by Tony Horwitz
The treason charge was eventually dropped, and Wise ultimately renounced the institution he had fought so hard to defend. “God knew that we could be torn away from our black idol of slavery only by fire and blood and the drawn sword of the destroying angel of war,” he stated in 1866, sounding very much like the man he’d hanged in 1859.
IN THE INTERVENING YEARS, Brown’s body had lain a-mouldering in North Elba, but his family was no longer with him. Mary left the struggling property behind in 1863, writing that she hoped to give her daughters “a chance to do something for themselves in a new country that they cannot have here.” She headed west, writing soon after her departure: “I very much regret that I ever spent a cent on that farm.”
The little money Mary possessed was a legacy of her husband’s hanging. Abolitionists created a John Brown Fund to support the family, with donations coming from as far afield as Haiti. Mary received several thousand dollars, and when she and four children reached northern California in 1864, neighbors raised additional money to help her buy land and build a cottage.
She lived in California until her death twenty years later, in relative comfort and peace. But there was one gruesome postscript to her loss at Harpers Ferry. In 1882, when Mary was visiting Chicago, an Indiana doctor offered to return the remains of her son Watson, who had been killed near the engine house and carried off for dissection and display at the medical school in Winchester. The doctor had served in Virginia during the war and recovered Watson’s remains before Union troops burned the medical school to the ground in 1862.
“Four of his finger joints on one hand and all the toes of one foot had already been cut off and carried away by relic seekers,” a reporter wrote of Watson’s partly preserved body, consisting of the skeleton, nerves, and blood vessels. The body had a bullet hole corresponding to Watson’s fatal belly wound. The family collected the remains for belated burial in North Elba, beside Brown and another son, Frederick, killed in Kansas.
Owen Brown, the last of the twenty-one men who had joined his father at the Kennedy farm, died in 1889, having spent his final years as a hermit on a mountainside in California. But Annie Brown lived on, well into the twentieth century, outlasting her many siblings and everyone else directly connected to the 1859 plot.
“She was born to suffer and yet endure,” John Brown, Jr., had written six months after Harpers Ferry, when Annie was still afflicted with “bone-crushing sorrow,” not only for her father and brothers but for an unnamed sweetheart who, her siblings believed, was among those killed in the attack.
In 1864, Annie moved with her mother to California, where she continued to teach black children and married an older man. For a short time she seemed “wonderfully happy,” a friend wrote. But her husband became alcoholic, abusive, and unable to work, leaving Annie struggling to support their eight children. “He just sits and smokes and growls and snarls nearly all the time,” Annie wrote Franklin Sanborn, whose school in Concord she had briefly attended. “I married the man for what I thought he was or might be, not for what he has proved to be.”
Brown’s four surviving sons in old age, Owen at lower right
Though desperately poor, in debt, and often ill herself, Annie did not want to become “an object of charity” to admirers of the Brown family. She sold the few relics and letters of value she possessed, “to buy bread and clothing for my children,” and she told her offspring little about her father or Harpers Ferry. Annie “wished to live their lives with them—not the old, sad one that was gone,” she said, and so she “shut the past away.”
But as her children grew up and her siblings died, Annie began to talk and write freely about the ten weeks she had spent as housekeeper and “watchdog” for Brown’s band. That long-ago summer, her sixteenth, was the most stirring passage of Annie’s difficult life, and she recalled every detail, right down to her insect bites and the exact layout of the log house. Mostly, though, she spoke of the men she had concealed, vividly describing their appearance, idiosyncrasies, favorite songs, and fears of what lay ahead.
“People who never did a heroic deed themselves are very particular as to how heroes behave,” she wrote. Having “waited upon them, watched and cared for them,” she knew Brown’s men as “neither saints nor the worst of sinners.” They were high-spirited, vulnerable young idealists, as she had been herself.
Part of Annie had died with them in 1859, despite the fame and assistance accorded her family. Though abolitionists paid for her to attend fine schools and board with families like the Alcotts, “I used to lock myself in my room and lay and roll on the floor, in the agony of a tearless grief for hours at a time,” she wrote. “The honor and glory that some saw in the work, did not fill the aching void that was left in my heart, losing so many loved ones.”
Annie carried that grief into widowhood and old age. She was “easily upset,” a niece wrote of her aged aunt’s visits. “She always called herself ‘The Last Survivor.’” In 1926 there appeared a small dispatch from the Associated Press: “Death Comes to Last Brown of Harper’s Ferry.” At the age of eighty-two, Annie had died after a serious fall. Newspapers reported, incorrectly, that she had witnessed her father’s execution. But the coroner’s certificate revealed a curious detail. Sixty-seven years after Brown’s hanging, his loyal daughter had died of a broken neck.
THE TOWN ANNIE’S FATHER had attacked in 1859 never fully recovered from the trauma, either. As Brown had discovered, Harpers Ferry was easy to seize and hard to hold. It changed hands a dozen times in the Civil War, with passing armies repeatedly burning the river bridges and bombarding the town from surrounding hills. “The larger portion of the houses all lie in ruins and the entire place is not actually worth $10,” a Massachusetts soldier wrote his mother in 1863.
