by Tony Horwitz
Nearby stood John Wilkes Booth, the actor who had joined a Richmond troop headed to Charlestown. “I was proud of my little part in the transaction,” he later wrote, and glad to see the “trator” hanged. But he also regarded the abolitionist as “a brave old man” whose bold act had changed history. “John Brown was a man inspired, the grandest character of this century!” Booth told his sister in 1864, while ranting about Abraham Lincoln.
Another rabid defender of the South also viewed Brown with a mix of awe and contempt. Edmund Ruffin was Virginia’s foremost fire-eater, in some ways a mirror image of Brown. Sixty-five years old, with penetrating eyes and long white hair, Ruffin was an agriculturalist who had become a radical agitator for southern rights.
Edmund Ruffin
Ruffin described Brown as a “robber & murderer & villain of unmitigated turpitude,” but welcomed his attack on Harpers Ferry, which he hoped would “stir the sluggish blood of the South” to take up arms and form an independent country. Traveling to “the seat of war,” as he called Charlestown, Ruffin preached secession on the streets and borrowed the overcoat and arms of a Virginia cadet so he could get close to the gallows.
Later that day, Ruffin wrote in his diary that Brown had ascended the scaffold “with readiness & seeming alacrity. His movements & manner gave no evidence of his being either terrified or concerned.” Ruffin was particularly impressed that Brown maintained his statuelike calm despite the “cruel & most trying infliction” of the long delay while he stood with the halter around his neck. “The villain whose life has thus been forfeited, possessed but one virtue,” Ruffin concluded. “This is physical or animal courage, or the most complete fearlessness of & insensibility to danger & death. In this quality he seems to me to have had few equals.”
This was remarkable testimony, coming from a Virginian who would now devote his energies to whipping the South into a secessionist fever—while brandishing one of Brown’s pikes with a label that read: “Sample of the favors designed for us by our Northern Brethren.” Sixteen months after Brown’s hanging, Ruffin would don a uniform again, this time to join in the attack on Fort Sumter that inaugurated four years of bloody civil war.
BROWN FORETOLD THIS CARNAGE himself just before going to the gallows. Authorities had informed him a few days earlier that he wouldn’t be allowed to give a speech from the scaffold or write a public message intended for publication. “The object of this prohibition,” the New York Herald explained, “is to avoid any further parade being made of his so called martyrdom.” The order was redundant in any event. The military cordon around the gallows ensured that no one would hear any final remarks he attempted, apart from soldiers and a few privileged observers close to the scaffold.
Brown’s last prophecy
But Brown found other means to make his last thoughts known. A jail guard, Hiram O’Bannon, had asked the famous prisoner for his autograph. Instead, as Brown exited the jail on the morning of his execution, he handed O’Bannon a scrap of paper bearing a few lines of his distinctive, oddly punctuated script. Also characteristic was the terse, emphatic message it conveyed.
“I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood.”
Brown had a rhetorical habit of going on a beat too long, diluting the power of his words and muddying their meaning. He did this in his final message, adding a second line that was much gentler and almost apologetic in tone. “I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.”
But this was an unconvincing coda to the apocalyptic prophecy that preceded it. Brown had often stated his belief in blood sacrifice. In 1855, not long before moving to Kansas and launching his crusade against slavery, he had written to his family: “Should God send famin, pestilence, & war; upon this guilty hypocritical nation to destroy it; we need not be surprised.”
In the years after Brown’s death, Franklin Sanborn would become the abolitionist’s most ardent champion, for decades defending Brown against every accusation and sanitizing some of his words and deeds. But when Sanborn reproduced his hero’s violent final message he did so without varnish. Instead, Sanborn noted the scripture it echoed—“Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins”—and declared this the essence of “Brown’s old-fashioned theology.”
During one of their earliest conversations, Brown had told the Concord teacher that he believed the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Liberty meant the same: we must love our neighbor as our equal. He then proclaimed to his acolyte that it “would be better for a whole generation to die a violent death” than for this sacred doctrine to go unfulfilled. “Such was the faith,” Sanborn concluded, “in which he died.”
