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

by Tony Horwitz

  Taking command of the ninety marines, Lee marched them into Harpers Ferry in a light rain, reaching the town about midnight. He coolly assessed the situation and immediately grasped that rumors of a mass uprising were wildly overblown. There was only “a party of Banditti” holed up in the armory, he wrote. After sending word that no further troops were needed, he posted the marines around the engine house, choosing not to endanger the hostages with a nighttime attack.

  Lee also drafted a formal message to “the persons” inside the engine house, to be delivered at daybreak. “If they will peaceably surrender themselves and restore the pillaged property, they shall be kept in safety to await the orders of the President,” the document read. “Colonel Lee represents to them, in all frankness, that it is impossible for them to escape; that the armory is surrounded on all sides by troops; and that if he is compelled to take them by force he cannot answer for their safety.”

  Lee expected that his demand for surrender would be refused. In that event, he planned to launch an immediate attack so the gunmen in the engine house wouldn’t have additional time to prepare, or to harm the hostages. To further guard the captives’ safety, Lee ordered his men to attack with bayonets and “cautioned the stormers particularly to discriminate between the insurgents & their prisoners.”

  This may have sounded straightforward in theory, but it presented considerable challenges in practice. Few of the marines had seen combat. The engine house was small and crowded. And its defenders had already shown themselves resolute fighters, prepared to die if necessary.

  The mob surrounding the armory yard also posed a problem. “The people are terribly excited and threats are made of killing all in the morning,” a railroad official telegraphed late that night. By daybreak, a throng of about two thousand people had crowded every window, doorway, and other vantage point within sight of the engine house. “All eyes were directed to one spot,” wrote Edward White, a young teacher in Harpers Ferry. “All were awaiting the final act of the drama.”

  SOON AFTER SUNRISE ON Tuesday, October 18, Jeb Stuart approached the engine house under a flag of truce and announced that he had a message from Colonel Lee. A gunman “opened the door about four inches,” Stuart wrote, “and placed his body against the crack with a cocked carbine in his hand.” Stuart recognized the man, having encountered him while serving in the U.S. cavalry out west.

  “You are Osawatomie Brown, of Kansas?” Stuart asked.

  “Well, they do call me that sometimes, Lieutenant.”

  Brown’s presence in Harpers Ferry had been widely rumored for the past twenty-four hours, but Stuart was the first Virginian able to positively identify him.

  “This is a bad business you are engaged in, Captain,” Stuart said. “The United States troops have arrived, and I am sent to demand your surrender.”

  “Upon what terms?” Brown asked.

  Stuart then delivered Lee’s message, promising protection to Brown and his men until the president determined their fate. Brown countered with his own now-familiar proposition—that he and his men be granted a chance to escape across the river.

  “I have no authority to agree to such an arrangement,” Stuart said, “my orders being to demand your surrender on the terms I have stated.”

  This Brown refused to do. Knowing “he could expect no leniency,” Brown told Stuart, he preferred to die fighting and “would sell his life as dearly as possible.”

  The exchange at the door greatly alarmed the hostages. Some of them begged Stuart to bring Colonel Lee into the parley. But Stuart’s orders were to avoid negotiations, and to signal any refusal to surrender as quickly as possible.

  “Is that your final answer, Captain?” Stuart asked Brown.

  “Yes.”

  Stepping away from the door, Stuart waved his cap—the sign agreed upon for the marines to attack. A storming party of twelve men stood ready against the side wall of the engine house. Three of them now sprang to the front of the building and battered the heavy wooden doors with sledgehammers.

  As Lee had hoped, the swiftness of the assault caught Brown by surprise. “It was evident he did not expect an attack so soon,” Lewis Washington said. But the previous day’s siege had given the engine-house defenders ample time to fortify their position. They’d placed the two fire carts against the entrance as a brace, and fastened the double doors with ropes. This gave the doors spring, so that each blow of the sledgehammers pushed the heavy wood in without shattering it.

