by Tony Horwitz
As spurious as most of this correspondence was, it made a strong impression on Governor Wise, a man inclined from the start to see a vast northern conspiracy at work in Harpers Ferry. When a Virginia reverend and former classmate of Wise’s urged him to spare Brown the gallows on grounds of insanity, the governor replied that the entire North seemed unhinged. “It is alarming not to my fears of peace, but to my patriotism, to read the bushels of letters from like maniacs that keep pouring in to me, as if from a full fountain of Bedlam,” he wrote. “You people have no idea of the extent of this plot.”
Wise also sent detectives to track down the escaped insurgents and gather intelligence on plots to free Brown. These and other sources generated ever graver alarms. One rumor told of up to a thousand armed men approaching from Ohio, led—improbably—by John Brown, Jr. By the time Colonel Davis pleaded for aid to combat the guerrillas he believed were lighting fires near Charlestown, Wise was only too ready to oblige. He quickly boarded a train himself, arriving in Charlestown on November 20 with four hundred soldiers. Another hundred and fifty men with cannon came the next day.
These reinforcements brought the force in and around Charlestown to about a thousand, straining the capacity of citizens to board and supply them. Soldiers made barracks of the courthouse, schools, churches, even graveyards. “Everything in the shape of business is suspended, and the inhabitants seem to do nothing but make efforts to provide for the military,” the Baltimore American reported.
The patrols that fanned out across the countryside failed to turn up any guerrillas. Though a few slaves were arrested on suspicion of arson, none appear to have been charged. The true culprit was probably the strong winds and “too dry” weather that the farmer James Hooff noted in his daily diary that fall. Also, despite constant alarms—including reports “that there are rockets firing from all the mountains”—the rumored legions of Brown rescuers never appeared.
This left most soldiers in Charlestown with little to do, apart from frequent dress parades. Press reports described the troops passing the time by playing a game of chase called Fox and Hounds, posing for portraits at a “daguerreotype wagon,” holding cotillions in their barracks, and rehearsing “tragedy from ancient and modern dramatists.”
The Richmond Grays in Charlestown, 1859
One of these antic militiamen was a noted young actor named John Wilkes Booth. He had been in Richmond preparing for a play called The Filibuster when he noticed troops readying to board a train for Charlestown. Borrowing portions of two men’s uniforms, Booth decided to play soldier and tag along. “He was a remarkably handsome man, with a winning personality and would regale us around the camp fire with recitations from Shakespeare,” wrote a member of Booth’s adopted unit, the Richmond Grays.
In later years, Booth would theatrically inflate the extent of his service in Jefferson County. He would also invoke John Brown as he devised his own daring plan to take violent action against a government he despised.
ALTHOUGH GOVERNOR WISE HAD clearly called out many more troops than needed, it turned out that his informants weren’t entirely delusional in warning of a rescue attempt. Higginson and a few other diehards had dreamed of freeing Brown almost from the moment of his capture. One of the northern lawyers who arrived during the trial, George Hoyt, had actually gone to Virginia as a spy in an effort to gather information for a possible jailbreak. He made a detailed sketch of the prison, but a few days after his arrival he reported to a co-conspirator that Brown “positively refused his consent to any such plan,” which in any event was hopeless due to the tight security. “There is no chance of his ultimate rescue,” Hoyt wrote on October 30.
This failed to deter some would-be rescuers. One alleged plot involved a Kansas woman who would visit Brown’s cell with a rescue plan hidden inside a wax ball in her mouth, which she would then transfer to the prisoner’s mouth while kissing him. Another scheme called for an execution-day assault by revolutionary German émigrés, wielding “Orsini bombs”—spiked projectiles named for an Italian who had hurled them at Napoleon III in a failed assassination attempt the year before. There was also a plan to kidnap Governor Wise, bundle him aboard a boat in Richmond, and hold him hostage in exchange for Brown. These latter two plots actually reached the recruitment stage, but both were as expensive as they were outlandish. They were abandoned when sufficient money and men failed to materialize.
