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

by Tony Horwitz

  AS EMERSON AND OTHERS canonized Brown, the man himself, imprisoned in his cell, was more than playing his part. For most of his life, he had shown little inclination to turn the other cheek; his own heroes were mostly Old Testament warriors. But now he donned the mantle of Christian martyr and inhabited the role with the steeliness he had brought to every other pursuit. Nothing would deter him from his glorious sacrifice—not family, not plots for his rescue, not weakness of spirit or resolve. In dying well, he would redeem all the tribulations of his difficult career, most particularly the failure at Harpers Ferry that had cost him so much, including his two young sons.

  Brown in his prison cell

  “I have been whiped as the saying is,” Brown wrote his wife soon after his sentencing, “but am sure I can recover all the lost capital occasioned by that disaster; by only hanging a few moments by the neck; & I feel quite determined to make the utmost possible out of defeat. I am dayly & hourly striving to gather up what little I may from the wreck.”

  In this last great work of his life, Brown also found a new and potent weapon. At Harpers Ferry he had used guns and pikes; in court, he’d deployed the spoken word. Now, confined to a cell, he wielded his pen, aiming round after round of correspondence at friends, family, and supporters, clearly intending to hit a broader audience.

  “You know that Christ once armed Peter,” he wrote an admirer in one of many letters that quickly made its way into print. “So also in my case I think he put a sword into my hand, and there continued it so long as he saw best, and then kindly took it from me.”

  God had “often covered my head in the day of battle,” he wrote a cousin, and must have spared him certain death in the engine house for a purpose. If it was not his destiny to be a triumphant warrior, like Gideon or David, or to die gloriously in battle, than the end of his being must be this: as a captive among the nonbelievers.

  Brown felt no shame in dying a criminal at the hands of an unjust government. “Jesus of Nazareth suffered a most excruciating death on the cross as a fellon,” he wrote his family, in what was meant as a consoling observation. “Think also of the prophets, & Apostles, & Christians of former days; who went through greater tribulations than you & I.” His sacrifice, Brown added, “will do vastly more toward advancing the cause I have earnestly endeavored to promote, than all I have done in my life before.” Or, as he put it plainly to his brother: “I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose.”

  Brown’s quest for martyrdom was greatly if unintentionally enhanced by those who had condemned him to death. Judge Parker, who had rushed the trial and turned down repeated requests for delays, could have sent Brown to the scaffold with equal dispatch. Instead, to allow ample time for the appeals process, and perhaps mindful of criticism that he’d tried Brown with unseemly haste, Parker granted the prisoner a full month of life and ordered him hanged outside the jail yard—steps that would make his end a protracted and public vigil. “No theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words,” Thoreau observed.

  Although he still felt weak from his wounds, Brown was determined to use every minute left him and wrote letters for hours each day. As he told one supporter, he wished he could offer “something more than words; but it has come to that, I now have but little else to deal in.” He also received a stream of visitors, many of them proslavery, and took time to patiently answer their questions and explain his views. When a reporter for the antiabolitionist New York Herald saw Brown a week after his conviction, he marveled at the prisoner’s metamorphosis from “irascible” defendant to composed and reflective inmate, awaiting his fate “with that calm firmness which is the sure characteristic of a brave man.”

  Maintaining this courageous front was far more wrenching than Brown made it appear. At moments the mask fell away, revealing his doubts and fears. Mary Brown, upon learning of her husband’s conviction, had quickly set off for Virginia; she was escorted part of the way by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who hoped she might urge her husband to cooperate in a rescue attempt. But when Brown heard she was en route, he immediately tried to stop her.

  “Mr. Brown says for gods sake dont let Mrs Brown come,” one of his lawyers telegraphed Higginson from Virginia. Another lawyer wrote to her: “Mr. Brown fears your presence will undo the firm composure of his mind & so agitate him as to unman and unfit him for the last great sacrifice. He thinks it best to avoid the awful leave-taking which must precede the last act of his earthly existence & which might disturb the great serenity and firmness which he wills to have accompany him to the gallows.”

