All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  Brown began with a simple lie to cover up for the Secret Six. “Can you tell us who furnished money for your expedition?” asked Mason. “I furnished most of it myself; I cannot implicate others,” Brown replied. Then he turned the question to reproach himself for his failure, displaying his honesty. “It is by my own folly that I have been taken. I could easily have saved myself from it, had I exercised my own better judgment rather than yielded to my feelings.” Mason badgered him. “If you would tell us who sent you here,—who provided the means,—that would be information of some value.” “I will answer freely and faithfully about what concerns myself,” Brown said sternly. “I will answer anything I can with honor,—but not about others.” Thus the Puritan deflected the line of inquiry invoking the Southern code of honor. “Any questions that I can honorably answer I will,—not otherwise. So far as I am myself concerned, I have told everything truthfully. I value my word, sir.”

  “What was your object in coming?” asked Mason. “We came to free the slaves, and only that,” said Brown. “How do you justify your acts?” Mason demanded, giving Brown his opportunity to condemn him. “I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity,—I say it without wishing to be offensive,—and it would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you so far as to free those you willfully and wickedly hold in bondage. I do not say this insultingly.” “I understand that,” Mason conceded. Brown went on. “I think I did right, and that others will do right who interfere with you at any time and at all times. I hold that the Golden Rule, ‘Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you,’ applies to all who would help others to gain their liberty.”

  J.E.B. Stuart the cavalry officer charged in, misjudging the terrain he was on and failing to anticipate being outflanked. “But don’t you believe in the Bible?” he demanded. “Certainly I do,” answered the great Calvinist. “What wages did you offer?” asked Mason, changing the subject. “None,” replied Brown. Stuart wanted to return to his Bible test. “‘The wages of sin is death,’ ” he declared solemnly, quoting from the Book of Romans. “I would not have made such a remark to you if you had been a prisoner, and wounded, in my hands,” said Brown. He claimed the mount of humility and mercy, convicting Stuart of the sin of prideful cruelty. Brown was the Christ, Stuart the Roman. With that Brown defeated Stuart on the battlefield of faith.

  After brushing off Vallandigham’s petty attempts to implicate the Ohio abolitionist congressman Joshua Giddings, Brown was asked, “Do you consider yourself an instrument in the hands of Providence?” “I do,” he said. Giving him a further opening, he was asked with incredulity, “Upon what principle do you justify your acts?” “Upon the Golden Rule,” he declared. “I pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them: that is why I am here; not to gratify any personal animosity, revenge, or vindictive spirit. It is my sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged, that are as good as you and as precious in the sight of God.” He added, “I don’t think the people of the slave States will ever consider the subject of slavery in its true light till some other argument is resorted to than moral suasion.”

  Brown refused to answer question after question that sought to get him to implicate others. “I do not wish to annoy you,” said the newspaper reporter, “but if you have anything further you would like to say, I will report it.” Brown the prophet replied, “I have nothing to say, only that I claim to be here in carrying out a measure I believe perfectly justifiable, and not to act the part of an incendiary or ruffian, but to aid those suffering great wrong. I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better—all you people at the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question, that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared the better. You may dispose of me very easily,—I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled,—this negro question I mean; the end of that is not yet.”

  Governor Wise baited him. “Brown, suppose you had every nigger in the United States, what would you do with them?” “Set them free,” he said simply. The questioner became annoyed. “Your intention was to carry them off and free them?” “Not at all.” “To set them free would sacrifice the life of every man in this community.” “I do not think so.” Then the questioner became accusatory. “I know it. I think you are fanatical.” Brown flung back the charge. “And I think you are fanatical. ‘Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad,’ and you are mad.” With that, Brown claimed the high ground of reason.

  “Mr. Brown,” said Governor Wise, “the silver of your hair is reddened by the blood of crime, and you should eschew these hard words and think upon eternity. You are suffering from wounds, perhaps fatal; and should you escape death from these causes, you must submit to a trial which may involve death. Your confessions justify the presumption that you will be found guilty; and even now you are committing a felony under the laws of Virginia, by uttering sentiments like these. It is better you should turn your attention to your eternal future than be dealing in denunciations which can only injure you.”

  “Governor,” Brown answered, “I have from all appearances not more than fifteen or twenty years the start of you in the journey to that eternity of which you kindly warn me; and whether my time here shall be fifteen months, or fifteen days, or fifteen hours, I am equally prepared to go. There is an eternity behind and an eternity before; and this little speck in the center, however long, is but comparatively a minute. The difference between your tenure and mine is trifling, and I therefore tell you to be prepared. I am prepared. You all have a heavy responsibility, and it behooves you to prepare more than it does me.”