Legal attempts to save Brown from the gallows also foundered. Defense lawyers petitioned Virginia’s Supreme Court to reconsider the verdict due to defects in the indictment; they also sought clemency on the basis of Brown’s alleged insanity, supported by the affidavits from Ohioans who knew him and his family. This had a momentary effect on Governor Wise, who wrote a letter asking the head of Virginia’s lunatic asylum to evaluate Brown. “If the prisoner is insane,” Wise wrote, “he ought to be cured.” But Wise immediately countermanded his own request; the letter was never sent.
Wise could still seek approval from the state legislature to commute Brown’s death sentence. He was strongly urged to do so, and not only by the prisoner’s supporters. “To hang a fanatic is to make a martyr of him and fledge another brood of the same sort,” opined the pro-southern Journal of Commerce, in New York. Former president John Tyler, of Virginia, agreed. “Brown deserves to die a thousand deaths upon the Rack to end in fire and termination in Hell,” he wrote Wise, but from “a point of political policy as cold as marble,” hanging him would only aid the abolitionist cause. If Wise commuted the death sentence to life in prison, “the magnanimity of Virginia will be commended, and the wisdom of her Governor extolled, the enemy disarmed and the triumph of the Democracy secured.”
Wise wrote long and considered replies to these appeals, including one by Lydia Maria Child, a prominent women’s rights activist and self-described “uncompromising abolitionist.” Their initially civil letters turned into a barbed exchange that was published in the New York Tribune. This in turn drew the ire of the wife of Virginia senator James Mason, who rebuked Child for supporting “the hoary-headed murderer of Harper’s Ferry,” whose success would “condemn women of your race” to “see their husbands and fathers murdered, their children butchered, the ground strewed with the brains of their babies.” Child’s correspondence with the Virginians was published as a tract by the American Anti-slavery Society and quickly sold 300,000 copies.
This and other exchanges only hardened Wise’s conviction that Brown’s northern sympathizers were culpable in the attack—if not literally, then in spirit. “I will not reprieve or pardon one man now after the letters I have rec’d from the North,” Wise wrote to Andrew Hunter on November 6. He expressed a similar view to a Pennsylvanian who shared a train ride with him and was struck by the Virginian’s fixation on northern opinion. “Gov. Wise told me there was one condition on which he would surrender Gen. Brown—which was that I should deliver up to him General Sympathy for execution in his stead. The Governor and the citizens are evidently more afraid of the latter than of the former.”
Wise dwelled on northern sympathies again in an address to the Virginia Assembly. “Shall John Brown be pardoned, lest he might be canonized by execution of felony for confessed murder, robbery and treason in inciting servile insurrection in Virginia? Why a martyr? Because thousands applaud his acts and opinions, and glorify his crimes?” To Wise, the course was clear. “Sympathy was in insurrection, and had to be subdued more sternly than was John Brown.”
The only possible brake on Wise’s determination to hang Brown was the Supreme Court of Virginia, but on November 19 it unanimously rejected the appeal by Brown’s lawyers. Wise and his troops reached Charlestown the next day, and on the twenty-first he visited Brown and the other prisoners. “Governor Wise left them,” the Baltimore American reported, “with an injunction that they prepare for their doom, as under no circumstances whatever would the arm of the Executive be interposed in their behalf.”
The American also reported that “Brown was sti
ll as determined as ever, justifying his course” at Harpers Ferry to the governor and “perfectly resigned to his fate.” He had, after all, never asked for clemency, had rejected an insanity defense, and had discouraged rescue attempts. Even so, the Supreme Court decision, and Wise’s visit, cleared away any remaining doubt that Brown’s sentence would be carried out eleven days hence, on December 2.
AS HIS APPOINTMENT DATE with the gallows neared, the prisoner picked up the pace of his letter writing and moved to final matters.
“I have now been confined over a month, with a good opportunity to look the whole thing as ‘fair in the face’ as I am capable of doing; and I now feel it most grateful that I am counted in the least possible degree worthy to suffer for the truth,” Brown wrote his children in North Elba the day after Wise’s visit. “I want you all to ‘be of good cheer.’ This life is intended as a season of training, chastisement, temptation, affliction, and trial.”