  In his own writing, Brown also expressed worry that Mary would deplete the family’s “scanty means” in coming to Charlestown, and he didn’t want her to become “gazing stock” for a hostile public. But his main concern was the effect she would have on him. “Her presence here will deepen my affliction a thousand fold,” he wrote Higginson, in a letter he asked to be conveyed to his traveling wife. “I beg of her to be calm and submissive; & not go wild on my account. I lack for nothing & am feeling quite cheerful before I learned she talked of coming on.” He urged her to abide by his wish, “out of pity to me.”

  Mary had reached Baltimore and was about to board a train for Virginia when she was persuaded to turn back. Brown wrote a letter thanking her for “heeding what may be my last, but earnest request” and asked her to stay calm as they faced this final trial. “In the world we must have tribulation: but the cords that have bound you as well as I; to Earth: have been many of them severed already.” These losses included “the fall of our dear sons” at Harpers Ferry. Hoping to recover “all the lost capital” in death, Brown couldn’t risk breaking down or wanting to live beyond the brief period allotted him.

  But he would permit Mary to come later. “If after Virginia has applied the finishing stroke to the picture already made of me,” he wrote, “you can afford to meet the expence & trouble of coming on here to gather up the bones of our beloved sons, & of your husband; and the people here will suffer you to do so; I should be entirely willing.”

  CHAPTER 11

  A Full Fountain of Bedlam

  On November 10, 1859, as Brown wrote Mary about collecting his body, four other inmates were learning their fate in the courthouse across from the Charleston jail. Since their capture, not all of them had displayed Brown’s passion for martyrdom. Edwin Coppoc said he had been misled about his leader’s intentions and thought the attack was meant only to “run off slaves into a Free State.” John Copeland made the same claim.

  Copeland’s lawyer also argued that he and the other black defendant, Shields Green, couldn’t be charged with treason because the Supreme Court, in its notorious Dred Scott decision of 1857, had ruled that blacks were “beings of an inferior order” who possessed “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Blacks, slave or free, were effectively noncitizens, and as such had no government to betray.

  The prosecution acknowledged the logic of this argument and dropped the treason charge against the black men. But this victory by the defense proved hollow. Copeland and Green were found guilty of murder and inciting slaves; Coppoc was convicted of all charges.

  John Cook’s case appeared to offer more hope. For one thing, he had written a twenty-five-page confession that detailed his association with Brown, soft-pedaled his own role, and implicated prominent abolitionists. Further, Cook was well connected: his sister was married to Indiana’s governor, a southern sympathizer who wrote obsequious letters to Wise and came to Charlestown accompanied by a talented attorney to aid the defense.

  Shields Green and John Copeland in prison cell with Albert Hazlett

  The Indiana lawyer, Daniel Voorhees, gave a court address in which he declared slavery “more fully justified than ever before” by Brown’s failure at Harpers Ferry. He also cast Cook as a “wayward, misled child” who had been exploited by a fanatical old man. “John Brown was the despotic leader and John E. Cook was an
ill-fated follower of an enterprise whose horror he now realizes and deplores,” Voorhees stated. “Cook simply obeyed—no more.”

  Voorhees’s defense of the handsome, fair-haired youth with “a face for a mother to love, and a sister to idolize” moved some in the courtroom to tears. But it failed to sway the jurymen, who found Cook guilty of murder and inciting slaves. He, Coppoc, Green, and Copeland were then sentenced to hang on December 16, two weeks after their leader.

  Judge Parker handed down these sentences on the final day of the circuit-court session. And he marked the occasion by expressing the relief and vindication that Virginians felt at the failure of the Harpers Ferry attack. “Happily for the peace of our whole land, you obtained no support from that quarter whence you so confidently expected it,” he told the four men he sentenced on November 10. Each of the slaves forced to join the uprising had “hurried to place himself once more beneath the care and protection of his owner.”

