Seward was traveling in Paris with John Bigelow, an editor and co-owner of the liberal antislavery newspaper the New York Post, who observed that he was “not disturbed in the least about the Harper’s Ferry incident,” or the attempt to blame him. But Seward’s enemies did not even need Forbes’s garbled and uncorroborated account to convict him; they simply cited his “irrepressible conflict” speech as proof. A Richmond newspaper posted an advertisement in which one hundred Virginians pledged “to pay five hundred dollars each ($50,000) for the head of William H. Seward, and would add a similar reward for Fred Douglass, but regarding him head and shoulders above these Traitors, will permit him to remain where he now is.”
Frederick Douglass had fled to England on the day Brown was captured. Few men had a longer or closer association, or guilt by association, with John Brown. Douglass feared “in what was then the state of the public mind I could not hope to make a jury of Virginia believe I did not go the whole length he went, or that I was not one of his supporters; and I knew that all Virginia, were I once in her clutches, would say ‘Let him be hanged.’ ” He bolted through Canada to catch a ship from Labrador to Liverpool. “I could but feel that I was going into exile, perhaps for life.” Governor Wise declared that “could he overtake that vessel he would take me from her deck at any cost.” Once in London, Douglass applied to the U.S. embassy for a passport but was refused on the grounds that he was not considered to be a citizen. He went to the French embassy and was issued a visa immediately. Douglass did not return for six months to the United States, where he was stunned “to participate in the most important and memorable presidential canvass ever witnessed in the United States, and to labor for the election of a man who in the order of things was destined to do a greater service to his country and to mankind than any man who had gone before him in the presidential office.” But in November of 1859, in flight, again a fugitive, Douglass had no premonition of when or how he might come back, or of Lincoln’s nomination.
Gerrit Smith panicked when a Herald reporter arrived at Peterboro to interview him about his involvement with Brown. “I am going to be indicted, sir, indicted!” he shouted. The Herald correspondent wrote, “I believe that Brown’s visit to his house last spring was intimately connected with the insurrection, and that it is the knowledge that at any moment, either by the discovery of papers or the confession of accomplices, his connection with the affair may become exposed, that keeps Mr. Smith in constant excitement and fear.” On November 7, Smith’s doctor diagnosed him as “quite deranged,” and he was committed to an insane asylum. When he was released after more than a month confinement, he denied to his deathbed his complicity with Brown.
Upon hearing that Brown’s letters had been discovered, Franklin Sanborn destroyed “the records of our conspiracy” in his possession. He consulted John A. Andrew, a Boston lawyer and Republican, who would in 1860 be elected governor. Andrew’s opinion was that he could be “suddenly and secretly arrested and hurried out of the protection of Massachusetts law.” That night, on October 20, Sanborn fled to Canada. After Wendell Phillips wrote him that Higginson, Howe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson concurred that there was “no risk” he returned within a week.
The day Sanborn came back Howe and Stearns arrived in exile in Canada. Howe became unnerved when Andrews advised him he could be arrested, and Howe convinced Stearns he was at jeopardy and must join him. Howe sent a denial of his knowledge of Brown’s raid to the New York Tribune. “That event was unforeseen and unexpected but by me,” he wrote. He could not “reconcile” the John Brown he knew with “his characteristic prudence, and his reluctance to shed blood, or excite servile insurrection. It is still to me a mystery and a marvel.”
Higginson was infuriated at Howe’s disavowal, writing him “it would be the extreme of baseness in as to deny complicity with Capt. Brown’s general scheme—while we were not, of course, called upon to say anything to criminate ourselves.” Sanborn wrote Higginson to disagree: “What has been prudence is prudence still and may be for years to come.” Higginson angrily replied, “Is there no such thing as honor among confederates?” Higginson publicly held meetings in Worcester to defend Brown for “the most formidable insurrection that has ever occurred,” while attempting to organize elaborate rescue missions that never got off the ground.
Theodore Parker, dying in Rome, wrote a defense of John Brown in the form of a prophecy. “For it is not to be denied that we must give up DEMOCRACY if we keep SLAVERY, or give up SLAVERY if we keep DEMOCRACY.” On the day of Brown’s execution, Parker said to his doctor, “I shall be seeing Brown soon. . . . Hold a séance and I shall let you know his answer.”