  Brown had lost his battle, but within hours of the smoke settling he had already won the aftermath. No matter how many men they massed against him now, his captors were overmatched. “They are mistaken who take Brown to be a madman,” said Wise after the interview. “He is a bundle of the best nerves I ever saw; cut and thrust and bleeding, and in bonds. He is a man of clear head, of courage, fortitude, and simple ingenuousness. He is cool, collected, and indomitable, and it is but just to him to say that he was humane to his prisoners, and he inspired me with great trust in his integrity as a man of truth. He is a fanatic, vain and garrulous, but firm, truthful, and intelligent.”

  The nation’s press descended on the small Charles Town courtroom packed with hundreds of spectators where Brown’s trial began on October 25. The entire front page of the New York Times, among other newspapers, was given over to transcripts and reports of “The Trial of the Insurgents.” The New York Herald stated it was “in point of national importance” the most prominent trial in a half century. More than one thousand militiamen from around the state patrolled the town. Brown lay on a cot in the middle of the courtroom rising unsteadily to make his first objection. “Virginians, I did not ask for any quarter at the time I was taken. I did not ask to have my life spared. The Governor of the State of Virginia tendered me his assurance that I should have a fair trial; but, under no circumstances whatever will I be able to have a fair trial. If you seek my blood, you can have it at any moment, without this mockery of a trial.” The somber judge, Richard Parker, a former Democratic congressman from an old Virginia family, determined to preside over a fair trial, assigned him two competent attorneys already prepared to take his case. A young Boston lawyer, George H. Hoyt, would soon join the defense table. After a jury of twelve men was empaneled, Brown was arraigned on charges of treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, incitement of slave insurrection, and murder—“evil and traitorous.” One of Brown’s lawyers raised an insanity defense, but if Brown were to be declared insane, he could not be executed and his design for martyrdom would be foiled. He stood to object, called it “miserable artifice and pretext . . . and if I am insane, of course I should think I know more than all the rest of the world. But I do not think so. I am perfectly unconscious of insanity.” And so that last straw was discarded. Brown explained in a letter to his b
rother on November 12 his motive “that I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for other purpose.” Brown denounced his local attorneys and they quit. His case was left to Hoyt, who was joined by two prominent Northern attorneys quietly arranged by Montgomery Blair. Brown was intent that his lawyers elicit from his former hostages the testimony that he had not harmed them. He believed this would deflect the charges by showing he was a humanitarian. The jury returned a verdict of guilty after forty-five minutes of deliberation. “Not the slightest sound was heard in the vast crowd, as this verdict was returned and read,” reported the New York Herald, “not the slightest expression of elation or triumph was uttered from the hundreds present. . . . Nor was this strange silence interrupted during the whole of the time occupied by the forms of the court.”

  Judge Parker asked Brown if he had anything to say before sentencing. He stood erect from his bed on the floor. “I deny everything,” he said. His claim of blamelessness was false and argumentative. But in the shadow of his cross he put on the crown of thorns. “This Court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, I did no wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.” Parker sentenced him to death, and he was on his way to his Calvary.

  Over the next month John Brown in his cell was at the serene center of the universe. He wrote a series of letters, in the plain style of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, touching letters to his wife and children, inspiring and courageous ones to his friends, spiritual ones disclaiming any motive of revenge, and unapologetic ones for following God’s voice to free the slaves. Every day he met with visitors including proslavery men. “I endeavor to improve them faithfully, plainly, and kindly,” he wrote. He found strength in his coming execution. “I think I feel as happy as Paul did when he lay in prison,” he wrote. “He knew if they killed him, it would greatly advance the cause of Christ; that was the reason he rejoiced so. On that same ground ‘I do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice.’ Let them hang me; I forgive them, and may God forgive them, for they know not what they do. I have no regret for the transaction for which I am condemned. I went against the laws of men, it is true, but ‘whether it be right to obey God or men, judge ye.’ ” By the day of his execution he had been transfigured.

  The Execution of John Brown, drawing by David Hunter Strother

  On December 2, in the bright light of the late morning, Brown was taken from the jail wearing red carpet slippers, a blue shirt, a vest, and his still blood-stained black suit with cuts in it, his battle raiment now his shroud for crucifixion. He sat in the back of the wagon with his jailor atop his black walnut coffin for the ride through the streets to a field when his gallows had been constructed. “This is a beautiful country,” Brown said gazing into the distance at the Blue Ridge Mountains where he thought he would be hiding with his slave army. The wagon drove through ranks of troops standing at attention in a hollow square. “I am sorry citizens have been kept out,” he said.

  “Brown had his arms tied behind him, and ascended the scaffold with apparent cheerfulness,” wrote an eyewitness, Major Thomas Jackson (later known as “Stonewall”), professor of natural philosophy at the Virginia Military Institute, in command of the VMI cadets at the execution. “After reaching the top of the platform, he shook hands with several who were standing around him. The sheriff placed the rope around his neck, then threw a white cap over his head and asked him if he wished a signal when all should be ready—to which he replied that it made no difference, provided he was not kept waiting too long.” “You must lead me—I cannot see,” said Brown when he was asked to step on the trapdoor. Ten minutes after the trapdoor was opened the rope was cut. “With the fall his arms below the elbow flew up, hands clenched, and his arms gradually fell by spasmodic motions—there was very little motion of his person for several minutes, after which the wind blew his lifeless body to and fro.”