  Parker’s paternalistic message had, by then, become the refrain of leading Virginians. As they saw it, the attack illustrated not only the perfidy of abolitionists but also the fallacy of their belief that slaves were mistreated and desperate for freedom. “Those who were taken by force from their happy homes deserted their liberators,” Governor Wise declared. “Not a slave around was found faithless.”

  Such testimonials, however, did not accord with all of the evidence that emerged after Brown’s capture. They were further undercut by the behavior of white Virginians themselves. “The inhabitants are not by any means easy in their minds as to the temper of the slaves and free negroes among them,” the New York Herald reported two weeks after the attack. “Colonel Washington who was one of Brown’s hostages does not spend his nights at home, and we are assured that many other wealthy slave owners, whose residences lie at a distance from those of their neighbors, also regard it as prudent to lodge elsewhere for the present.”

  The Herald also noted whites’ suspicion that local slaves “had at least cognizance of the plans of the marauders,” and mentioned that one slave “had joined the rebels with a good will.” This was a reference to Lewis Washington’s coachman, Jim, who had been hired from a doctor in nearby Winchester. Jim was away from Washington’s estate when Brown’s men raided it, but he later joined the insurgents en route to Harpers Ferry, helped guard Hall’s Rifle Works, and drowned while fleeing the Virginians who attacked the factory. Many locals, including a minister present at the scene, took Jim’s behavior as evidence of his complicity with Brown’s men.

  One of John Allstadt’s slaves, twenty-year-old Ben, also carried a pike at the rifle works. Though he quickly surrendered and told his captors he had been forced into guard duty, Ben was nonetheless taken to prison on suspicion of aiding the insurgents. He died in jail a week later, from what the county death register termed “Pneumonia and fright.” A doctor who saw him in jail said Ben “manifested many of the symptoms which usually attend attacks of ‘delirium tremens’ such as nervous startings & tremors, together with various hallucinations, among the most prominent of which was a constant dread of being killed by armed men.”

  This dread required no hallucinations to bring it on: Ben had almost been lynched upon his capture, and armed white men ringed the prison where he was held. Whatever disease killed him, it appears also to have struck his mother, Ary, who came to nurse him in jail and died a few weeks later, at the age of forty-five.

  Their owner, John Allstadt, sought compensation from the state for property “destroyed by Civil War and Commotion.” Jim’s owner did likewise. These petitions included accounts of the slaves’ “tractable and faithful” service to their masters, and of their value. John Avis, the jail keeper and slave dealer in Charlestown, priced Ben at $1,450. His mother was judged to be worth $600 “in the common market”; at auction “she would have sold for a much larger price.”

  There is no record of either owner receiving compensation for “being deprived of his property,” as Allstadt put it. But the petitions show how little had been gained by the slaves caught up in Brown’s effort to liberate them. Three were dead, while the surviving slaves taken from Washington and Allstadt were returned to bondage and showed signs of continuing to fear arrest.

  Charles Tidd, who had accompanied a number of the liberated slaves into Maryland to transport arms, later described them as “ready & glad to be armed against their masters,” and said two of them had planned to escape the next summer. During the fray, one of these men rode to the Kennedy farm to urge Brown’s men posted at the hideout to “go over to the Ferry and help in the fight.” Another carried Lewis Washington’s shotgun. “But when they heard firing & then the rumor that all [were] killed, they slipped back & joined their masters,” Tidd said.

  Most white Virginians nonetheless maintained that slaves had fled Brown’s men, or failed to join them, out of childlike devotion and terror. Only years later did some slaveholders acknowledge the unease they’d felt at the time. One farmer, Charles Conklyn, said the anxiety in Jefferson County after Harpers Ferry was greater even than during the Civil War. “It was not about John Brown, but about the fear—the uncertainty—as to how far disaffection might be spread among the negroes,” he recalled. “In the towns it was comparatively a small matter—the danger—but the situation of country estates—and of women and children on country farms, was horrible, if insurrection was afoot. And the whole excitement arose from the uncertainty as to how far the negroes had been tampered with.”