On the morning of Brown’s hanging, George Luther Stearns sat by Niagara Falls, on the Canadian side, “listening to the dirge of the cataract,” according to his son. “There he repeated the vow he had made at the time of the assault on Sumner, to devote the rest of his life and fortune to the liberation of the slave.” In January 1860, he quietly went to North Elba, New York, to Brown’s farm, to visit his grave. He endowed and managed a fund for his widow and family, paid for the private education of two of Brown’s daughters at the school in Concord where Sanborn was headmaster, and arranged for a mason to carve a tombstone for John Brown. Back in Boston, some people ostracized him, but most of the Bird Club “stood by him.”
At two in the afternoon on December 2, about two hours after John Brown was hung, the leading citizens of Concord crowded into the Town Hall for a Martyr’s Service, exalting the legend of John Brown. The first speaker was Henry David Thoreau. After the raid, when nearly all abolitionists scurried to separate themselves, he had delivered on October 30 “A Plea for John Brown,” in which he said, “Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.” Now he read poetry as a liturgy from Marvell, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. Ralph Waldo Emerson read from Senator Mason’s interview with Brown and from Brown’s last speech to the court. Emerson, who was the most famous intellectual and sought after lecturer in the country, had electrified controversy on November 8, just after Brown received his sentence, in an address he entitled “Courage,” before a packed protest meeting at the Music Hall in Boston, in which he declared Brown “the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.” Bronson Alcott led the Concord congregation in a new “Service for the Death of a Martyr,” and ending with the singing of a “Dirge” composed by Franklin Sanborn: “Today beside Potomac’s wave, Beneath Virginia’s sky, They slay the man who loved the slave, And dared for him to die.”
Virginia governor Henry A. Wise’s handling of Brown did more to revolutionize Southern opinion than any other factor. John Brown, who had contempt for politics and made a point of knowing almost nothing about it, became a malleable political element for him to twist and turn. Throughout his erratic career, beginning as a Whig, Wise “delighted in his isolation and rioted in the eccentricities of his genius,” according to John Forney. Wise had wanted to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 1856 but pledged support to Douglas, whom he betrayed for Buchanan. Raising the flag of rebellion, he proclaimed that if Frémont were elected he would march fifty thousand Virginians on Washington and proposed a preliminary secession conference. In 1858 he promised Douglas he would support him for the nomination in 1860, but betrayed him again. Despite his vehement threats and appeals to honor, he was at constant political war with the Calhoun faction of the Democratic Party in Virginia, which was known as the Chivalry and more radical than its phlegmatic leader Senator Robert M.T. Hunter. Wise decried “the extremists South,” while occasionally borrowing their rhetoric in vain efforts to usurp them. In the passion play of John Brown, the high-strung governor played a series of shifting roles from Pontius Pilate to Marc Anthony, from Hamlet to Lord High Executioner. He held Brown for trial in
a Virginia court presided over by a fair-minded judge rather than turn him over to a drumhead military tribunal. His hands were washed of guilt, at least for the moment. After personally hectoring Brown, Wise praised him for the courage of his convictions, seeming to rise above vengeance. Then he put Charles Town under martial law to surround the condemned man and prevent an illusory attack to rescue him. Wise refused to commute his death sentence on grounds of insanity, then reconsidered, only to insist Brown was sane. “I therefore say to you firmly that I have precisely the nerve enough to let him be executed,” Wise declared. The Richmond Enquirer, edited by the governor’s son, O. Jennings Wise, editorialized that Brown “may be insane . . . but there are other criminals, guilty wretches, who instigated the crimes perpetrated at Harper’s Ferry. Bring these men, bring Seward, Greeley, Giddings, Hale, and Smith to the jurisdiction of Virginia, and Brown and his deluded victims in the Charlestown jail may hope for pardon.” Three days after Brown’s execution, Wise told the Virginia legislature, “If these men were monomaniacs, then are a large portion of the people of many of the states monomaniacs.” His tribute to Brown tainted the whole North. It fit with the logic that Brown, who was his own party, was the representative man of all Republicans. This was a campaign theme. Wise was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, hoping to be the latest dark horse candidate. Brown was his horse. Wise also called upon the legislature to impose greater repression on slaves in supposed fear they might be inspired by Brown to rebel. “The most stringent laws are required against all secret and nightly association of negroes, bond or free,” he said. That, too, was part of his campaign.
