A Disease in the Public Mind (37 page)

Colonel Lee began hiring out some of slaves who refused to labor productively at Arlington to neighboring plantations, where overseers used to obedience would make them work, or else. This created another problem—almost all Arlington's people belonged to three large families, and they
protested at seeing their relationships disrupted, even when they were told it was a temporary arrangement.

Arlington's proximity to Washington, DC, added yet another problem. Abolitionists were numerous in the capital, and they often made forays into Virginia and Maryland, pretending to be peddlers or travelers. They would talk to slaves, and if they sensed discontent they would urge them to run away. The Lee family discovered two of these activists conversing with Arlington's slaves soon after Mr. Custis's death.
⁹

These uninvited visitors would have had no trouble getting the Arlington's slaves to tell them that they were being denied their freedom. The slaves even concocted a touching story, in which the ailing Mr. Custis had summoned them to his bedside and told them they would be free when he died.

In 1859, three slaves made a dash for freedom—Wesley Norris, his sister Mary, and a cousin, George Parks. They were caught in Maryland on their way to the free state of Pennsylvania and were returned to Arlington. Lee hired them out to plantations in eastern Virginia, where a successful second escape would be difficult.

Several days later, two letters appeared in the
New York Tribune
. Both accused Colonel Lee of ordering his overseer to strip the slaves and whip them on their return to Arlington. When the overseer refused to whip the young woman, the letter writer claimed, “Mr. Lee himself administered the thirty nine lashes to her.”

Lee's only response to these stories was a letter to his son Custis: “The N.Y. Tribune has attacked me for my treatment of your grandfather's slaves. I shall not reply. He has left me an unpleasant legacy.” Generations of historians have dismissed these letters as abolitionist propaganda. But a recent Lee biographer has found evidence that convinced her they may be substantially true.

In 1866, Wesley Norris published a letter in a Baltimore newspaper, reiterating that he had been whipped. This version omitted the story of Lee personally lashing Norris's sister, Mary. Norris cited the name of the constable and other details, including how much money Colonel Lee paid the
lawman. These additional facts have convinced Lee's biographer that Norris's letter was not an abolitionist creation and the previous letters were substantially true.
¹⁰

Contradicting this conclusion is a vehement letter that Lee wrote to a friend in 1866, calling the charge slander. “There is not a word of truth in it. No servant, soldier or citizen that was ever employed by me can with truth charge me of bad treatment.”
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•      •      •

During his twenty-six months at Arlington, Colonel Lee was a harassed and unhappy man. He was both master and overseer, constantly involved in disputes with the slaves, with planting and harvesting corn and other crops, and with crucial repairs to the Arlington mansion and the slave quarters. Mrs. Lee's arthritis continued to worsen, and it was soon evident that she would be crippled for life.

In the midst of these travails the colonel received a summons to the White House, where President Buchanan ordered him to leave immediately for Harpers Ferry to put down some sort of insurrection in or near the federal arsenal there.

In his confrontation with John Brown, Colonel Lee kept his emotions under tight control, as every combat leader is trained to do. As we have seen, Lee was present when Brown was interviewed by Virginia's Governor Henry Wise and other politicians. The colonel heard the intruder's distortions of his mission and his warning that slavery was a problem that the South had better solve soon. The next day Lee supervised the transfer of Brown and his surviving men to Charlestown, Virginia, the county seat, where they would stand trial.

Lee looked through the papers that Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart had seized at Brown's headquarters on the Kennedy farm. With typical inattention to details, Brown had left behind a carpetbag containing four hundred letters, compromising his Boston backers, Gerrit Smith, and many other people. Lee decided that any conclusions about this evidence were beyond his authority and forwarded the documents to Washington, DC, without comment.

At nine o'clock on the night Lee hoped to leave Harpers Ferry, he received a message that raiders had descended from the nearby mountains and had massacred a family in Pleasant Valley, Maryland, a village about five miles away. The colonel and Lieutenant Stuart rushed there with twenty-five marines but found the town peaceful. Colonel Lee returned to the Ferry, finished his official report on Brown's capture, and left on the 1:15 a.m. train.

The report virtually dismissed John Brown and his grandiose scheme. “The result,” Lee wrote, “proves the plan was the attempt of a fanatic or a madman.” Lee was probably playing down Brown's attack, hoping to calm jittery civilians. He was much too intelligent not to recognize the significance of this murderous foray, especially since the seized letters revealed that it had been financed by wealthy northern backers.
¹²

The colonel would soon learn that Pleasant Valley's panic was spreading through Maryland, Virginia, and the rest of the South. Everywhere seldom-summoned militias were hastily ordered to start drilling. A college in Richmond organized a group of “minutemen,” invoking the heroes of 1776. One of the nation's leading Republican newspapers, the
New York Times,
was soon reporting that Virginians were “almost insane with terror as their telegraph lines hummed with exaggerated and frantic alarms.”
¹³

Anyone who said a word against slavery in the South in the weeks after John Brown's foray was threatened with expletive-thick violence. Northerners, especially New Englanders, were regarded with special hostility and suspicion. One man in Pulaski County, Virginia, was hanged from a tree until he was close to death for no apparent reason beyond his Yankee accent. The
Times
called for calm in both South and North and condemned the abolitionists as people “who do not love the slave as much as they hate the white.”
¹⁴