  Though apprehension was greatest in the countryside, the towns were tense as well. Mary Mauzy, who witnessed the attack on the rifle works, wrote often to her daughter that fall with updates on the mood in Harpers Ferry. On November 10, she reported that guns were still turning up around town and all the children “have a warlike feeling.” This included her son, who was too young to read and write but allowed by his father to carry a double-barreled pistol. “He says tell sister I’ve a pistol and I am going to shoot Niggers with it,” Mary wrote.

  Anxious whites that autumn also kept mulling the role played by “the great scamp Cook,” as Mary’s husband called the silver-tongued Yankee who had ingratiated himself with the Mauzy family and many others. In his written confession before trial, Cook said he had heeded Brown’s order to tell no one of their plans, apart from one oblique conversation he had with four slaves near Harpers Ferry. “I asked them if they had ever thought about their freedom,” Cook stated. “They replied, ‘they thought they ought to be free,’ but expressed doubts that they ever would be. I told them that time might come before many years, but for the present to keep dark and look for the good time coming.”

  Few whites believed this was Cook’s only attempt to alert or incite blacks. Nor did white fears subside with Cook’s sentencing. The very next day, mysterious fires started breaking out in Jefferson County, engulfing haystacks and outbuildings. As the blazes continued, they struck members of the jury that had convicted Brown, including the foreman, whose barn, corn crib, carriage, and hay burned on the night of November 17.

  At first, locals attributed the fires to “Abolitionist incendiaries,” acting in sympathy with the jailed insurgents. But when fires also broke out on slaveholders’ properties in neighboring counties, whites blamed the “monstrous scoundrel,” John Cook. “It is to his action we ascribe these fires—for he was the emissary to urge the negroes up,” one of the fires’ victims wrote Governor Wise, warning him that “Lynch will rule” if the convicted insurgent was shown any clemency.

  THE HARPERS FERRY ATTACK had failed in military terms, but it had clearly evoked the deepest terror of white Virginians—that slaves would rise up in the night and slaughter them, just as Nat Turner’s band had done in 1831. This fear spread well beyond Jefferson County. “There is considerable excitement here in reference to this insurrection,” a resident of distant Augusta County, Virginia, wrote on November 14. “Many persons are selling, and sending their negros to the South.”

  Whites also became cons
umed, as they had after Turner’s insurrection, by the image of northern infiltrators conspiring with blacks behind every barn and haystack. “They are panic stricken & fear their own shadows,” James Hooff, the Jefferson County farmer, wrote of his neighbors. Even the veteran officer and West Pointer in command of the troops around Charlestown, Colonel J. Lucius Davis, succumbed to the panic. “There is a guerrilla war here; the property of five of the best citizens has been burnt,” he telegraphed Governor Wise, asking for immediate reinforcements.

  The fires also coincided with fresh warnings about plots to rescue the jailed insurgents. These had been pouring in since the moment of Brown’s capture, along with scores of threatening letters directed at the Virginia executive. “Dishonorable Gov Wise,” began a letter from a group calling itself Black Band of New York, “death to you if John Brown not pardoned.” For added effect, the letter bore a skull and crossbones. Other letters threatened the South in general. “So sure as you hurt One hair of his head,” an anonymous New Yorker wrote of Brown, “mark my word the following day you will see every City—Town and Village South of Mason & Dixon’s line in Flames.”

  Most of these letters were hoaxes, often blatant ones. One, from Illinois, warned that a party of young women was on the way to Charlestown wearing “petticoats filled with powder, having slow matches attached.” Others, sent to the Charlestown jail, included bribes for the sheriff, or coded rescue plans (one of them blotted with blood). These missives were handed over to the prosecutor, Andrew Hunter, who collated all the suspicious correspondence relating to Brown and his men. He also made notations on the letters such as “Evidently insane,” “Contemptible Nonsense,” “Anonymous Rescue, rather bold, consider,” or “Deciphered. Significant.”