Edmund Ruffin, the Virginia fire-eater, co-founder of the recently formed secessionist League of United Southerners, who had come to Charles Town to join the ranks of the VMI cadets in order to witness the hanging, was an acidulous observer of Wise’s antics. “Before the Harper’s Ferry affair,” he wrote, “he had but little support in Virginia (and none elsewhere) for the presidency, which he was seeking so boldly and shamelessly. But his conduct in and since the affair, though very blameable for indiscretion, has given him more popularity than all he ever acquired for his real worth and ability, or his praiseworthy public services.” Ruffin viewed Wise’s belligerence as pantomime; Brown’s authentic militancy, however, thrilled him. Stuart’s soldiers gave him a batch of Brown’s pikes to whose wooden handles Ruffin attached a label: “Samples of the favors designed for us by our Northern Brethren.” He brought one to Washington to show to Southern senators and shipped others to every Southern governor. He beat the drum for a reopening of the slave trade and boycott of Northern goods.
Wise’s handling of the Brown incident dismayed the conservative Virginia Chivalry faction. James Seddon, the former congressman (later Confederate secretary of war), wrote Senator Hunter on December 26 that “the train of events and the course of public conduct and opinion upon them, especially in Va have been injudiciously and alarmingly mismanaged and misdirected, and I hold the unsound judgment, insatiate vanity and selfish policy of our fussy Governor mainly responsible for them.” Seddon believed that Wise had committed a political offense in not depicting Brown and his band as “the mad folly of a few deluded cranks branded fanatics” rather than “elevating them to political offenders or making them representatives and champions of Northern Sentiment.” Instead, “our Honorable Governor, seduced by the passion of oratorical display, commenced by a picturesque description of them as heroes and martyrs, and, by insisting on holding them as the chiefs of an organized conspiracy at the North, has provoked and in a measure invoked the sympathy and approbation of large masses and of established organs of public opinion at the North.” At the same time, by making “these infamous felons grand political criminals” he “roused pride and animosities of both sections against each other, has brought on a real crisis of imminent peril to both.”
The Southern reaction to Harpers Ferry went through three stages: first, shock; then, relief and triumph; and, finally, a paroxysm of paranoia, some spontaneous and some cynical. Relief that Brown was so swiftly defeated gave way to exhilaration that the slaves did not rise up. Harpers Ferry was hailed as vindication of slavery. “I take pride in repeating,” said Senator Mason, “that the State of Virginia was saved from insurrection among her slaves only by the loyalty of her slaves. That those fields do not now present a scene of incendiarism and blood is owing only to the loyalty of the slaves upon the soil of Virginia.” Upon further reflection, Mason decided that Harpers Ferry implicated the entire Republican Party. “John Brown’s invasion was condemned [in the North] only because it failed,” he said. “But in view of the sympathy for him in the North and the persistent efforts of the sectional party there to interfere with the rights of the South, it was not at all strange that the Southern States should deem it proper to arm themselves and prepare for any contingency that might arise.”
Brown’s sanctification by some abolitionists, despite the nearly universal condemnation of his action by Republicans, was received as an insult to Southern honor. John S. Wise, the governor’s son, wrote, “When it was learned that, in many parts of the North, churches held services of humiliation and prayer; that bells were tolled; that minute-guns were fired; that Brown was glorified as a saint; that even in the legislature of Massachusetts, eight out of nineteen senators had voted to adjourn at the time of his execution; that Christian ministers had been parties to his schemes of assassination and robbery; that women had canonized the bloodthirsty old lunatic as ‘St. John the Just’; that philanthropists had pronounced him ‘most truly Christian’; that Northern poets like Whittier and Emerson and Longfellow were writing panegyrics upon him; that Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison approved his life, and counted him a martyr,—then Virginians began to feel that an ‘irrepressible conflict’ was indeed upon them.”
