Bound for Canaan (60 page)

 

A
round ten-thirty on the dank night of Sunday, September 17, nineteen shadowy figures led by the man some now called Old Osawatomie slipped down from the brooding bluffs of Maryland overlooking the Potomac River, and with the brisk steps of men who knew that whatever the outcome, they were about to make history, they entered the black tunnel of the covered railroad bridge that spanned the river to Harpers Ferry. Each carried a Sharpes rifle, a brace of pistols, and a knife sheathed at his waist. Twelve of the men were white, five black. Almost all were in their twenties. Some were naive idealists, others veterans of the guerrilla war in Kansas. Among them were Brown's youngest sons Watson and Oliver, two neighbors from North Elba, a Canadian spiritualist, a black graduate of Oberlin College, a pair of Quakers who had abandoned their pacifist beliefs to follow Brown from Iowa, a freed slave hoping to liberate his wife and children, and boys from Maine, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. Three more members of Brown's twenty-two-man “army” remained behind in Maryland to guard the weapons with which he planned to arm battalions of rebellious slaves.

Of all the men on the bridge, Shields Green knew the dehumanizing reality of slavery best, for he had lived it all his life. Millions of other enslaved men and women symbolically walked with him that night: those who prayed hopelessly for freedom that never came, as well as all those who had struck out for Canaan and failed, and were dragged back to auction blocks, or who died unmourned on wilderness trails, or from the gunshots of their pursuers. Less than two years earlier, the uneducated Green had escaped from Charleston, South Carolina, and made his way to the home of Frederick Douglass, in Rochester. A dark-skinned man with sharp, chiseled features and a goatee, Green looked older than his twenty-three years. He had traveled south with Douglass to a secret meeting at a rock quarry on the Conecochequi River, near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where Brown assembled his men before the attack. Douglass bluntly told Brown that his plan was hopeless, that he was “going into a steel trap, and that he would not get out alive.” Brown responded that the time for
peaceful persuasion was long past, and that the nation's complacency needed to be shattered. After two days of discussion, Brown, by no one's account a man given to physical warmth, put his arms around Douglass, and pleaded, “Come with me, Douglass. I will defend you with my life.” Douglass, choosing survival over his old friend's assurances, pulled himself away, and bade Brown farewell. He asked Shields Green what he planned to do. Green knew that he could simply return to Rochester. A life of freedom and safety lay before him. He had heard Douglass's warnings. Finally he said, “I b'leve I'll go wid de ole man.”

As Brown's men came off the bridge into Harpers Ferry, he dispatched parties to seize the musket factory, the armory, and the fire-engine house, taking several nonplussed watchmen prisoner in the process. Within minutes, the raiders were in control of thousands of rifles and huge stocks of powder and ball. Guards were posted at the bridges over the Potomac and the Shenandoah. Telegraph lines were cut. The railroad station was seized, and a Baltimore-bound express train halted. It was at the station that the raid's first casualty occurred. The baggage master, an enslaved black man named Hayward Shepherd, challenged Brown's men and was shot dead in the dark. Once the key locations had been secured, Brown sent a detachment to arrest several of the area's prominent slave owners as hostages, including Colonel Lewis W. Washington, the great-grandnephew of the first president.

Brown was audacious and extremely brave, but he had seduced himself with his sense of destiny, and he was no strategist. He expected to have fifteen hundred men under his command by midday Monday, and later said that he believed that he would eventually command between two thousand and five thousand. “When I strike, the bees will swarm,” he had assured Douglass. His first mistake was to release the Baltimore train, allowing word of the raid to spread quickly up and down the line, and then by telegraph across the nation. The earliest reports were hysterical, claiming that Harpers Ferry had been taken over by a company of first fifty, then one hundred and fifty, then two hundred white “insurrectionists” and “six hundred runaway negroes,” evoking the terrifying specter of race war. However, as Brown's band watched dawn break over the rugged ridges that enclosed Harpers Ferry like the walls of a natural amphitheater, militias as far away as Baltimore, Frederick, and Winchester were already hastening to arms. President Buchanan personally dispatched a company of
marines from Washington, under Colonel Robert E. Lee, who would one day command the armies of the Confederacy. By mid-afternoon, volunteers were pouring toward Harpers Ferry from every direction, carrying everything from shotguns and old muskets, to squirrel rifles. There was no sign at all of the thousands of slaves who Brown had convinced himself were just waiting to rally to his standard.