  “So perish all such enemies of Virginia!” shouted Colonel J.T.L. Preston of VMI. “All such enemies of the Union! All foes of the human race!”

  Standing about thirty feet from the scaffold in the line of the Richmond Greys, one militiaman felt faint at the sight of Brown’s twisting body. “I would like a good, stiff drink of whiskey,” said John Wilkes Booth. He left the scene with the mementos of a piece of the poplar wooden box that had contained Brown’s coffin and one of Brown’s pikes inscribed “Major Washington to J. Wilkes Booth,” a gift from B.B. Washington, great-great-nephew of George Washington, of the Continental Morgan Guard of Winchester. “I may say I helped to hang John Brown,” Booth wrote a year later. But he never spoke of him except in a tone of awe. “John Brown was a man inspired, the grandest character of this century!” The lesson he took away was that “open force is holier than hidden craft, the Lion is more noble than the fox.”

  John Brown’s last note, December 2, 1859, the day of his execution

  As John Brown left his jail cell on his way to his execution he handed one of his guards a note: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  WITCH HUNT

  John Brown’s initial legacy was contained in a carpetbag he left in the attic of the farmhouse he used as his base camp. It was filled with hundreds of letters implicating everyone with whom he communicated. Soldiers under Lieutenant Stuart’s command discovered the cache of incriminating and seemingly incriminating documents on the afternoon after Brown’s capture. “Had he succeeded, therefore, in gaining the hills and beginning his guerrilla raids, his enemy would have been in full possession of his purposes and of the names of his confederates in the North,” wrote Brown’s biographer, Oswald Garrison Villard. The soldiers also found most of the pikes with which he intended to arm slaves and distributed them to militiamen, townspeople, and hangers-on as souvenirs. Brown’s letters were shared with the reporter from the New York Herald on the scene and soon published in the newspaper along with those letters obtained for a price from the erstwhile soldier of fortune and insurgency expert Hugh Forbes. “I never dreamed that the most terrible engine of destruction which he would carry with him in his campaign would be a carpet-bag loaded with 400 letters, to be turned against his friends,” Forbes wrote in a note to James Gordon Bennett, editor of the Herald, which was prominently featured to highlight an editorial entitled, “The Exposure of the Nigger-Worshipping Insurrectionists.” “After Brown and his unfortunate comrades shall have been disposed of, the turn of Seward and the other republican Senators and members of Congress will come,” it said. “If they be not impeached and condemned, then neither should a hair of John Brown’s head suffer, for he is really less guilty than they.”

  Hinton Rowan Helper

  Seward was on a Grand Tour of Europe, not to return until the year’s end, but he immediately became the prime target. He was, after all, the prohibitive front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. John Brown, who believed he was God-sent, was a godsend to Democrats. He appeared like a lightning bolt to strike down Seward. On October 19, the New York Herald published the first news about John Brown’s raid alongside “Wm. H. Seward’s Brutal and Blood Manifesto,” his “irrepressible conflict�
� speech reproduced in its entirety. Brown’s “treason, robbery and murder” was claimed to have been “plotted by that demagogue, Wm. H. Seward.” On October 27, Hugh Forbes claimed in the Herald he had confided to Seward “the whole matter in all its bearings.” “What is Treason?—Who are Traitors?” ran the headline on an editorial two days later. “Let the Senate take Seward and [Henry] Wilson, and every other one of the traitors in its bosom, in hand, and either impeach them or expel them from the chamber. . . . Let justice be done on all the traitors concerned in Brown’s treason.”

  On November 18, the conservative Wall Street Democrats with financial ties to the Southern cotton trade, led principally by S.L.M. Barlow, the lawyer and financier instrumental in the nomination of Buchanan, usually operating politically as the Fifth Avenue Hotel Committee held a meeting under the name of an organization they called the New York Democratic Vigilant Association, a name calculated to mock the abolitionist New York Vigilance Committee, which served as the public face of the Underground Railroad. This Democratic Vigilant Committee was the Fifth Avenue Hotel Committee in another guise. It raised money to “make known to our Southern brethren our condemnation of the instigators of the movement [behind Harpers Ferry].” The group published a pamphlet called Rise and Progress of the Bloody Outbreak at Harper’s Ferry, featuring on the title page excerpts from Seward’s “irrepressible conflict” speech. The committee cited Hugh Forbes’s letters to “prove that republican Senators of the United States, were made cognizant of the invasion intended, but concealed the secret within their own breasts, and refrained from divulging it to the public authorities.” “John Brown has only practiced what William H. Seward preaches,” the committee concluded.