CHAPTER 13
Dissevering the Ties That Bind Us
As John Brown rode atop his coffin to the gallows on December 2, northern admirers composed verse in his praise. “O Patriot true! O Christian meek and brave!” Bronson Alcott wrote in a sonnet to mark the occasion. His daughter, Louisa May, also felt moved to poetry: “Living, he made life beautiful, /—Dying, made death divine.”
Unaware of Brown’s blood-soaked prophecy, the Alcotts and others continued to celebrate what they saw as his Christ-like sacrifice. Herman Melville was a notable exception. Unable to support his family after the commercial failure of Moby-Dick and other works, the embittered novelist wrote fourteen lines that spoke to the dark future Brown had foretold.
In Melville’s haunted imagining, Brown swayed from the beam, casting a gaunt shadow on the Shenandoah, his face hidden by the hangman’s shroud.
But the streaming beard is shown
(Weird John Brown),
The meteor of the war.
Melville’s eerie poem, titled “The Portent (1859),” wasn’t published until after Appomattox. But it captured a premonition that many Americans felt on the day of Brown’s hanging. “Even now as I write, they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves!” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his diary on December 2. “This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon.”
His words were echoed that night by a black preacher in Pittsburgh, at one of many “Martyr’s Day” services held by African Americans. “From the firmament of Providence today, a meteor has fallen. It has fallen upon the volcano of American sympathies,” J. S. Martin said, “and it shall burst forth in one general conflagration of revolution that shall bring about universal freedom.”
Longfellow and Martin were ardent abolitionists, unlike George Templeton Strong, a New York lawyer who thought Brown was “cracked” and “justly” hanged. Even so, Strong acknowledged in his diary on December 2 that Brown’s “name may be a word of power for the next half-century. It was unwise to give fanaticism a martyr. Why could not Virginia have condescended to lock him up for life in a madhouse?”
In communities across the North, citizens solemnly observed Brown’s hanging with tolling bells, hundred-gun salutes, prayer meetings, and grandiloquent oratory. In Ohio, Akron businesses shut and Clevelanders hung the streets of their city in crepe. In Hartford, a statue of Liberty atop the statehouse dome was draped in black. One young Connecticut woman made a pilgrimage to Torrington, to spend the hour of Brown’s execution at his birthplace. She found the weathered saltbox inhabited by an Irish family who knew nothing of Brown, but they allowed her to wander the house and take the door latch to the room in which her hero was born.
In Boston, four thousand people packed the Tremont Temple to honor Brown. Among the eulogies they heard was one by William Lloyd Garrison that showed how much the ground had shifted, even beneath those who had long opposed violence. “I am a non-resistant,” Garrison reminded his audience, “yet, as a peace man—an ‘ultra’ peace man—I am prepared to say, ‘Success to every slave insurrection at the South, and in every slave country.’” He went on: “Give me, as a non-resistant, Bunker Hill, and Lexington, and Concord, rather tha
n the cowardice and servility of a Southern slave plantation.”
This outpouring of northern anger and veneration went on for days, swelled by reports of Brown’s demeanor on the day of his execution, including a false item in the New York Tribune, which claimed that he had kissed a black baby held up to him by its mother as he left the jailhouse. Even George Templeton Strong wrote admiringly of Brown’s “simplicity and consistency, the absence of fuss, parade and bravado, the strength and clearness” he showed to the end. “Slavery has received no such blow in my time as his strangulation.”
The slow transit of Brown’s body home from Virginia afforded a further opportunity for northern adoration. The day after the execution, Mary Brown boarded a train in Harpers Ferry and escorted her husband’s coffin to Philadelphia, where the crowd awaiting the funeral train was so large that the mayor feared a riot. He arranged to send an empty hearse through the city to decoy the throng of Brown’s admirers, while a separate wagon quietly carried the coffin directly aboard a boat for New Jersey.