  The marines’ pounding “reechoed from the rocky sides of the lofty mountains,” one spectator said. Finally, after several minutes, the marines stopped their futile hammering and withdrew; there followed “a brief pause of oppressive silence” for those crowded around the armory.

  Though the initial assault had failed, the thunderous banging terrified the men inside the engine house, who couldn’t see out and had no clear idea what was happening. “There was a cessation for a moment or two,” Terence Byrne later testified, “and during this time one of Brown’s men turned round to him and said, ‘Captain, I believe I will surrender.’”

  “Sir, you can do as you please,” Brown replied.

  A few of the hostages began shouting, “One man surrenders!” But they couldn’t be heard in the confusion, and, moments later, there was another awful thud at the door.

  The marines had tossed aside their sledgehammers and taken hold of a heavy ladder in the armory yard, deploying it as a battering ram. A dozen soldiers clutched the ladder and rushed at the engine house. Their first charge did not so much as dent the doors. With Brown’s men now firing from inside, the marines stepped back, hoisted the ladder, and rushed forward a second time. Again, nothing happened. Then, on their third charge, the attackers stove in one of the doors, splintering open a breach just large enough to charge through, one man at a time.

  The leader of the storming party, Lieutenant Israel Green, leaped on the inward-leaning door and darted inside. He was followed by a marine paymaster who wielded only a rattan switch. The firing was now heavy on both sides, despite Lee’s order that the men use only bayonets. The third marine rushing into the engine house fell back with a gunshot to his stomach. The next took a bullet in the face.

  Newspaper illustration of marines storming engine-house

  The huge crowd around the armory could see little except marines in powder-blue uniforms vanishing into the smoke and noise. The frightened hostages in the engine house also looked on in confusion, their view partly obscured by the fire carts and gun smoke. “When I heard the door breaking in,” said Armistead Ball, the portly machinist, “I thought I was a goner.” Lewis Washington urged his fellow prisoners to throw up their hands, so the storming party could more easily distinguish them.

  Two of Brown’s men also “cried for quarter and laid down their arms,” a hostage testified. But as marines poured in, “they picked them up again and resumed the fight.” These two unnamed men were almost certainly Dauphin Thompson and Jeremiah Anderson. A third, Edwin Coppoc, later stated that he, too, had wanted to surrender but fought on in the heat of the moment, with a gun that misfired. Shields Green, according to Coppoc and the testimony of a hostage, put down his rifle and cartridge box and joined the six slaves in the engine house, hoping to be mistaken for one of them.

  Only Brown appeared committed to fighting to the end. Israel Green, the marine lieutenant who was the first man to burst into the engine house, ran to one side of a fire cart positioned just behind the shattered door. As he came around the rear of it, Lewis Washington pointed at a crouched figure near the front of the building, between the two fire engines. “There’s Brown!” Washington cried. Perched on one knee, pants tucked into his boots, Brown was pulling a lever to reload his carbine.

  “Quicker than thought,” Lieutenant Green said, “I brought my saber down with all my strength upon his head.” Brown was moving as Green struck. The sword blow gashed his neck. He fell to the floor and rolled onto his back. “Instinctively as Brown fel
l I gave him a saber thrust in the left breast,” Green said.

  This blow could easily have pierced Brown’s heart or lung. But Green, in nervous haste that day, had armed himself with a light dress sword rather than a combat saber. He also seems to have struck a strap or buckle that deflected the thrust. Instead of penetrating, the light sword blade bent double. Green kept flailing at Brown, stabbing at him and beating his head with the sword’s hilt until he lay motionless on the floor.

  The other marines pouring into the engine house had gone after Brown’s men. One of the attackers bayoneted Dauphin Thompson, who had taken cover under a fire engine. Another thrust his bayonet so fiercely into Jeremiah Anderson that the insurgent was pinned to the rear wall of the engine house and twisted almost upside down in his agony.

  Other marines quickly seized Edwin Coppoc and Shields Green without injury. The hostages in the engine house, and the black men briefly liberated from slavery, also escaped harm. Robert E. Lee, who had engineered the storming and observed it from behind a pillar near the armory gate, dispassionately summarized the attack for his superiors. “The whole was over in a few minutes,” he wrote in his official report.

