by Tony Horwitz
“John Brown’s effort was peculiar,” he told leading Republicans at New York’s Cooper Institute in February, 1860. “It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed.”
Reiterating the Republican position on slavery—to oppose the institution’s spread but “to let it alone where it is”—he addressed southern fears directly. “You charge that we stir insurrections among your slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper’s Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise.”
Brown was indeed no Republican, and Lincoln no abolitionist. Though the two men shared certain traits, including a Calvinist upbringing on the frontier, Lincoln had very different views on race and emancipation. Born in the slave state of Kentucky, he believed the institution would die of its own accord, and he favored resettling freed blacks in Africa, just as Jefferson and others had proposed decades earlier.
“I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” he stated during his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas. Citing a “physical difference between the races” that made such equality impossible, he added: “I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
Such attitudes were broadly in line with the white northern mainstream and served Lincoln well in the anxious aftermath of Harpers Ferry. So did the militancy of the Republican frontrunner, Senator William Seward, of New York, who was famous for having spoken of “an irrepressible conflict” that would make the nation all slaveholding or entirely free. Southerners and their northern allies repeatedly cited this remark after Harpers Ferry. In their telling, Seward had called for an abolitionist crusade, of which Brown and his men were the inevitable vanguard.
Lincoln had many political assets, including his “Rail-Splitter” image of backwoods self-reliance. But his deft handling of the slavery issue, amid the fallout from Harpers Ferry, did much to secure his surprise, third-ballot victory over Seward at the Republican convention in May 1860. The party also wrote into its platform Lincoln’s rebuke of Brown, adopting a resolution to “denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.”
IN THE SOUTH, HOWEVER, Republicans’ pledge of noninterference with slavery fell on deaf ears. Fire-eaters, emboldened by the secessionist fever that broke out after Brown’s hanging, led a walkout at the Democratic convention when delegates refused to endorse extreme guarantees for slaveholders. In the end, the two factions nominated separate candidates, while disaffected moderates formed a third party and nominated a Tennessean who drained support from both Democratic candidates.
The Republicans, needing only to hold their northern base, ran a cautious campaign; Lincoln gave no speeches and barely left Springfield, Illinois. This made electoral sense, but it served to further isolate North from South. There was little national discussion of the brewing crisis, and almost no Republican presence below the Mason-Dixon Line, where Southerners dismissed or wildly misrepresented Lincoln’s views on slavery. All that mattered was his denunciation of the institution as a great evil, and his leadership of a “Black Republican” party that Southerners had long since caricatured as an abolitionist cabal, intent on waging a “war of extermination” against slavery everywhere.
The depth of the sectional divide became apparent that fall, when Lincoln won all but one northern state, in most cases easily. This gave him enough electoral votes to win the presidency in the crowded field, even though he received less than 40 percent of the popular vote and had almost no support in the South (in eleven states, Republican ballots weren’t even available).
Mary Chesnut, the South Carolina diarist, was on a train the day after the election when news of Lincoln’s victory swept her car. The response was electric, she wrote, with everyone agreeing a Rubicon had been crossed. The election result would reprise, on a national level, the terror in Virginia the previous fall.
“Now that the black radical Republicans have the power I suppose they will Brown us all,” one passenger cried. Chesnut added in her diary: “No doubt of it.”
SOUTH CAROLINIANS DIDN’T WAIT to have their fears confirmed. Six weeks after the election, delegates meeting in Charleston voted unanimously to repeal the state’s ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788: “The union now subsisting between South Carolina and the other States, under the name of ‘The United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.”
Six other Deep South states quickly followed South Carolina out of the Union. In formal declarations explaining their secession, the states often cited Harpers Ferry and made clear their core grievance. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” Mississippians stated. “There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union.”
In February 1861, the secessionists formed the Confederate States of America and elected Jefferson Davis as president. They also adopted a “Provisional Constitution,” outlining the laws of their breakaway government. Sixteen months earlier, Southerners had pointed to Brown’s Provisional Constitution as evidence of treason. Now they were in rebellion themselves.
Virginians, however, balked at joining the Confederacy, at least initially. This hesitation irked Henry Wise, who was eager as always to be at the forefront. As delegates in Richmond debated secession that April, the former governor secretly convened a band of conspirators, appointing himself as commander. Their mission: to seize the federal armory at Harpers Ferry before the U.S. government fortified it.