The Harpers Ferry that emerged from the ruins of war was an ironic counterpoint to the antebellum community that had fought Brown in 1859. Jefferson County wasn’t even part of Virginia anymore. It belonged to West Virginia, a new state carved out of the old during the Civil War, in support of the Union and its cause. Former slaves poured into the ravaged town, and by war’s end, it was a refugee camp, with tents filling the grounds of the burned armory.
A few years earlier, it had been a crime to teach slaves how to read and write. Now, a black school arose, founded by northern Baptists, and in 1867 it became Storer College, an institution mainly devoted to training black teachers. Its first dormitory was called Lincoln Hall.
The armory engine house in the late nineteenth century
For many years, another building stood on the Storer campus: the brick engine house where Brown made his last stand. In the decades after his attack, it was chipped at by souvenir hunters, painted with the words “John Brown’s Fort,” and disassembled for exhibit at the World’s Fair in Chicago before finally returning to Harpers Ferry.
White townspeople who trickled back after the Civil War, including families whose members had fought against Brown, valued the fort as a tourist attraction for their beleaguered community. One early visitor was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who honeymooned in Harpers Ferry following his second marriage in 1879 and found the town “shabby and ruined.” Two years later, another prominent backer of Brown’s arrived: Frederick Douglass, invited to speak at the fourteenth anniversary of Storer College.
The former slave and militant abolitionist found himself “upon the very soil” Brown “had stained with blood,” he wrote, “and among the very people he had startled and outraged and who a few years ago would have hanged me in open daylight to the first tree.” Sitting just behind Douglass on the speaker’s platform was Andrew Hunter, whose prosecution of Brown and his men had sent them to the gallows in nearby Charlestown.
Douglass nonetheless proceeded to give the most rousing celebration of Brown ever delivered. “His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine—it was as the burning sun to my taper light,” Douglass said. “I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”
Douglass’s speech was given added force by his acknowledgment of the doubts he had harbored about Brown. Describing their first meeting in Springfield, he confessed to having felt “a little disappointed at the appearance of this man’s house,” a barely furnished abode on the back street of a working-class district, where Douglass joined Brown’s family for a repast of potatoes, cabbage, and soup. But he had come to recognize the significance of this humble household. “In its plainness it was a truthful reflection of its inmates: no disguises, no illusions, no make-believes here, but stern truth and solid purpose.”
At first, Douglass had also been taken aback by Brown’s consuming hatred of slavery, unusual in a white man. “He saw the evil through no mist or haze,” Douglass said. “Against truth and right, legislative enactments were to his mind mere cobwebs—the pompous emptiness of human pride—the pitiful outbreathings of human nothingness.” For Brown, slavery was a state of war and must be met in kind.
This, too, Douglass had resisted. He told of their last meeting in the Chambersburg quarry, when Douglass “could see Harper’s Ferry only as a trap of steel” and refused to join Brown. He also conceded to his audience that Brown’s nighttime invasion of their town could fairly be regarded as “cold-blooded and atrocious.”
But for all that, Douglass had come “to pay a just debt long due,” to “vindicate” the man he had doubted and ultimately abandoned. The attack on Harpers Ferry was an awful price that had to be paid—“the answering back of the avenging angel to the midnight invasions of Christian slave-traders on the sleeping hamlets of Africa.” Nothing less, Douglass said, could force the nation to face its great wrong. “Slavery had so benumbed the moral sense of the nation that it never suspected the possibility of an explosion.”
Once Brown lit the fuse, less with his actions than with the moral clarity of his words, Southerners were unable to extinguish it. “They could kill him,” Douglass told his audience, “but they could not answer him.” In the war that followed, the Union’s armies had “found it necessary to do on a large scale what John Brown attempted to do on a small one.” Douglass therefore regarded Harpers Ferry, not Fort Sumter, as the true start of the nation’s great conflict. “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery.”
All this was apparent in retrospect, when war and emancipation had come to seem inevitable. But Douglass closed his speech by returning to the autumn of 1859, to remind his audience how the events of that fall had changed history.
“Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes, and compromises. When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone—the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union—and the clash of arms was at hand.” The South, no longer able to steer the nation, “drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown’s, the lost cause of the century.”
These words didn’t sit well with some whites in his audience. Andrew Hunter had been close to Governor Wise and others whom Douglass criticized in his oration. Hunter’s home had also been a casualty of the “lost cause,” burnt by northern troops on the orders of his own cousin, a Union commander. At points during the speech, Douglass later wrote, Hunter “condemned my sentiments as they were uttered.”
But the prosecutor surprised Douglass once the speech was over. Hunter shook his hand, “commended me for my address, and gave me a pressing invitation to visit Charlestown,” offering to share details about “the sayings and conduct of Captain Brown while in prison and on trial.” Hunter said he still disapproved of the attack, but admired Brown’s “manliness and courage.”