  MUCH MORE EMOTIONAL WAS the response of the many spectators who had watched the marines rush in and anxiously awaited the outcome. When the hostages emerged unhurt, “the breathless silence outside was broken, and from thousands of throats rose a shout,” one witness recalled. Even W. P. Smith, the laconic B & O official, was momentarily overcome. “I never saw so thrilling a scene,” he telegraphed the railroad president immediately after the fray ended.

  The most visibly ecstatic man was Armistead Ball, who had believed himself “a goner” just moments before. “I embraced my friends eagerly and in fact, everybody,” he said. “I never was so happy in my life.” Lewis Washington, on the other hand, maintained an air of unruffled dignity. Before leaving the engine house, he collected the sword belonging to his great-granduncle, which Brown had laid on one of the fire engines. Then he “stepped daintily out, carefully drawing on a pair of kid gloves,” wrote Edward White, the local teacher. According to another witness, “Colonel Washington emerged from his prison-house looking as well dressed as usual, and seemed as cool as if nothing had happened. He said he would like some breakfast.”

  The cheers and hugs that welcomed the freed hostages were in sharp contrast to the reception given the captured insurgents as they were brought out of the engine house. “The crowd, nearly every man of which carried a gun, swayed with tumultuous excitement, and cries of ‘Shoot them!’ ‘Shoot them!’ rang from every side,” a newspaper correspondent wrote.

  Marines also carried out the dead and wounded and laid them in front of the engine house. Dauphin Thompson died almost instantly from his bayonet wound. Jeremiah Anderson, having been unpinned from the wall, was still alive, although “vomiting gore.” As the crowd pressed forward to stare, a spectator with a woman on each arm asked, “Gentlemen, can’t you stand back and let the ladies see the corpses?”

  Others weren’t so genteel. One spat tobacco juice into Anderson’s face. Another stared at the dying man in disgust, walked away, and then returned, telling him: “Well it takes you a hell of a long time to die.” In Anderson’s pockets were found his commission as captain and a letter from his brother in Iowa, urging him to move there and study law. From the pockets of other insurgents, scavengers took an empty wallet, a lock of a woman’s hair, a copy of Brown’s Provisional Constitution, and a love letter from a lady in Illinois.

  Watson Brown, still alive after a night of anguish in the engine house, received somewhat gentler treatment. Taken to the guardroom adjoining the engine house, he was laid on a bench with two pairs of overalls placed under his head. C. W. Tayleure, a militiaman and correspondent for a Baltimore newspaper, gave him a cup of water and asked what had brought him to Harpers Ferry.

  “Duty, sir,” he replied. “I did my duty as I saw it.”

  Watson “feelingly enquired whether his father was alive,” Tayleure wrote, and “affirmed his conviction of the justness of the cause in which he had been so disastrously engaged.” Watson lingered through that Tuesday and died early the next morning, leaving his widow, Belle, with their two-month-old baby. “Keep up good courage,” he’d written her two days before the attack, “there is a better day a-coming.”

  Watson’s father had been carried to the nearby paymaster’s office and laid on the floor beside his badly wounded lieutenant, Aaron Stevens, moved there from the Wager House. In the same building, on the other side of a low partition, lay a dying marine, Luke Quinn, whom Brown or one of his men had shot in the stomach as the twenty-four-year-old stormed the engine house. A priest administered last rites to the Irish-born Quinn, “a mere boy,” one reporter wrote, whose “cries and screams made one’s flesh creep.”

  Also curdling were the cries from outside, where a crowd bayed for the lynching of the surviving insurgents. To those inside the paymaster’s office, it seemed unlikely that Stevens and Brown would live long enough to be hanged, legally or otherwise. Stevens lay “with his hands folded helplessly across his breast and giving no sign of life except his slow labored breathing and occasional quivering of the eyelids,” wrote David Strother, a reporter and artist who sketched the scene. Brown, “gaunt, grim & grizzled,” writhed atop a wretched shakedown. He was covered by a dirty quilt, his head resting on a carpetbag.