Upon reaching New York City late that night, Brown’s body was taken to an undertaker at a coffin factory in the Bowery. This conveyance was meant to be secret, but word quickly spread and “our entire block was filled with anxious men to see the body of John Brown,” wrote the wife of the undertaker’s assistant. She added: “When he come he was black in the face for they slung him in the coffin with all his clothes on with his head under his shoulder and the rope he was hung with in the coffin.”
Pieces of the rope, along with screws from the coffin, quickly became prized relics. One man made off with a lock of Brown’s hair. The undertaker washed the body and laid it on ice, then put a cravat collar around Brown’s injured neck and placed him in a new walnut coffin for the onward journey. Mary escorted it by train to Vermont, with tolling bells and processions marking each stop. After taking a boat across Lake Champlain, she traveled by carriage through slushy snow to North Elba, where she arrived late on December 7.
The next day, family and neighbors gathered for Brown’s funeral at his frame house beneath the Adirondack peak known as Cloud-Splitter. The mourners included four women widowed by the attack on Harpers Ferry: Mary and the young wives of Oliver Brown, Watson Brown, and William Thompson. The family of Lyman Epps, a black neighbor and friend of Brown’s, opened the service by singing the abolitionist’s favorite hymn, “Blow Ye the Trumpet, Blow.”
Let all the nations know,
To earth’s remotest bound,
The Year of Jubilee has come.
After a prayer and eulogies, mourners carried the coffin to Brown’s grave site beside a rough granite boulder and lowered the box into the winter-hard ground. The funeral was entirely without pomp, as befitted the man. But one eulogist, the abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips, spoke eloquently to the hanged man’s legacy. “History will date Virginia Emancipation from Harper’s Ferry. True, the slave is still there. So, when the tempest uproots a pine on your hills, it looks green for months—a year or two. Still, it is timber, not a tree. John Brown has loosened the roots of the slave system; it only breathes,—it does not live,—hereafter.”
ON THE DAY OF the funeral, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi gave his own prescient speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. A new Congress had convened just three days after Brown’s hanging and immediately fallen into heated debate over Harpers Ferry. Davis mocked Brown for claiming, in the Mississippian’s words, “if we would allow him to take our niggers off without making any fuss about it, he would not kill anybody.” But the issue was no longer Brown, per se; it was his beatification in the North, which Southerners had watched in horror.
So had many Northerners, particularly businessmen who had commercial ties to the South and feared the country’s breakup. They organized enormous “Union meetings,” to denounce Brown and declare allegiance to the Fugitive Slave Law and other southern totems. “FANATICISM REBUKED,” read a flyer for a Union meeting in Philadelphia on December 7, which attracted six thousand people. There were similar rallies in Boston and New York, where speakers, including New York’s mayor, hailed “the bond of commerce” between North and South.
But the demonstrations did little to allay southern fears, or to deter southern scaremongers who sought to exploit the region’s alarm. A long-held southern suspicion was now hardening into conviction. The North, at heart, was abolitionist, and its leaders could not be trusted to uphold the constitutional protections afforded slavery.
“John Brown, and a thousand John Browns, can invade us, and the Government will not protect us,” Jefferson Davis proclaimed in his December 8 speech to the Senate. If “we are not to be protected in our property and sovereignty, we are therefore released from our allegiance, and will protect ourselves out of the Union.” Davis also issued a chilling threat: “To secure our rights and protect our honor we will dissever the ties that bind us together, even if it rushes us into a sea of blood.”
Not all southern leaders shared this view, and some vehemently opposed it, including Governor Sam Houston of Texas, who had served with Davis in the Senate and thought him “as ambitious as Lucifer and cold as a lizard.” But moderates were drowned out by the calls for separation that echoed across the South all through December 1859. In Virginia, Edmund Ruffin revived a dormant secessionist group, which declared Harpers Ferry the “last and crowning aggression of Northern usurpation and hatred.” South Carolina reaffirmed its “right to secede” and sent a commissioner to lobby for a convention of slaveholding states. “The Harper’s Ferry invasion, with the developments following it,” the commissioner told Virginians, “prove that the north and the south are standing in hostile array.”
