by Tony Horwitz
Wise, in effect, had declared martial law across a large swath of Virginia. Yet even this wasn’t enough. Citing “information from various quarters” of plans to invade Virginia and rescue Brown, he wrote President Buchanan asking him to “take steps to preserve peace between the states.” He sent copies of this dispatch to the governors of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, adding: “Necessity may compel us to pursue invaders of our jurisdiction into yours.”
Even the pliant Buchanan bucked at Wise’s extraordinary request. The governor’s alarm was “almost incredible,” the president wrote in reply, and he was “at a loss to discover any provision in the constitution or laws of the United States” authorizing him to guard one state from another. As a token gesture, Buchanan agreed to send federal artillery to protect the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, but otherwise declared the security in place “sufficient for any emergency.”
Undeterred, Wise secured the state borders on his own, ordering men posted “on the line of frontier” along the Potomac and Ohio Rivers. He also called out still more militia, bringing the total in Charlestown to about sixteen hundred men, equal to the civilian population. “The town looks to-day as if the times were revolutionary,” a New York Herald correspondent reported on November 29. “Drums beating, music playing, flags waving, sentinels pacing.” Even the new commander in charge of the area thought the force excessive. “There is no absolute need for half we have,” he wired the governor.
The newly arrived troops included cadets from the Virginia Military Institute, accompanied by a professor, Major Thomas J. Jackson, who would soon earn the nickname Stonewall. His future Confederate commander, Robert E. Lee, also returned to the scene, in charge of the artillery sent by Buchanan. As before, Lee regarded fears of “the enemy” to be greatly overblown, and he showed little enthusiasm at the prospect of serving again in Harpers Ferry.
On the morning of December 1, Lee was introduced to Mary Brown, who was seeking clearance to visit her husband in jail. Lee referred her to the general in overall command of Virginia’s troops. “It is a matter over which I have no control & wish to take none,” Lee explained in a letter to his wife later that day.
The commander, General William Taliaferro, authorized Mary to proceed to Charlestown, but only under the terms laid out by Governor Wise. She must go alone, must be subject to the usual jail security, must see Brown and no other prisoner, and must return promptly that evening to Harpers Ferry, to await delivery of her husband’s body.
RIDING IN A CARRIAGE and escorted by a number of cavalrymen, Mary set off for Charlestown early on the afternoon of December 1. She was greeted at the jail by a throng of curious onlookers and hundreds of soldiers, with bayonets bristling and cannon at the ready. “There seemed to be an evident intention to appall the poor woman with the military majesty of the Commonwealth of Virginia,” wrote the Baltimore American.
Once inside the prison, Mary endured fifteen minutes of “stiff platitudes” from officials, including General Taliaferro, who “assured her that if she should ever be disposed to visit Virginia again, he would cordially invite her to Charlestown, where she would receive true Southern hospitality.” Finally, at four o’clock, after being searched by the jailer’s wife, Mary was taken to see her husband. As required, the jailer, John Avis, was present.
“For some minutes they stood speechless—Mrs. Brown resting her head upon her husband’s breast, and clasping his neck with her arms,” wrote a correspondent who spoke to Avis. According to another report, “they were so much affected that they were absolutely unable to utter a syllable.” The couple had last seen each other six months before, and they’d spent very little time together in the four years since Brown’s departure for Kansas in 1855.
“Wife, I am glad to see you,” Brown said, breaking the silence. He had seemed emotional at first, but “was soon calm and collected.” The couple spoke of their children, dead and alive, and moved quickly to practical matters. Brown suggested she gather up his body with that of their sons and also their neighbors, the Thompsons, burn off the flesh, and box the bones for transport to North Elba. Mary wasn’t happy with this grim proposal and doubted she could get permission. “For my sake, think no more of such an idea,” she said. Brown consented. He had only suggested the measure because he thought it would save money and guard against the odor of his decomposing corpse.