Despite his impending execution, Brown’s health and mood improved. He found himself “able to sit up to read; & write pretty much all day: as well as part of the Night,” he wrote his wife on November 26. He also hosted a plethora of new visitors, many of them soldiers posted to Charlestown who were curious to see the archvillain they’d come to guard. These callers included men who had fought against him at Harpers Ferry and even a few foes from Kansas. Brown spoke to them frankly about the evils of slavery, and relished playing the role of Christian teacher. As he wrote an admirer on the twenty-fourth: “I have many very interesting visits from pro-slavery persons almost daily, & I endeavor to improve them faithfully, plainly, and kindly. I do not think I ever enjoyed life better than since my confinement here.”
The only company Brown could not abide was that of southern clergymen. One who tried to speak with him wrote in a letter: “He said that he would not receive the services of any minister of religion, for he believed that they, as apologists of slavery, had violated the laws of nature and of God, and that they ought first to sanctify themselves by becoming abolitionists, and then they might be worthy to minister unto him.” Brown likewise told visiting Methodist ministers that “they had better pray for themselves.”
He was more receptive to journalists, answering their questions on a range of topics. Asked by the Baltimore American for his views on “amalgamation,” or interracial marriage, “he responded, that although he was opposed to it, yet he would much prefer a son or a daughter of his to marry an industrious and honest negro than an indolent and dishonest white man.” Brown also gave written answers to questions posed by the Independent Democrat, one of the hostile local papers. Asked about his opinion of the justice meted out to him, Brown replied: “I feel no shame on account of my doom.” Yet as a Calvinist, he could never be sure that he was among God’s Elect.
Question: To what political party do you belong?
Answer: To God’s party. (I think)
Brown also spoke of his spiritual doubts in a letter to Mary a week before his scheduled execution. “Life is made up of a series of changes: & let us try to meet them in the best maner possible,” he wrote. “The near aproach of my great change is not the occasion of any particular dread. I trust that God who has sustained me so long; will not forsake me when I most feel my need of Fatherly aid: & support. Should he hide his face; my spirit will droop, & die: but not otherwise: be assured. My only anxiety is to be properly assured of my fitness for the company of those who are ‘washed from all filthiness.’”
But his mind was not only on God. He ended the letter by telling Mary:
If you now feel that you are equal to the undertaking do exactly as you FEEL disposed to do about coming to see me before I suffer. I am entirely willing.
Your affectionate Husband
John Brown.
CHAPTER 12
So Let It Be Done!
During his weeks in confinement, Brown was often asked about the failure of his attack on Harpers Ferry. What had gone wrong? In reply, Brown took full responsibility and faulted his own judgment. He had held tightly to the engine house instead of the Potomac bridge, and he had mistakenly believed his hostages would shield him from attack. But he repeatedly blamed his compassionate nature as well; as one reporter wrote after interviewing Brown, “It was a feeling of humanity that betrayed him.” He had let the train full of frightened passengers go, and had been delayed in Harpers Ferry out of concern for the welfare of his prisoners.
However, Brown had come to terms with the failure of his intended mission. “I have been a good deal disappointed as it regards myself in not keeping up to my own plans; but I feel reconciled to that even; for Gods plan, was Infinitely better; no doubt; or I should have kept to my own,” he wrote the Reverend H. L. Vaill, who had tutored him as a teenager. “Had Samson kept to his determination of not telling Delilah wherein his great strength lay; he would probably have never overturned the house.”
The Samson reference was telling, as was another observation he made in his letter to Vaill. “I cannot believe that any thing I have done suffered or may yet suffer will be lost; to the cause of God or of humanity: & before I began my work at Harpers Ferry; I felt assured that in the worst event; it would certainly PAY.”