With tensions rising in the winter of 1859–60, southern states massively increased their military budgets; they also cracked down on perceived infiltrators by barring postmasters from delivering “incendiary” materials and strictly policing book vendors and other “dangerous emissaries from the Northern states.” Citizens conducted a witch hunt of their own. In Georgia alone that December, two “suspicious” book agents were lashed, a shoe peddler was tarred and feathered after “enticing negroes into his cellar at night and reading them all sorts of abolitionist documents,” and a traveling map seller was lynched for allegedly preaching abolitionism to blacks.
“I do not exaggerate in designating the state of affairs in the Southern country as a reign of terror,” the British consul in Charleston, South Carolina, wrote on December 9. “The Northern merchants and Travellers are leaving in great numbers.”
A movement also arose in the South to “use, eat, drink, wear or buy nothing under the sun from north of the Mason and Dixon line,” in the words of a legislative committee in Virginia. This boycott extended even to education. That December, southern medical students in Philadelphia voted “to secede in a body” from the city’s medical schools “and go to Southern Colleges.” About 250 students departed, arriving in Richmond to the cheers of five thousand Virginians and a welcome speech by Governor Wise, whose term was about to end.
In his final address to the Virginia Assembly, Wise declared “abolition a cancer eating into our very vitals.” Even President Buchanan, whom Wise had supported, could no longer be counted on to defend southern rights. “We must rely on ourselves,” Wise concluded. “I say then—To your tents! Organize and arm!”
AS THE SOUTH MOBILIZED in the weeks following Brown’s death, six of his accomplices still lingered in the Charlestown jail. Four of them were scheduled to hang on December 16. “The prisoners seem to have given up all hope, and look with great composure on their approaching fate,” the Baltimore American reported. For at least two of the men, this wasn’t in fact the case.
John Cook shared a room with Edwin Coppoc, their ankles shackled to a bolt on the floor. Cook passed time in prison reading Byron, writing poetry, and composing florid letters. “A dungeon bare confines me, a prisoner’s cell is mine,” he wrote his wife, who had taken refuge with his family in the North. “Yet ther
e are no bars to confine the immortal mind, and no cell that can shut up the gushing fountain of undying love.”
Coppoc’s letters were more restrained. In his youth, he had been expelled from Quaker meeting for dancing and other “wayward tendencies”; now he wrote his mother to express regret for having taken up arms. “I have seen my folly too late, and must now suffer the consequences.” On December 10 he told a friend about pies he and Cook had received. “So you may know that we live fat, but it is only fattening us up for the gallows rather poor consolation.”
In their final days, a local paper reported, the two prisoners “professed a desire to be left alone, and not be interrupted by visitors, as they wish time for preparation to die.” On December 15, the eve of execution, they and the other condemned men received clergymen. “Each expressed a hope of salvation in the world to come,” the American wrote. “Cook and Coppoc were loudest in their professions of a change of heart, and in the hope of Divine forgiveness.”
The two men were actually “playing possum.” For about a week, they had been chiseling a hole in the wall of their cell, using a bedstead screw and a knife they’d borrowed from a jail guard to cut a lemon. The hole was concealed by one of their beds, and the bricks they dislodged were hidden in the room’s potbellied stove. The men also succeeded in sawing off their shackles. On the night before their hanging, they crawled through the hole and onto a drain spout outside, quietly dropping to the prison yard, some twenty feet below.
Security had been eased somewhat in the days since Brown’s execution, and the weather had turned foul; just a week prior to Cook and Coppoc’s breakout, the night guard in the prison yard was withdrawn inside the jail due to the cold. But the escapees still had to scale the yard’s fifteen-foot wall before they could reach the street beyond. To do so, they climbed atop a pile of timber—it was Brown’s scaffold, which had been disassembled and stored in the yard until its intended reassembly, a few hours hence, for the hanging of his accomplices.
