by Tony Horwitz
Few other details of this interview survive. But Brown’s bold and unapologetic words made a strong impression on Wise. “He is the gamest man I ever saw,” the governor told a reporter. A few days later, in his first public speech about the attack on Harpers Ferry, Wise spoke even more fulsomely. “He is a bundle of the best nerves I ever saw cut and thrust and bleeding and in bonds,” Wise declared. “He is a fanatic, vain and garrulous, but firm, and truthful, and intelligent.”
Brown had a similar effect on a second, larger set of interrogators at the paymaster’s office. This time, the audience included Robert E. Lee, Jeb Stuart, Lewis Washington, and three proslavery congressmen. Among the latter was Senator James Mason of Virginia, who had drafted the Fugitive Slave Act. Also present were several journalists for pro-southern papers who took note of Brown’s extraordinary manner.
“No sign of weakness was exhibited,” reported the Baltimore American, even though he lay smeared with blood, “in the midst of enemies, whose homes he had invaded; wounded, and a prisoner; surrounded by a small army of officials, and a more desperate army of angry men; with the gallows staring him full in the face.”
The reporters gave a verbatim transcript of the questioning, which was initially led by Senator Mason and, despite Brown’s weakened condition, lasted three hours. Typical was the following exchange:
SEN. MASON—How do you justify your acts?
BROWN—I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity. I say that without wishing to be offensive. It would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you, so far as to free those you willfully and wickedly hold in bondage. I do not say this insultingly.
MR. MASON—I understand that.
BROWN—I think I did right, and that others will do right who interfere with you at any time, and all times. I hold that the golden rule, do unto others as you would that others should do unto you, applies to all who would help others to gain their liberty.
Brown maintained this mix of courtesy and defiance throughout the extraordinary session, parrying every thrust, including several by angry bystanders. When one cried out, “I think you are fanatical,” Brown retorted: “And I think you are fanatical. ‘Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.’”
Brown also succeeded in steering the interrogation away from specific queries about his funding and supporters, returning instead to his central argument. “I want you to understand, gentlemen,” he said, “that I respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of colored people, oppressed by the slave system, just as much as I do those of the most wealthy and powerful. That is the idea that has moved me, and that alone.”
Near the end of the long interview, Brown turned to the reporters in the room and made what amounted to a closing statement. “You had better—all you people at the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question that must come up,” he said. “You may dispose of me very easily; I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled—this Negro question I mean—the end of that is not yet.”
PART THREE
They Will Brown Us All
He could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
“A Plea for Captain John Brown”
CHAPTER 10
His Despised Poor
Journalists arriving in Harpers Ferry on Tuesday, October 18, found gruesome proof of the violence that had just ended. David Strother, who wrote and sketched for Harper’s Weekly, visited the railroad trestle where the town’s mayor, Fontaine Beckham, had lain for hours after being shot. “The boards were stained with dark blood marks and tufts of white hair were visible sticking to them,” he wrote. Beckham’s exposed body had finally been carted away in a wheelbarrow by Christine Fouke, the same woman who kept gunmen from shooting one of Brown’s men held prisoner in the Wager House.
No one had yet bothered to collect the slain insurgents, most conspicuously Dangerfield Newby, whose maimed corpse still lay on the pavement, twenty-four hours after he became the first of Brown’s men to die. “A dog was smelling the mass of coagulated blood which surrounded his head and a couple of pigs were rooting at the body,” Strother wrote. The bullet-riddled bodies of John Kagi, William Leeman, and William Thompson floated in the Potomac and Shenandoah.
Six other insurgents lay dead or dying near the rifle works and engine house. When the bayoneted Jeremiah Anderson finally expired in the armory yard, his body was crammed into a barrel and taken away for dissection at a medical school in nearby Winchester. The same fate befell Watson Brown. The other eight dead, most of them still wrapped in the shawls they’d worn into battle, were piled into a pair of pine storage boxes. A local man, paid $5 to bury them in an out-of-the-way location, carted the boxes half a mile up the Shenandoah, and dumped them in shallow unmarked pits.
