas. On October 17, he was visiting the War Department, trying to sell it on a scabbard strap he’d designed. Overhearing talk of trouble at Harpers Ferry, he volunteered his services and was promptly sent with a summons for one of the Army’s best officers, Colonel Robert E. Lee, whose son was a close friend of Stuart’s.

  Lee, an acclaimed military engineer and Mexican War veteran, was living at his family’s mansion in Arlington, Virginia, directly across the Potomac from Washington. Stuart quickly located the colonel at an Arlington apothecary shop and hurried him back to the capital.

  Then fifty-two, Lee was in the midst of an unwelcome hiatus in his military career, having returned from the field upon the death of his father-in-law, George Washington Custis. The grandson of Martha Washington by her first marriage, Custis had been raised at Mount Vernon and inherited tremendous wealth, but he wasn’t an attentive manager. As
his father-in-law’s executor, Lee found himself mired in the tedious business of untangling a vast and ill-run estate that included three plantations and two hundred slaves.

  “He has left me an unpleasant legacy,” Lee wrote his son in the summer of 1859, reporting on the capture of two escaped slaves from one of the Custis properties. This incident brought the colonel unwanted attention when northern newspapers claimed he had whipped the runaways.

  Lee regarded slavery with distaste, but he staunchly defended Southerners’ right to maintain their peculiar institution. He abhorred abolitionists and believed emancipation should be left to “a wise Merciful Providence.” He also didn’t hasten to carry out the instruction in his father-in-law’s will to free the Custis slaves, a number of whom expressed their displeasure by running away or otherwise rebelling. Lee finally freed his father-in-law’s slaves in 1862, by which time he was commanding a Confederate army, with Jeb Stuart at his side.

  In 1859, however, the two future secessionists were loyal U.S. soldiers, and now they were charged with putting down rebels who had seized a federal armory. Lee was put in command of the ninety marines from the Navy Yard, with Stuart accompanying him as an aide. On Monday afternoon, the two men boarded a special locomotive to catch up with the marines, who were already en route to “the scene of difficulty,” as Stuart called it. “I had barely time to borrow a un.’f. coat and a saber.” Lee wore only his civilian clothes.

  J.E.B. Stuart

  Robert E. Lee

  At about eleven P.M., they reached the depot at Sandy Hook, Maryland, just across the Potomac from Harpers Ferry. This station was now a crowded staging area for soldiers and others who had converged on the scene, including the aggrieved B & O official W. P. Smith. “Have given telegraph up to reporters, who are in force strong as military,” he wired his superiors on Monday night.