At about noon, the Charlestown militia made a dash across the bridge over the Shenandoah, firing shotguns and pistols as they ran, killing the first of Brown's men to die that day, forty-eight-year-old Dangerfield Newby, who had been born into slavery but freed by his white father. Newby had moved North to earn money to buy freedom for his wife and six children, but had not succeeded. In Newby's pocket was found a letter from his wife. She had written: “It is said Master is in want of money. I know not what time he may sell me, and then all my bright hopes of the future are blasted, for their [
sic
] has been one bright hope to cheer me in all my troubles, that is to be with you…Come this fall without fail money or no money.”

As the number of attackers swelled, Brown's men retreated to the engine house, a formidable brick structure that was windowless on three sides and had three stout oak doors in the front. Three abolitionists, including the provisional government's “congressman,” Osborne Anderson, held the armory, and three more men the musket works, half a mile to the west. Acknowledging the precariousness of his predicament, Brown sent out William Thompson of North Elba under a flag of truce, to propose a cease-fire. But Thompson was immediately seized and dragged away to a local hotel, where he was kept under guard. As militiamen worked their way toward the rear of the engine house, Brown then sent his twenty-four-year-old son Watson and one of his best men, the powerfully built ex-cavalryman Aaron Stevens, out under a white flag, but the mob shot them down in the street. Watson, though fatally wounded, managed to drag himself back to the engine house. Stevens, who was shot four times, was taken into custody.

Brandishing a sword that had once belonged to Frederick the Great and that had been taken from Colonel Washington, Brown strode among his remaining men, urging them to stay calm and not to waste their ammunition. Loopholes had been drilled in the doors, and through them Brown's men tried to pick off attackers who came too near. One of their
shots killed the popular mayor of Harpers Ferry, Fountain Beckham. Seeking immediate revenge, a mob of townspeople pushed its way into the hotel where William Thompson was being held, dragged him outside, and cold-bloodedly shot him in the head, as he begged for his life.

Realizing that their position was untenable, the three men in the rifle works made a run for the shallow Shenandoah, firing as they ran. Two, John Kagi, the vice president of the provisional government, and a black man named Lewis Leary, were shot down in the rapids. The black Oberlin student, John Copeland, managed to reach a rock in the middle of the river, where he threw down his gun and surrendered. William Leeman, at twenty the youngest of the raiders, broke and ran from the armory, jumped into the Potomac, and swam for his life. But he was trapped on an islet, and shot. Throughout the afternoon, militiamen with nothing else to shoot at used his body for target practice.

Late in the afternoon, Shields Green managed to reach the armory with a message from Brown. The surviving men there, Osborne and Hazlett, had already decided to try to make their escape, and they urged Green to join them. It was obvious that their position was hopeless. Green declined their offer and returned to the engine house. He must have understood that he was going back to certain death. But he had promised Brown that he would do his duty. Soon militia reinforcements arrived and attacked the engine house from the rear, cutting off his last chance of escape.