Brown told Mary he hoped she would remain in North Elba and spoke of the stone at the farm he wanted inscribed in his memory. He also discussed the disposition of his meager assets, which he had laid out in a will written earlier that day. He left a compass and other surveying tools to John junior, a silver watch to Jason, an opera glass and rifle to Owen (along with fifty dollars, “in consideration of his terible sufferings in Kansas: & his cripled condition from his childhood”), and his old family Bible to his eldest daughter, Ruth. His sons and other daughters were to receive “as good a coppy of the Bible as can be purchased at some Book store in New York or Boston at a cost of Five Dollars each.” Brown also designated small sums from his father’s estate to pay off debts still outstanding in Connecticut and Ohio.
Avis invited the Browns to supper with him and his family, and not long after dining on “simple jail fare,” the couple was told that it was time for Mary to go. Brown, it was later reported, lost his composure for a moment and “showed a good deal of temper,” as he wanted her to remain. But they had already been together four hours, longer than initially permitted, and the orders were for Mary to return to Harpers Ferry that night.
Avis gave them privacy at the end, or chose not to disclose much about their parting, beyond saying that Brown told his wife “God bless you,” and that Mary replied, “Good bye, may Heaven have mercy on you.” She then rode back to Harpers Ferry to wait at the Wager House, the hotel that had figured so prominently in the fight that ravaged her family.
AFTER HIS WIFE’S DEPARTURE, Brown wrote a final note to “MY DEAR WIFE,” saying he wished to “bid you another Farewell: ‘be of good cheer’ and God Allmighty bless, save, comfort, guide, & keep; you, to ‘the end.’ Your Affectionate Husband.” He enclosed the plain inscription he wanted etched on the old family monument at North Elba: “John Brown born May 9 1800 was executed at Charlestown, Va., December 2d 1859.”
He also wrote his brother Jeremiah, noting that he could “only say a few words to you for want of time.” He had sent Jeremiah $15.50, he said, “to refund to you what you had advanced to my boys on my account.” Brown’s many debts were trailing him to the grave and beyond. Even his horse and cart from the Kennedy farm had been seized in lieu of payment for the breakfasts he had ordered from the Wager House during his attack. He closed his note to Jeremiah: “Am quite cheerful & composed. Yours Ever J.B.”
That same evening, Brown received a letter from Lora Case, a childhood neighbor and long-ago Bible-class student of his in Hudson, Ohio. Case asked for “something from your hand to look upon,” offered to educate one of Brown’s girls, and closed, “May God Almighty strengthen you as you are about to be offered up.” Brown replied to Case in his final letter, dated Dec. 2, the day of his execution.
“Your most kind & cheering letter,” he wrote, “compells me to steal a moment from those allowe[d] me; in which to prepare for my last great change to send you a few words.” Brown took time to discuss faith—“Pure & undefiled religion before God & the Father is as I understand it: an active (not a dormant) principle”—and said he had no more role in educating his children. “I leave that now entirely to their excellent Mother.” Brown signed himself, “Your Friend.”
Brown’s hanging was scheduled for eleven A.M. That morning, he dictated a codicil to his will, leaving his family any property of his that might be recovered from Virginia authorities, apart from items he had given his keepers. These included his prison Bible, left to John Blessing, a local baker who had shown him great kindness and provided the prisoners with cakes and oysters. In the Bible, Brown had marked a number of passages th
at were particularly significant to him, most of them related to persecution. Typical was this, from Ecclesiastes: “So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.”
Brown also dispensed a small gift and a few parting words to his fellow prisoners, whom he was allowed to visit in their cells. “As soon as Brown entered,” wrote a local editor with access to the jail, “he was again General Brown, and the prisoners his humble and devoted followers.” Stopping first at the cell occupied by Shields Green and John Copeland, Brown scolded them for “false statements” he felt they’d made following their capture, about having been deceived as to the nature of his attack. Brown told them plainly that they had joined in it “of their own accord.” At the next cell, he gave a similar reprimand to Edwin Coppoc, and heatedly contradicted Coppoc’s cellmate, John Cook, who had stated in his confession that Brown sent him ahead to Harpers Ferry to gather intelligence.