This overture was all the more astonishing for its timing. By 1881, the year of Douglass’s address, postwar Reconstruction had given way to resurgent white supremacy. Former Confederates were regaining power across the South, and many whites in Jefferson County wanted to join in this restoration of the old regime. In Harpers Ferry, Ku Klux Klansmen had harassed black students at Storer College.
But for the moment, at least, Douglass allowed himself to feel hopeful about the revolution Brown had unleashed. “The abolition of slavery has not merely emancipated the negro, but liberated the whites,” he wrote of his warm reception at Harpers Ferry.
DOUGLASS’S OPTIMISM WOULD PROVE misplaced. As Jim Crow laws took firm hold in the 1880s and 1890s, Harpers Ferry itself became a symbol and shrine in the struggle for civil rights. In 1906, black activists walked barefoot at dawn to the engine house, carrying candles. “Here on the scene of John Brown’s martyrdom,” they resolved, “we reconsecrate ourselves, our honor, our property to the final emancipation of the race which John Brown died to make free.”
Those who had died with Brown also received belated recognition. On the fortieth anniversary of Harpers Ferry, the eight insurgents whose bodies had been dumped in unmarked pits by the Shenandoah were disinterred. Their remains, along with those of Aaron Stevens and Albert Hazlett, removed from their graves in New Jersey, were then reburied in North Elba, beside those of John and Watson Brown.
These reunited raiders included two black men whose families had carried on their struggle for freedom and dignity. One of them was Dangerfield Newby, who had hoped to rescue his wife and children from slavery in Virginia. Newby’s brother joined the Union Army and died in the long battle for Petersburg, which preceded Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Newby’s widow, Harriett, who had been sold south to Louisiana with some of their children, found her way at war’s end to a Freedmen’s Bureau camp. She married a fellow refugee from Virginia and they returned to their home state, as free people. Harriett raised a large family—including most of the children she’d had by Dangerfield—while her husband farmed and acquired land, becoming a substantial property holder.
The second black man interred at North Elba was Lewis Leary, the harness maker from Ohio who had been shot in the Shenandoah. His young widow, Mary, received a few hundred dollars from a local John Brown Fund and married an ardent Brown supporter, Charles Langston. They moved to Kansas, and in old age Mary raised a grandson, wrapping him in a bullet-riddled shawl she said her first husband had worn during the fight at Harpers Ferry.
“My grandmother,” the grandson later recalled, “held me on her lap and told me long, beautiful stories about people who wanted to make the Negroes free.” She also took the youngster to Osawatomie, site of Brown’s battle during the days of Bleeding Kansas.
That boy was Langston Hughes, who grew up to become a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance and one of the most celebrated poets of the twentieth century. Hughes kept his grandmother’s shawl and never forgot her stories of Lewis Leary, “who went off to die with John Brown.” In 1931, he wrote a poem addressed to black Americans; “October the Sixteenth” took its title from the date in 1859 when the raiders embarked on their night march from the Kennedy farm.
Perhaps
You will remember
John Brown.
John Brown
Who took his gun,
Took twenty-one companions,
White and black,
Went to shoot your way to freedom
Where two rivers meet
And the hills of the
North
And the hills of the
South
Look slow at one another—
And died
For your sake.
Now that you are
Many years free,
And the echo of the Civil War
Has passed away,
And Brown himself
Has long been tried at law,
Hanged by the neck,
And buried in the ground—
Since Harpers Ferry
Is alive with ghosts today,
Immortal raiders
Come again to town—
Perhaps,
You will recall
; John Brown.
APPENDIX
The Toll from the Raid on Harpers Ferry
Raiders killed in action:
Dangerfield Newby, shot in the street, Oct. 17, 1859
William Leeman, shot in Potomac River, Oct. 17, 1859
Watson Brown, shot in the street, Oct. 17, 1859
John Kagi, shot in Shenandoah River, Oct. 17, 1859
Lewis Leary, shot in Shenandoah River, Oct. 17, 1859
William Thompson, shot on Potomac bridge, Oct. 17, 1859
Steward Taylor, shot in engine house, Oct. 17, 1859
Oliver Brown, shot in engine house, Oct. 17, 1859
Jeremiah Anderson, bayoneted in engine house, Oct. 18, 1859
Dauphin Thompson, bayoneted in engine house, Oct. 18, 1859
Raiders captured:
John Brown, wounded in engine house, hanged Dec. 2, 1859
Shields Green, captured in engine house, hanged Dec. 16, 1859
Edwin Coppoc, captured in engine house, hanged Dec. 16, 1859
John Copeland, captured in Shenandoah River, hanged Dec. 16, 1859
John Cook, captured in Pennsylvania, hanged Dec. 16, 1859
Aaron Stevens, wounded in street, hanged March 16, 1860
Albert Hazlett, captured in Pennsylvania, hanged March 16, 1860
Raiders escaped:
Barclay Coppoc, died in Civil War, 1861
Charles Tidd, died in Civil War, 1862
Francis Meriam, wounded in Civil War, died 1865
Osborne Anderson, recruiter in Civil War, died 1872
Owen Brown, died 1889
Others:
Jim, slave who joined raiders, drowned near rifle works, Oct. 17, 1859