  “The old man’s strongly marked face, iron grey hair and white beard were grimed and matted with blood,” Strother wrote, “and fresh puddles oozing from wounds in his head collected on the floor and traveling bag.” Jeb Stuart, who seemed to harbor an especial loathing for the abolitionist, assisted Strother in his work, “giving Brown a round cursing & roughly ordered him to pull down his blanket that we might have a better view of his face.”

  Though Brown was initially judged unlikely to survive, Robert E. Lee informed the secretary of war in a follow-up telegram that “upon a more deliberate examination,” his injuries “are believed not to be mortal. He has three wounds, but they are not considered by the surgeon as bad as first reported.”

  David Strother sketch of Brown and Stevens in paymaster’s office

  Lee treated the wounded prisoners with solicitude. When people crowded into the paymaster’s office to question the leader of the insurrection, Lee said he would clear the room “if the wounded men were annoyed or pained by them,” a reporter wrote. “Brown said he was by no means annoyed; on the contrary he was glad to be able to make himself and his motives clearly understood.”

  HE WOULD SOON DO so, in a remarkable performance that marked yet another twist in his volatile career. By all appearances, the mission he called “the great work of my life” had just ended in abject failure. Instead of a months-long campaign reaching across the South, his attack had withered in thirty-two hours, a stone’s throw inside Virginia. The climactic battle lasted five minutes, with the insurrectionists’ brick citadel easily breached and its commander beaten to the floor with a parade-ground sword. The few slaves Brown had briefly liberated were now returning to bondage. And two more of his sons had been sacrificed, along with their in-laws, the Thompsons, and a number of other young men Brown had led.

  Henry Wise

  As he lay bleeding on the floor, Brown also faced the prospect of his own imminent and ignoble death. Even if he survived his wounds and the lynch mob outside, he could anticipate summary execution under martial law, or a show trial and hasty transit to the gallows like that given Nat Turner in 1831. Either way, the audience gathering in the paymaster’s office might be his last.

  This audience also included a new and formidable adversary in the figure of Henry Wise, the governor of Virginia and a man as driven as the bloodied abolitionist to make the most of the opportunity at hand. Tall, sallow, and gaunt, with deep-set gray eyes, the cadaverous governor was an electric orator who spoke like “a corpse galvanized,” one contemporary said. Wise had shot his first political opponent in a duel, an
d he had since maneuvered his way into consideration for the presidency. Though his political positions were renowned for their shiftiness, Wise could always be counted on to seize center stage, which he had done the moment he heard of the trouble in Harpers Ferry. After ordering out the state’s militia, Wise boarded a troop train in Richmond, hoping to lead Virginians in a valiant recapture of the town.

  But his train was delayed; after sixteen frustrating hours, Wise arrived to find the fight had just ended. “The Governor,” a Virginia reporter wrote, “looked like a man who in a violent passion has kicked at a door & found it open.”

  Wise was nonetheless determined to take command of the battle’s aftermath. Following a briefing by Colonel Lee, he hurried with his entourage to the paymaster’s office, eager to interrogate the author of this great crime against his state.

  “Old Brown received him with the utmost composure, though evidently suffering much from his wounds,” wrote a reporter for the Richmond Enquirer, a paper edited by Wise’s son. “He said, ‘Well, Governor, I suppose you think me a depraved criminal. Well sir, we have our opinions of each other.’ The remark was made with no disrespect whatsoever.”

  Wise officiously replied, “You are in the hands of the State, and I have questions to ask, which you can answer or not.” Brown said he had nothing to conceal, though he refused to speak about any of his men still at large. “He was singularly free and communicative,” wrote a lawyer who accompanied Wise. “He told us of the plan of government he was going to set up here, and also where his carpetbag was that had in it all the documents, i.e., the form of government, with lists of the officers, etc.” When a copy of the Provisional Constitution was retrieved and read aloud, Brown proudly acknowledged authorship.