With the fighting over, the dead disposed of, and the surviving insurgents under heavy guard, the disturbance at Harpers Ferry appeared at be at an end. “The work is done,” W. P. Smith telegraphed the B & O president, soon after Brown’s capture. “No difficulties have attended our trains except their slight irregularity by the interruption.”
Even before the marines stormed the engine house, Robert E. Lee had turned back additional federal troops headed to Harpers Ferry, judging reinforcements unnecessary. Now that the fight was over, he expected to return to Washington with the marines and prepared a report that minimized the significance of Brown’s actions. “The result proves that the plan was the attempt of a fanatic or madman, which could only end in failure,” Lee wrote, “and its temporary success was owing to the panic and confusion he succeeded in creating by magnifying his numbers.”
Lee’s tactical analysis was acute. But the panic and confusion he mentioned went deeper than he realized. Locals’ anxiety resurfaced immediately after Brown’s capture, when Sharps rifles were found in the cellar of a house by the Shenandoah. They’d been left there by two insurgents, Albert Hazlett and Osborne Anderson, who had managed to slip away from their posts at the arsenal and escape in a stolen boat. From Maryland, reports also filtered in that John Cook and an unknown number of insurgents were still at large in the hills near Harpers Ferry. Townspeople were so jittery that even the “shaking of a tree on the mountain opposite” sparked a rumor that guerrillas were “throwing up entrenchments,” the New York Herald reported.
The panic crested on the night of October 19, thirty-six hours after Brown’s capture, when a man rode into Harpers Ferry crying, “To arms! To arms! They are murdering the women and children!” The herald told of hearing gunfire and screams from a neighbor’s farmhouse in Pleasant Valley, Maryland, five miles east of Harpers Ferry, and he claimed to have seen slaves running off to the mountains. On the way to the Ferry, he’d sounded the alarm in Sandy Hook, the Maryland community just across the Potomac, causing families to stream across the river in search of refuge.
Colonel Lee, characteristically, responded with calm dispatch. Though he doubted the report, he set off with Jeb Stuart and twenty-five marines “for the scene of the alleged outrage.” Upon reaching Pleasant Valley, he found its residents “safe and asleep.”
Lee also sent troops to the Maryland school and the Kennedy farm, where locals believed Brown’s men might still be holed up. These rumors proved unfounded: both buildings were vacant, except for the dog that had been given to the Browns, which someone had left tied to the porch rail of the Kennedy farmhouse. The soldiers nonetheless made a series of astonishing discoveries. Butting in the door of the log schoolhouse, they found sixteen heavy boxes of rifles, revolvers, bayonets, swords, and ammunition. At the Kennedy farm, they found tents, blankets, axes, knives, boxes of clothing, and almost a thousand pikes, which Brown had planned to put in the hands of freed slaves.
Carried in wagons back to Harpers Ferry, the combined haul from the school and farm constituted a formidable arsenal. In addition to hundreds of carbines and revolvers, the
hoard included 23,000 percussion rifle caps, a heavy swivel gun, fourteen pounds of lead shot, and enough clothing, tools, and other supplies to outfit a large mountain army—“all the necessaries for a campaign,” Lee wrote. In light of these finds, Brown’s claim that he had expected a long operation and thousands of reinforcements seemed more than an idle boast.
The Kennedy farm yielded an additional cache: trunks and carpetbags stuffed with letters and other documents that revealed the breadth of Brown’s ambitions. Among the papers were thousands of copies of his Provisional Constitution (“done up in small bundles, apparently for convenient distribution,” a reporter wrote); hundreds of copies of Hugh Forbes’s manual on guerrilla tactics; and, most ominously, large maps of southern states, with cross marks and census figures denoting counties where blacks greatly outnumbered whites. These maps, carefully mounted on thick cambric cloth, appeared to offer a blueprint for a far-reaching invasion of the slaveholding South.