The next day, having dispatched his men, Wise returned to the secession meeting and brandished a pistol, telling delegates: “Blood will be flowing at Harper’s Ferry before night.” On April 18, six days after South Carolinians shelled Fort Sumter and exactly eighteen months after Brown’s capture, Wise’s allies took over the government works at Harpers Ferry, amid cries of treason from townspeople who wanted Virginia to stay in the Union. Delegates in Richmond voted to secede that same day and belatedly sent troops to assist in Wise’s raid. The newly Confederate state acquired thousands of federal guns and hauled the factory’s machines and tools to an armory in Richmond.
Burning of the arsenal at Harpers Ferry
Before surrendering the government works, federal guards torched the arsenal, and in June, Confederates completed the job, burning the stripped armory and rifle factory. Born with John Brown at the turn of the nineteenth century, the Harpers Ferry armory had outlived him by less than two years. One of its few surviving structures was the little brick engine house that had served as his headquarters.
The men who had led U.S. marines in the attack on the engine house, Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart, were now Confederate officers, opposing federal troops. So was Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, who had watched Brown hang. In 1862, Jackson returned to Harpers Ferry and won a battle that resulted in the largest surrender of U.S. troops in American history until World War II.
But the town itself was no longer much of a prize. Earlier that year, Union troops had retaliated against Confederate sniper fire from the town by burning the Wager House, the Gault House saloon, and other buildings from which Virginians had battled Brown and his men. The major who carried out the burning was Hector Tyndale, an abolitionist who had escorted Mary Brown when she traveled to Virginia in 1859 to bring home her husband’s remains.
THE MEMORY OF BROWN’S body also lived on, in song. Early in the war, Massachusetts troops marched to the tune of a popular hymn, improvising their own lyrics, which ran, in part:
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave …
He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord,
His sou
l is marching on!
The poet Julia Ward Howe first heard the marching song in the fall of 1861. Married to Samuel Howe of the Secret Six, she regarded Brown as a “holy and glorious” martyr and was moved to compose new lyrics. Though her version of the song made no mention of Brown, it was infused with his crusading spirit.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are
stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was to become the anthem of the Union, a righteous call to answer God’s trumpet and crush the serpent’s head. But in one respect, her lyrics—like the man she honored—were ahead of their time. In late 1861, when Howe composed the “Battle Hymn,” the Union hadn’t yet embraced the stirring line “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”
Through six months of war, Abraham Lincoln had held to his long-standing pledge of noninterference with slavery in the South. He was fighting to preserve the Union, not to free slaves. For Lincoln, this wasn’t simply a matter of principle or constitutional duty. The northern public wasn’t ready to fight for emancipation, and he needed the support of slaveholding border states such as Maryland and Kentucky, which hadn’t seceded and were crucial to the war effort.
But slaves themselves quickly upset Lincoln’s policy. They fled their owners and streamed to Union-held positions in the South. Many expressed eagerness to join the northern fight. Abolitionists urged Lincoln to free and enlist these refugees, and some officers in the field effectively did so, refusing to return them to their owners and employing the fugitives at forts and camps.
Still, Lincoln wouldn’t budge from his policy. Fugitive slaves were “contraband of war”—property seized from the enemy—and nothing more. He would not wage a war for liberation.
“Emancipation,” the president declared in December 1861, “would be equivalent to a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale.”
BUT LINCOLN WAS A self-questioning man; unlike Brown, he was willing to reconsider his views when they butted against circumstance. In 1862, as the South secured one battlefield victory after another, he reversed course, intent on doing whatever was necessary to win the war. Assailing slavery would bring the North both manpower and European support, while at the same time weakening the southern war effort. Once he decided to change his policy, Lincoln awaited an elusive northern victory to announce it, lest his shift seem an act of desperation.
Fittingly, the crucial battle occurred just seven miles from the Kennedy farm, where Brown and his men had launched their assault on slavery three years before. On September 17, 1862, after driving north across the Potomac, Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army met a massive Union force by Antietam Creek, outside the Maryland town of Sharpsburg. The clash left 23,000 dead and wounded men strewed across cornfields and sunken farm roads—the bloodiest single day of combat in American history. The roar of battle was so great that it could be heard ten miles away in Harpers Ferry.
Neither army was driven from the field. But a day after the battle, Lee led his battered army back into Virginia, ending the southern offensive. Lincoln then signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which was formally issued on January 1, 1863. As of that date, slaves in states “in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
The edict’s impact was more symbolic than real. The slaves declared free were under Confederate control, beyond the reach of the federal government. But the proclamation nonetheless marked a sea change in the war and its ultimate aims. “God bless Abraham Lincoln and give God the glory for the day of Jubilee has come,” Mary Brown wrote from North Elba six days after the proclamation.