This was a rare acknowledgment by Brown that he had ever harbored doubt about the prospects for his attack. It also gave substance to the suspicion of some observers that Brown had launched his strike knowing it was doomed. As William Lloyd Garrison wrote a friend on the day after Brown’s conviction: “His raid into Virginia looks utterly lacking in common sense—a desperate self-sacrifice for the purpose of giving an earthquake shock to the slave system, and thus hastening the day for a universal catastrophe.”
A first cousin of Brown’s also questioned why his kinsman had gone “wading in blood” to inevitable defeat. “What you intended was an impossibility,” the Reverend Heman Humphrey wrote him in prison. No one in his “right mind” would “have plunged headlong, as you did, into the lion’s den, where you were certain to be devoured.”
In reply, Brown assured Humphrey that he wasn’t insane, and again made reference to Samson, referring to him as the “poor erring servant” of whom it was said, “He shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hands of the Philistines.” As told in the Book of Judges, Samson, shorn of his strength by Delilah, was taken captive by the idolatrous Philistines, who gouged out his eyes and brought the shackled Israelite forth to entertain thousands of men and women at their temple in Gaza. Samson then asked God to “strengthen me just once more” before grasping the pillars of the temple and pulling it down on himself and all those gathered round. “Thus he killed many more as he died than while he lived.”
Brown echoed this line in writing about Samson to Reverend Humphrey. “For many years I have felt a strong impression that God had given me powers and faculties, unworthy as I was, that he intended to use for a similar purpose. This most unmerited honor He has seen fit to bestow; and whether, like the same poor frail man to whom I allude, my death may be of vastly more value than my life is, I think quite beyond human foresight.”
Northern admirers might cast Brown as a Christ figure, and he was willing to play that part. But the role he wrote for himself at the end was that of God’s avenger, wounded and in bonds, triumphantly crying at the last, “Let me die with the Philistines!”
NO SINGLE PASSAGE OF Scripture defined Brown; in the course of his life, he took inspiration from a multitude of biblical figures. Nor is it possible to pinpoint when he first saw shades of Samson’s story in his own. But he referred to Samson’s “victory” in his writing well before Harpers Ferry, and his prison letters suggested he had mulled the parallels between the biblical hero and himself for many years.
Brown’s identification with Samson also illuminated many aspects of his Virginia mission that otherwise defied explanation. The first mystery concerned his attack plan. What exactly was it? Brown’s own version kept shifting. In court, he said he planned to run slaves north to freedom, as he’d do
ne in Missouri. He later retracted this, saying he had hoped to arm slaves “without any bloodshed” so they could defend themselves in the South. At other times, he spoke of a mountain-based guerrilla campaign that would oppose U.S. troops if necessary and carve out a provisional state, ultimately toppling the government.
His men provided a more consistent picture of what they thought Brown intended, at least in the campaign’s first stage. In their view, Brown planned to seize the armory, carry off its weapons, and quickly move back into the mountains with liberated slaves and any others who joined them. Some of Brown’s men were also under the impression that similar strikes were to be made elsewhere in the South, by allied parties.
The detailed maps and other documents found at the Kennedy farm further suggested that Brown had well-laid plans for an extended campaign across the South. And his confidants described military preparations he had made over many years, including close study of historical precedents and sketches of mountain forts he intended to build.
But when Brown finally launched his strike, he gave little sign of pursuing any of his purported plans. Where was the mountain base he spoke of establishing, or the log redoubts he’d diagrammed for Frederick Douglass, Franklin Sanborn, and his own children? The Maryland schoolhouse and the Kennedy farm were meager strongholds, particularly if Brown envisioned large numbers of men following him back into the hills. With winter approaching, how would he feed and shelter those who flocked to his mountain refuge? For that matter, why did Brown fail to take even a modest supply of food for the small force he led across the Potomac?
Brown’s behavior in Harpers Ferry didn’t accord with his alleged plans, either. He said he had chosen to target the town because of its vast supply of arms. If so, why did he leave the town’s hundred thousand guns untouched during the time he controlled the armory, arsenal, and rifle works? How did he plan to transport these weapons? And why was he bringing his own guns forward to the schoolhouse, when Harpers Ferry held an abundant store?