The soldiers who ransacked the Kennedy farm also uncovered troubling correspondence, including a letter from the U.S. Ordnance Department in Washington, “answering inquiries as to the disposition of the United States troops.” Other letters pointed to a network of prominent northern supporters, such as Gerrit Smith and Frederick Douglass. Some letters were entirely in code. All told, the papers suggested “the existence of an extensive and thoroughly organized conspiracy,” wrote a reporter who accompanied the troops to the Kennedy farm.
Lee either disagreed with that assessment or chose to downplay the documents; he barely mentioned them in his official report. But Governor Wise seized on the papers, portraying them as incendiary evidence of northern complicity in the attack. He read from the captured letters before a crowd at the Wager House in Harpers Ferry, where he stayed for two days, orating from the hotel porch to “Sons of Virginia!” Upon returning to Richmond, he delivered a long speech at the statehouse, declaring “I would have given my right arm to its shoulder” for Virginians to have defeated the insurgents on their own. “But, my fellow citizens, you must not imagine that this invasion was so insignificant, or that Commander Brown was mad because his force was so small.”
Newspapers published selections from the captured documents, and Wise ordered them transcribed and entered into Virginia’s official record just weeks after their discovery. In an accompanying ten-thousand-word address, he darkly conjured “a numerous host of enemies” for whom the twenty-two insurgents were “mere tools,” sent ahead “to kindle the sparks of a general conflagration.”
Wise, like Brown, wanted to shock and mobilize his countrymen and lead them to the ramparts—in his case, to protect southern white property and sovereignty. It therefore served his interests, just as it had Brown’s, to inflate the size and menace of the Harpers Ferry attack. The two men also shared a taste for martial bluster. If he’d arrived in time to lead the counterattack, Wise claimed, he would have shown the insurgents “no quarter” in battle; he would have “tried the survivors, if any, by court martial,” and “shot the condemned on the spot.”
The governor’s words were belied by his actual treatment of the prisoners. He protected Brown and his men from summary justice in Harpers Ferry and put them on trial in a civilian Virginia court. This required considerable legal legerdemain, since most of the violence had occurred at a federal armory, on land owned by the U.S. government. But Wise was intent on enabling Virginia to claim Brown’s scalp, and in this he was aided by the passive executive in the White House.
Apart from dispatching federal troops to the scene, President Buchanan did little and said less about Harpers Ferry. Known as a “Northern man with Southern principles,” he was content to let Virginians take the lead. As he later wrote the prosecutor who took charge of trying the insurgents, the question of jurisdiction in Harpers Ferry was “a matter quite indifferent to me.”
And so, two days after the recapture of the engine house, the Virginia governor accompanied John Brown and the other prisoners, under heavy guard, past crowds crying “Lynch them!” and onto a train from Harpers Ferry to Charlestown, the Jefferson County seat, where Brown and his men would be jailed and tried. Wise also issued a thousand-dollar reward for the capture of John Cook, who was believed—incorrectly—to be Brown’s chief lieutenant and still in command of an unknown force in the Maryland hills.
These fears were stoked by alleged evidence of Cook’s contacts with local blacks. One of his supposed allies was an elderly woman who was arrested soon after the fighting ended on charges of having fed Cook during the fray and promised to spy on Harpers Ferry. “A supper basket was found in her hut ready to be carried into the mountains,” read the newspaper report on her arrest. Another black woman was seized after telling someone she had visited Cook’s house before the attack and heard him say “he would turn Harper’s Ferry upside down.”
To panicky whites, it began to seem plausible that the affable Yankee living in their midst for the past year had quietly aroused legions of slaves who might yet rise up. This prompted false alarms like the one at the farmhouse in Pleasant Valley, and gave urgency to the manhunt that followed the fighting at Harpers Ferry. Patrols fanned out across the hills and valleys between the Potomac and the Pennsylvania line, searching for “the notorious Captain Cook” and his guerrilla band.