“You know I opposed it when first proposed,” Brown said, denying that he had sanctioned this mission.
“Your memory is very different from mine,” Cook replied.
“I am right sir,” Brown insisted.
Having rebuked his soldiers, Brown shook their hands, exhorted them to “die like men,” and gave each man a quarter dollar, “telling them it would be of no use to him as his time was drawing very short.”
Brown’s last goodbye was to Aaron Stevens, his cellmate and loyal lieutenant. As they warmly clasped hands, Stevens said, “I feel it in my soul Captain that you are going to a better world.” Brown agreed, and then added: “Stand up like a man—no flinching now. Farewell.” Along with a quarter dollar, he left the brave but tempestuous Stevens a note quoting Proverbs: “He that is slow to anger; is better than the mighty; and that ruleth his Spirit, than he, that taketh a city.”
A LITTLE BEFORE ELEVEN o’clock, Brown’s jailers wrapped a cord around him, pinioning his arms just above the elbows, and escorted him from the building. Waiting outside was the wagon of an undertaker and furniture maker who occupied a building just beside the prison. In the bed of the open wagon lay a black walnut coffin enclosed in a poplar box. This was to be Brown’s seat for his tumbrel ride.
Though it was early December, the weather was much finer than it had been six weeks before, when Brown drove a different wagon from the Kennedy farm to Harpers Ferry, inaugurating the attack that now led him to the gallows. On that October night, it had been wet and raw; now it was a sunny, springlike day with “a warm and dreamy haze,” one reporter wrote. Locals flung open their windows; “just like a May morning, in Virginia, honey-bees were flying about and birds singing everywhere,” recalled the undertaker’s assistant, who rode at the front of Brown’s wagon. Drawn by two horses, it traveled slowly east along George Street, flanked by lines of riflemen.
Brown riding on his coffin to the gallows
Brown, seated in back on his casket, appeared as calm and determined during the brief wagon ride as he had been in prison. According to one account, the undertaker commented that he seemed “a game man,” to which Brown replied that he’d never known fear. As the wagon neared the gallows, the prisoner took in the sweeping view of undulating farmland and gentle mountains. “This is a beautiful country,” he said. “I never had the pleasure of seeing it before.”
The site chosen for Brown’s execution was a forty-acre field of rye and corn stubble at the edge of Charlestown. It was not only convenient to the jail but also almost bare of trees or other landmarks, “so as to prevent any one being able to recognize it thereafter,” wrote Andrew Hunter, who had helped select it. The authorities wanted to ensure that the site of Brown’s hanging wouldn’t become hallowed ground. To that end, the scaffold was erected on the morning of the execution and taken down immediately after.
Enclosed by a rail, the field now resembled a military parade ground. White signal flags marked the position of each unit, and the troops formed two large squares around the scaffold, which was also guarded by cannon. Soldiers had marched onto the field and taken their places at nine A.M., while cavalry patrolled the perimeter and other men occupied posts in and around Charlestown. The overall force numbered about fifteen hundred.
This extraordinary security was ostensibly intended to prevent a rescue attempt. But it also created a military buffer between Brown and any civilians who wanted to witness his execution and possibly hear a reprise of his courtroom speech. Initially, even reporters were to be kept at a considerable distance from the scaffold; only at the last minute did they prevail on authorities to let them come closer. Apart from visiting dignitaries and well-connected citizens permitted onto the field, the public could only glimpse the proceedings from distant buildings or other spots hundreds of yards away. “Why this jealous caution?” wondered a reporter for the New York Tribune, who speculated that “it is feared this old man’s sturdy truths and simple eloquence will stir a fever in the blood of all who listen.”
As the wagon drew up to the gallows, observers who had waited two hours in the field saw a rather unprepossing figure. Wearing a broad-brimmed black slouch hat, Brown was dressed in the same disheveled dark suit he had worn in court. This funereal attire contrasted with his odd footwear: white socks and the blood-red “carpet slippers” he’d worn in prison.