The
Richmond Enquirer
cited a story in the
New York Herald
, a paper it praised for “its open, fearless and powerful denunciations of the fanatics . . . of the North.” The
Herald
warned “another insurrection is in preparation, more bloody and extensive than the first.” In support of this alarm bell, the
Enquirer
quoted the abolitionist
Washington Era
, the first publisher of
Uncle
Tom's Cabin.
The paper claimed that Brown's aborted upheaval would soon be “extended to other southern states, where the black population are more numerous in proportion to the whites”—a good summary of Brown's overall plan. It would be hard to suggest more explosive words. They aroused the South's worst fear—a race war.
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Robert E. Lee's friend and Arlington neighbor, Constance Gary Harrison, had a typical southern woman's reaction to John Brown. Harpers Ferry was far away from Fairfax County. She belonged to a family that was among the first in Virginia to emancipate their slaves. “There seemed to be no especial reason to share the apprehension of an uprising by the blacks” she wrote, years later. “In the daytime it seemed impossible to associate suspicion with those familiar black or tawny faces that surrounded us . . . What subtle influence would transform them into tigers thirsting for our blood? The idea was preposterous. But when evening came again . . . rusty bolts were drawn and rusty firearms loaded . . . Peace . . . had flown from the borders of Virginia.”
¹⁶

•      •      •

In the North, abolitionists seized on the stories about the South's panic and claimed that the much-touted courage of the slave-owning cavaliers was a myth. One of the first to speak out was the British-born journalist, James Redpath, an early booster of John Brown. In the
Boston Atlas
, he declared that Brown had first exposed the South's spinelessness in Kansas. Harpers Ferry demonstrated that the typical slave owner was “only a cowardly braggart, after all.” Proof was the “daily accounts” of the South's “shrinking and quaking.”

A posse of policemen, Redpath sneered, should have been able to capture or kill Brown and his men in ten minutes. Instead, “fifteen states had trembled for fifteen days” and “they are not done quaking yet. I am very much afraid
diapers
will be needed before the trial of Old Brown shall be finished.” All in all, Redpath concluded, “As a demonstration of the South's cowardice John Brown's exploit is a brilliant success.”
¹⁷

Again, it would be difficult to write anything that was more likely to arouse southern men to fury. Redpath was already hard at work on a biography of
Brown, full of the same insults to Southerners, which would be a best seller in 1860.

William Lloyd Garrison called Brown's raid “misguided, wild and apparently insane.” But it was “well intended.” While the father of abolitionism remained opposed to “war and bloodshed even in the best of causes,” he nonetheless hoped that no one “who glories in the Revolutionary struggle of 1776 denies the right of the slaves to imitate the example of our fathers.” As usual, Garrison blended his pacifism with hopes of violence by ignoring the bloodshed and death that permeated the Revolutionary War. His hatred of white Southerners and his indifference to the horrors of a race war remained impenetrable.
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•      •      •

Republican politicians, including Abraham Lincoln, were especially vehement in their denunciations of John Brown, showing their sensitivity to the political danger of abolitionists in their crowded tent. Presidential candidate Lincoln went out of his way to say Brown was “no Republican.” Democrats and their newspapers did their utmost to use Brown to prove that the Republicans should not be trusted with national power.

The
New York Herald
headlined the raid “
THE ABOLITION OUTBREAK IN VIRGINIA
” and said it was “the first act in the great drama of national disruption plotted by that demagogue, William H. Seward.” To substantiate this smear, editor James Gordon Bennett ran a copy of Seward's 1856 Irrepressible Conflict speech, as if he had given it yesterday. In this rancid atmosphere, it is easy to see why President Buchanan's claim that Brown exemplified a disease in the public mind had little or no impact.
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•      •      •

When Brown's trial for murder and treason began, this negative public attitude underwent a slow but ultimately momentous change. The terrorist of Harpers Ferry portrayed himself as a man inspired by God. He resisted his lawyers' attempts to have the court declare him insane. Though he had recovered from his superficial wounds, Brown claimed that he was too weak
to stand or sit. He lay on the floor on an improvised bed, an image of helpless suffering. For Brown, the trial was a stage on which he performed for the entire nation. He was achieving his wish to die and simultaneously fulfilling his lifelong hunger for fame, after so many failures.

It took the jury only forty-five minutes to find Brown guilty of treason against the state of Virginia, conspiring and advising with slaves to rebel, and murder in the first degree. Still prone on his pallet, Brown showed no emotion as he heard these words. His lawyers asked for an arrest of judgment, a formality that had no hope of success. The judge said he would rule on the motion the following day. He had to preside at the trial of one of Brown's confederates that afternoon.

The next day, Brown was brought to the courtroom when darkness was falling. This time he walked the short distance from the jail, displaying what a
New York Tribune
reporter called “considerable pain.” He sat down beside his lawyers, and the judge dismissed the arrest of judgment plea. He asked Brown if he had anything to say before he pronounced the sentence. After a moment's silence Brown rose to his feet. Overhead, glowing gas lamps gave his face what the same reporter called “an almost deathly pallor.”

I have, may it please the court, a few words to say.

     
In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, of a design on my part to free slaves. I intended certainly to have made a clean thing of that matter, as I did last winter when I went into Missouri, and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moving them through the country and finally leaving them in Canada. I designed to have done the same thing on a larger scale. This was all I intended. I never did intend murder, or treason, or destruction of property, or to excite slaves to rebellion or to make insurrection.

     
I have another objection, and that is that it is unjust that I should suffer such a penalty. Had I interfered in the manner in which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved—for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have
testified in this case—had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so called great, or on behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have for this interference, it would have been all right; every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.