THE MAN THEY HUNTED wasn’t nearly so threatening as locals supposed. Cook had acted alone in sniping across the river during the Harpers Ferry fight, and he’d received little aid from Marylanders, apart from passersby he’d questioned in the road and an Irish family he visited for food and coffee. The intelligence he received from them was also flawed: they said not only that his comrades were trapped, but that John Brown was among the dead.
On Monday night, as darkness settled on the besieged engine house, Cook had delivered this sobering status report to the rest of Brown’s men in Maryland. Together, after concluding that it would be “sheer madness” to attempt a rescue, they returned to the Kennedy farm for India-rubber blankets and other supplies, and then retreated into the mountain woods nearby.
The party consisted of Cook, Charles Tidd, and the three men who’d been left to guard the farm: Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Francis Meriam. With them was a slave from John Allstadt’s estate who had been taken to Maryland to help transport arms. The other slaves who’d accompanied Brown’s men into Maryland had fled back to Virginia upon learning the uprising was doomed. In the night, the last of Allstadt’s freed slaves did the same, slipping away while the others slept for a few hours in the rain.
The next morning, fearing their location would be exposed, Cook and his four comrades trekked east to a parallel swell of the Blue Ridge. They then turned north and began traveling through the mountains toward Pennsylvania. The going was slow and the weather foul, first a cold rain and then an early snow. The men traveled only at night; by day, they hid in laurel thickets as mounted patrols galloped past in the valley below. They couldn’t risk building a fire, and for food they had only a small supply of biscuits and sugar, supplemented by raw corn foraged from fields.
Within five days, the men were so hungry that they agreed to a desperate plan. One of them would approach a Maryland farmhouse and use the little money and barter they possessed to buy food. The obvious man for this mission was Cook, since “he could wield the glibbest tongue, and tell the best story,” as Owen Brown later explained.
Owen and the others waited anxiously for several hours. When Cook finally returned, he said he’d “made himself very agreeable” to the farm family, dining with them and spinning tales about the hunting party he belonged to. He also brought back bread loaves, salt, boiled beef, and a pie, which made his fellow fugitives “exceedingly merry.”
But this bounty quickly ran out, so Cook set off again. This time he descended into a valley near the Mason-Dixon Line. The others waited long into the night for his return, lingering until two A.M. and calling his name in the starlight. “Cook never came,” Owen said.
Hoping he
might have gone to a hideout near Chambersburg—the Pennsylvania town that Brown’s band had used as a transit point for the Kennedy farm—the men decided to push on. They also hoped to get food from Mary Ritner, who ran the Chambersburg boardinghouse where John Kagi had stayed that summer. On reaching the house, shortly before dawn, Charles Tidd climbed a beanpole to rap on Mrs. Ritner’s bedroom window. Upon seeing him, she motioned him away, whispering “Leave, leave!” The house was being watched by armed men.
Unbeknownst to Tidd and the others, Cook was already in custody just a few blocks away. His search for food the previous afternoon had led to a rural iron works, where he said he belonged to a hunting party and wanted to buy bacon. But one of the men he approached had seen wanted notices for Cook, and he communicated his suspicion to a colleague. Both were southern sympathizers and one of them was experienced at capturing fugitive slaves.
The two men offered to take Cook to a nearby store; en route, they overpowered him. On his person they found documents that erased any doubt about his identity. He carried a commission as a captain in Brown’s army, sketches of roads near Harpers Ferry, and a piece of parchment attesting to the lineage of the antique pistol he had taken from Lewis Washington during the raid on the Virginian’s plantation.
Bound and put in a wagon to Chambersburg, Cook tried to sweet-talk his captors, claiming he could pay them more than the official bounty. But the men took him before a judge, who committed Cook to the Chambersburg jail. A crowd of curious onlookers trailed the fugitive as he was escorted to prison, and among them were two abolitionist women who concocted a daring scheme. Carrying extra clothes, they planned to visit Cook in jail and dress him as a woman. Then one of the women would walk out of jail with Cook while the other remained in his cell.