Despite Brown’s worn clothes, there was nothing spent about the man himself. On recognizing the town’s mayor and the prosecutor standing near the gallows, he briskly addressed them: “Gentlemen, good bye.” Then he swiftly ascended the scaffold with “the same imperturbable, wooden composure which had distinguished him at every step of his progress,” the Evening Star of Washington reported.
Once on the platform, Brown obligingly positioned himself beneath the hanging rope. Facing south and a little east, toward the Shenandoah River, he had a commanding view of the crowded field, the rolling farmland beyond, and the gentle arc of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Born in the hard, stony hills of northwestern Connecticut, he would cast his last gaze at the fertile valley of Virginia. And his final company on the gallows would be, not the black children and slave mother he’d hoped for, but the portly, top-hatted sheriff, William Campbell, and the jailer and slave dealer, John Avis. Brown raised his pinioned arms to shake their hands, and then the two men tied his ankles, pulled a white hood over his head, and adjusted the noose around his neck. Avis asked Brown to step forward, onto the trap door.
“You must lead me, I cannot see,” he said, in what one reporter called “the same even tone as if asking for a chair.” Brown was equally composed when asked if he wanted a handkerchief to drop, to signal that he was ready to die. “No,” he replied, “but do not detain me any longer than is absolutely necessary.” Having fully prepared for this last great change, Brown was, as always, impatient for action. His last words were spoken “quietly & civilly” and without “the slightest apparent emotion.”
But Brown’s extraordinary resolve was now tested a final time. As he stood awaiting the sudden drop to his death, there was a long delay as the troops that had escorted him from prison found their place on the field. For an excruciating ten or fifteen minutes, Brown—hooded, noosed, and perched precariously atop the trapdoor—stood “upright as a soldier in position, and motionless,” wrote a colonel posted by the scaffold. “I was close to him, and watched him narrowly, to see if I could detect any signs of shrinking or trembling in his person, but there was none.”
Brown on the gallows with the sheriff and jailer
Then, finally, the military maneuvers ended and the commander on the field said to the sheriff, “All ready, Mr. Campbell.” The sheriff didn’t hear him; the order had to be repeated. At last the sheriff raised a hatchet and cut the rope holding the trapdoor in place. Brown plunged through the floor of the scaffold but fell only a few feet. The rope was short—too short, apparently, to break his neck.
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sp; “With the fall his arms below the elbow flew up, hands clenched, & his arms gradually fell by spasmodic motions,” wrote Major Thomas Jackson. A reporter for the New York Tribune observed: “There was but one spasmodic effort of the hands to clutch at the neck, but for nearly five minutes the limbs jerked and quivered.” Then Brown’s body went slack, swaying in a circle, the skirt of his coat fluttering in the breeze. “This motion,” the Evening Star reported, gave Brown “the appearance of a corn-field scarecrow,” so gaunt that his “limbs bore apparently not an ounce of surplus flesh, and thus did not fill out his clothes.”
Sketch of the execution by eyewitness Alfred Berghaus
Doctors approached the swaying body, holding it still while pressing their ears to Brown’s chest to make sure he was dead. Several teams of physicians took turns at this. Brown dangled for thirty-five minutes before he was cut down and his limp body finally placed in the coffin.
THE LARGE AUDIENCE IN the field had remained solemn and quiet throughout. “Of Sympathy there was none—of triumph no word nor sign,” wrote David Strother, the Harper’s Weekly artist and correspondent. “The fifteen hundred soldiers stood mute and motionless at their posts.” The spectators were nonetheless struck by the courage Brown had shown in death. “He behaved with unflinching firmness,” wrote Major Jackson, who would soon become known for standing like a stone wall in battle. “Awful was the thought that he might in a few minutes receive the sentence ‘Depart ye wicked into everlasting fire.’”