Lincoln’s decree also stated that “the people so declared to be free” would be “received into the armed service of the United States.” Circulars were issued, one of them urging “able-bodied COLORED MEN” to “fight for the STARS AND STRIPES.” At the top, the announcement said “ALL SLAVES were made FREEMEN” by Lincoln; at the bottom appeared the original version of the “John Brown Song.”
At one point, Lincoln even looked to Brown’s attack as a tactical model. Told by Frederick Douglass that Southerners had doubtless kept news of the proclamation from their slaves, Lincoln proposed organizing “a band” of black scouts, “whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown.” They would go behind enemy lines, carrying news of emancipation and urging slaves “to come within our boundaries.”
But the advance of Union armies made this measure unnecessary. Hundreds of thousands of slaves flocked to freedom, and black enlistment boosted the Union Army and Navy by 200,000 men. Brown’s dream of arming blacks to fight for their freedom was realized not at Harpers Ferry, but in the trenches of Petersburg, Virginia, and the lowlands of South Carolina, where the first regiment of freed slaves was led by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the minister-warrior and most stalwart of the Secret Six.
“I had been an abolitionist too long, and had known and loved John Brown too well,” Higginson wrote, “not to feel a thrill of joy at last on finding myself in the position where he only wished to be.”
BY WAR’S END, BROWN’S prophecy before the gallows would also be fulfilled. And it was Lincoln, yet again, who recapitulated Brown’s vision, that the “crimes of this guilty land” could only be purged with blood. The president echoed this most eloquently in March 1865, after four years of battle and the deaths of over 600,000 men. “This mighty scourge of war,” he said, was the “woe due” the nation for slavery. If God willed that the carnage continue “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” then this was the true and righteous judgment of the Lord.
Six weeks later, the fighting was finally over and Lincoln lay dead, shot in Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth, who had watched Brown hang. Harpers Ferry and Lincoln’s assassination became bookends to the great national bloodletting over slavery. And in death, the reluctant Emancipator was joined to the abolitionist he had distanced himself from six years before. “Lincoln and John Brown are two martyrs, whose memories will live united in our bosoms,” wrote a black newspaper editor in New Orleans.
Later that year, the nation ratified the first change to the U.S. Constitution since 1804. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery; the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, ratified a few years later, extended full citizenship rights to blacks. In 1859, Americans had howled at the absurdity of Brown’s constitution, particularly its provision for blacks holding political office. A decade later, one of the signatories to Brown’s document, Isaac Shadd, joined the first wave of black officeholders in the Reconstruction South, rising to the speakership of the Mississippi House of Representatives.
ANOTHER SIGNATORY TO BROWN’S constitution was Osborne Anderson, the black printer who had survived the fighting in Harpers Ferry. He recruited black soldiers in the Civil War and died soon after it, from tuberculosis. Shortly before his death, Anderson revisited Harpers Ferry with friends, “for the purpose of pointing out to them the field of their maneuvres under Capt. Brown.”
Three other men who escaped capture in 1859 also served in the war. Barclay Coppoc, whose brother Edwin hanged, enlisted at the war’s start and died soon after, when Confederates derailed his troop train. Charles Tidd, the Kansas veteran who had opposed Brown’s attack plan, enlisted in the summer of 1861 and died at the front six months later, from disease. Francis Meriam, the sickly Bostonian who had arrived at the Kennedy farm with much-needed money, became a captain of black troops in South Carolina. Wounded in the leg, he survived the war, only to die a few months after its end.
The last of the escapees, Brown’s partly crippled son Owen, spent the war years in the North, far from the battlefield. But Annie Brown, who had joined her father and brothers as a fifteen-year-old, wanted d
esperately to serve. “What a pity it is that I belong to the weaker sex, for if I were only a man then I could go to war,” she wrote in a letter in 1862. “I want to go and would if they would accept me.”
The next year she found a way, returning south as a teacher of freed slaves in Union-held territory in Virginia. While there, she attended a black Sunday school that had been established on the seized plantation of Henry Wise, the former governor who had been so intent on hanging her father. His now freed slaves were among those being educated at missionary schools on his property.
As for Wise himself, he had finally gotten his wish to lead Virginians in battle. Appointed a brigadier general, he rashly predicted that “Yankees would break and run” at the first sight of advancing rebels. Instead, under his incompetent and cantankerous command, Wise’s men were routed in Virginia and North Carolina—rare Confederate defeats in the East during 1861 and 1862.
At war’s end, Wise was indicted for treason along with Robert E. Lee and other Virginia rebels. Lee sought amnesty, but Wise followed Brown’s example, denying any guilt and refusing to plead with his accusers. “I could stand prouder on the gallows even,” he wrote, “than I could on any condition of servile submission.”