Frederick Douglass had of course been right. Brown was trapped. There would be no Subterranean Pass Way, no chain of forts, no Appalachian refuge for fugitive slaves. If Brown felt like a defeated man, however, it was not evident. As his son Watson wept with pain, Brown advised him to die “as becomes a man.” His twenty-year-old son Oliver already lay dead on the floor. When dawn came, Brown and his four remaining uninjured men looked out through their loopholes into the morning mist to see Robert E. Lee's marines deployed with fixed bayonets, and beyond them a mass of militiamen, spoiling for more blood. Shortly after seven o'clock, Lee's aide, a brash young lieutenant of cavalry, walked toward the engine house, carrying a white flag. He was met at the door by Brown. The soldier demanded immediate and unconditional surrender, and promised only that Brown's men would be tried according to law. Brown asked that they instead be allowed to retreat across the river to Maryland,
where they would free their remaining hostages. Suddenly, cutting Brown short, the lieutenant jumped aside, and signaled for the marines to attack. Brown could easily have shot him dead—“just as easily as I could kill a musquito,” he said later. Had he done so, the course of the Civil War would undoubtedly have been different in ways that can never be known. The lieutenant was J. E. B. Stuart, who would go on to serve in the war as Robert E. Lee's brilliant commander of cavalry.

Time suddenly speeded up now. The marines rushed forward in two columns. Two of the burliest first tried to batter the door down with sledgehammers. When that failed, another party charged the weakened door, using a forty-foot ladder as a battering ram, breaking through on their second try. The soldiers poured through the breach. Two fell in the melee, one shot through the body and the other in the face. But Brown's men were overwhelmed. A marine impaled Indianan Jeremiah Anderson against a wall. Another bayoneted young Dauphin Thompson of North Elba where he lay under a fire engine. An officer stabbed at Brown with his sword, and with a second stroke actually lifted him off his feet, but failed to kill him. He then knocked the dazed old man to the ground and beat him unconscious with the hilt of his sword. Minutes after it had begun, the battle was over. Only Shields Green and one of the Quaker brothers from Iowa, Edward Coppoc, were captured unwounded. Of the nineteen men who had walked across the bridge into Harpers Ferry barely thirty-six hours before, five were now prisoners, and ten had been killed or fatally injured.

Having witnessed the capture of the engine house, Osborne Anderson and Hazlett slipped out the back of the armory, climbed a wall, and scuttled behind the embankment of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to the bank of the Shenandoah, where they found a boat, and, while attention was concentrated on the scene at the engine house, paddled across to the Maryland shore. Two more of the original group, including Brown's son Owen, played no part in the fighting, having been sent back to join the three men in Maryland before the battle commenced. Of the seven who managed to evade the debacle, two would be caught later in Pennsylvania, and eventually executed. Five would escape.

After the attack, panic swept like an electric charge through the network that had provided Brown with logistical and financial support. Hazlett and three men whom Brown had left behind to guard supplies
were soon captured in Pennsylvania, and later extradited to Virginia. Jermain Loguen and Frederick Douglass destroyed whatever documents they had that might implicate them in Brown's plot, and fled to Canada, as did several of Brown's secret backers. Gerrit Smith collapsed with a nervous breakdown, becoming so “wild” with guilt and hallucinations that he committed himself to the insane asylum at Utica. William Still stayed at his post to assist the last of Brown's fleeing men, including Osborne Anderson, who appeared at his door in Philadelphia “footsore and powder begrimed,” and put them on the Underground Railroad for Canada.

Harriet Tubman was in New York City when she learned that Brown's raid had failed. She remembered a strange dream that she had just before she met Brown for the first time. She was in “a wilderness sort of place, all full of rocks and bushes,” when she saw a serpent lift its head among the rocks, and become transformed into the head of an old man with a white beard, gazing at her “wishful like, jes as ef he war gwine to speak to me.” Two other heads rose up beside him, younger than he. As she stared back at them, a crowd of men rushed up and struck down first the younger heads and then the old man's. Only now did the dream finally make sense to her. She recognized the two younger serpents as Brown's sons, Watson and Oliver. The third, bearded serpent, looking toward her so hopefully, was John Brown himself.

 

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n October 25, Brown and his six surviving men were charged with treason, first-degree murder, and “conspiring with Negroes to produce insurrection.” They were tried at Charlestown, the county seat, ten miles from Harpers Ferry. All the charges carried the death penalty. The outcome was never in doubt. Throughout, Brown remained serene and unapologetic. From the Bible, he told the court, he had early learned to do unto others as he would have done unto himself: “It teaches me further to remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction…Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood 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.”