The logic of disunion and the images down to the “bells” precisely echoed those of Christopher G. Memminger, South Carolina’s commissioner sent to organize a secession conference of Southern states. “Harper’s Ferry is the truthful illustration of the first act of the drama to be performed on a Southern theatre,” stated the resolution of the South Carolina legislature that established his office, which also predicted inexorable secession, “The election of a black Republican President will settle the question of our safety in the Union.” Memminger, a dignified former state legislator and financier, traveled to Richmond to present his case to the General Assembly on January 27, 1860. “Every village bell,” he said, “which tolled its solemn note at the execution of Brown, proclaims to the South the approbation of that village of insurrection and servile war, and the ease with which some of the confederates escaped to Canada proves that much of the population around are willing to abet the actors in these incendiary attempts.” Brown’s singular act was construed as the will of the North. “The Harper’s Ferry invasion with the developments following it, and the now existing condition of the country, prove that the North and the South are standing in hostile array—the one with an absolute majority, sustaining those who meditate our destruction and refusing to us any concession or guaranty, and the other baffled in every attempt at compromise or security. . . . Can any one mistake the roaring of the storm at Washington? Has the column of the Republican party there shown any sign of wavering?” The Virginia legislature rejected Memminger’s appeal, but the first secession commissioner was laying the groundwork. The governors of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama began regular communications on plans for a Southern Confederacy. (Memminger would become the first Confederate secretary of the treasury.)
A great fear swept the South. State after state passed more draconian black codes. Slave patrols and lynching increased. Random Northerners—businessmen, salesmen, and visitors—were physically assaulted, tarred and feathered, whipped, and threatened by mobs. Local vigilance committees warned Northerners to leave. The Montgomery, Alabama, Mail newspaper suggested that Northern peddlers should be assumed to be John
Browns in disguise, arrested and hung. Booksellers and teachers with suspect Yankee accents were driven out. The biracial experimental Berea School in Kentucky established by Cassius M. Clay and run by the minister John G. Fee was ordered by a county committee to shut down or else Fee would be killed. Boycotts of Northern goods were launched. Blacklists of businesses doing business with Northern firms were published. Local groups demanded payment to pronounce Northern businesses clean of abolitionism. “Let Virginia call home her sons!” proclaimed Governor Wise. And 259 medical students from schools in Philadelphia returned home on December 20 to cheering crowds, bands, and a banquet addressed by Wise in Richmond. Militia units across the South, inspired by the spectacle of the soldiers amassed around John Brown in his prison, attracted volunteers and regularly drilled. The three states that responded positively to Commissioner Memminger’s circuit riding for secession appropriated large sums for their militias: South Carolina, $100,000; Mississippi, $150,000; Alabama, $200,000. Governor William Gist of South Carolina privately wrote to the state’s congressional delegation, “If . . . you upon consultation decide to make the issue of force in Washington, write or telegraph me, and I will have a regiment in or near Washington in the shortest possible time.”
On December 5, the Monday following the Friday on which John Brown was hanged, the 36th Congress convened. The Democrats controlled the Senate, but no one had a majority in the House, where the first order of business was to elect a Speaker. Republicans held 109 seats, Democrats 101, but of these, 12 were anti-Lecompton Democrats who would not organize with the regular Democrats, 26 were Know Nothings, of which only 3 were not from the South. The one stray Whig, John Sherman of Ohio, emerged after one ballot as the Republican consensus candidate for Speaker. He had been a prosperous Whig lawyer in Cleveland aroused by the Kansas-Nebraska Act to run for the Congress. He had led the investigation and written the report on “The Troubles in Kansas.” He was also organically connected to the powerful Thomas Ewing, who had been the Whig U.S. senator from Ohio, secretary of the treasury under Harrison and Tyler, and secretary of the interior under Taylor, and most importantly the foster father of Sherman’s younger brother, William Tecumseh Sherman, taken in after the death of their father and who married Ewing’s daughter. Within the Ohio Republican Party, Congressman Sherman was not a radical like Giddings and Chase, but acknowledged as a moderate. He was now under fierce attack as the equivalent of John Brown.
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