Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price (12 page)

In 1819, an inventor named John Hall came to town and undertook a pioneering advance in America’s industrial revolution. Previously, muskets had been produced by highly skilled gunsmiths who made and assembled each part and weapon themselves—“lock, stock, and barrel.” Hall began manufacturing guns from interchangeable parts, employing “common hands,” even children, to run machines at his pilot factory.

Harpers Ferry also became a hub of the transport revolution. In the 1820s, stagecoaches arrived, traveling on turnpikes that had been newly macadamized, or paved with small broken stones. The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal reached town in 1833; the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad came the next year. New industries arose along the water and rail lines, as did hotels, shops, and restaurants. George Washington’s dream of the Potomac becoming a corridor of commerce seemed close to fulfillment.

But Harpers Ferry also offered a preview of the ills that afflicted the nation as it rapidly expanded and industrialized. In 1836, a visitor complained of the “coal smoke and clanking of hammers” that filled the “most abominable” town. Harpers Ferry officials urged citizens to clear piles of “offensive matter” from the streets, and struggled to rein in prostitution, cockfighting, brawling, “hallooing or rioting,” and “throwing stones.”

Panorama of Harpers Ferry from the Maryland shore

Some of those rowdy workmen were not happy. Many were skilled craftsmen who had once controlled the pace of their work; now they toiled through ten-hour shifts beneath factory clocks. In the 1840s, they went on strike and sent a delegation to the White House, complaining of being turned into “mere machines of labor.”

One disgruntled workman shot an armory superintendent who tried to curtail drinking and gambling on the job. The victim was found in his office “with a ghastly wound in the stomach, through which protruded portions of the dinner he had eaten a few minutes before.” Though the murderer was hanged, he lived on in local memory, a symbol of resistance to anyone who challenged the proud and fiercely independent workmen of Harpers Ferry.

The town’s rough-and-tumble atmosphere had calmed somewhat by the summer of 1858, when Cook arrived. But Harpers Ferry remained a fluid and heterogeneous place, accustomed to strangers from the North and abroad. Cook, a versatile and well-schooled young man, soon found employment at a variety of jobs, joined a debating society, and acquainted himself with a wide range of locals, from Irish canal workers
to patrician slave owners. He also worked his considerable charms on women, including the wives of leading armory employees, none of whom suspected an underground abolitionist cell was taking root in their midst.

“I was really pleased with him, he spoke so fluently and intelligently and had all the nice little graces of a gentleman,” one woman wrote her daughter, whose beauty Cook had complimented. “He seems to have made a favorable impression upon every one.”

AS COOK EMBARKED ON his covert operation that summer, Brown’s western mission was going less well. He returned to Kansas with a fresh alias—Shubel Morgan, the first name meaning “captive of God”—and a flowing white beard, which a journalist called “his patriarchal disguise.” The beard made Brown look older than his fifty-eight years, as did his deepening stoop. Decades of hardship had taken a toll on him.

A few years earlier, planning the house he wanted built in North Elba, Brown had written that he meant to place it very close to a stream to avoid lugging water uphill: “I have done a great deal of that.” Since then, he’d lived rough for long stretches and suffered frequent bouts of “ague,” a recurrent fever that was probably malarial. On returning west in the summer of 1858, he was incapacitated for weeks by severe shakes and other symptoms; he wrote to John junior that he “was never more sick” in his life.

As he recovered, though, Brown became impatient to resume his Virginia work. In August, Kansas voters had overwhelmingly rejected a pro-slavery constitution and thus guaranteed the territory’s eventual entry into the Union as a free state. Though violence continued near the border with Missouri, Brown once again lacked a clear purpose other than to dispel any rumors that Hugh Forbes might spread regarding his secret plans.

Then, in December, a new mission suddenly presented itself. A Missouri slave named Jim Daniels crossed into Kansas, on the pretext of selling brooms. Meeting one of Brown’s men on patrol near the border, Daniels said that he and other slaves were about to be sold and desperately needed help.

Brown answered this appeal by leading eighteen guerrillas into Missouri
the next night. One party under his command raided the farmhouse of Daniels’s master, liberating five slaves at gunpoint. They then freed five more slaves at a neighboring property. A separate party burst into another home and freed a slave, but in so doing shot her owner dead. The two groups of raiders also carried off oxen, horses, food, clothes, and other material, as well as two white hostages, before crossing back into Kansas.

This daring midnight strike caused an immediate sensation, much like the one following Brown’s Pottawatomie attack two years earlier. Proslavery posses quickly formed and as the identity of the raid’s instigator became known, both the governor of Missouri and President Buchanan offered rewards for Brown’s capture. The cross-border rescue also met with opprobrium from many in the antislavery camp. Defending free-state Kansans was one thing; it was quite another to invade a southern state, steal property, and kill a civilian.

Brown, ever the propagandist, mocked his critics in a letter to the
New York Tribune
. The previous May, he observed, a proslavery band had massacred five free-state settlers in Kansas, and authorities had done nothing. Yet when “eleven persons are forcibly restored to their ‘natural and inalienable rights,’” the government and much of the public “are filled with holy horror.”

Brown also kept himself in the news by embarking on a dramatic midwinter trek. He escorted the liberated slaves north, with posses and federal marshals in hot pursuit. Near Lawrence, Kansas, he eluded capture by switching getaway wagons, from an oxcart he’d taken in Missouri to a wagon drawn by horses. A few days later, an eighty-man posse intercepted his convoy at a ford. With just twenty-two men of his own, Brown marched straight at his foes, causing them to fall back in panic. “The closer we got to the ford the farther they got from it,” one of his men wrote. Brown’s band gave chase, capturing horses and taking several prisoners.

In February 1859, Brown left Kansas territory, leading his caravan across Iowa. At the eastern end of the state, the liberated slaves were secreted onto a boxcar bound for Chicago, then taken from there to Detroit, where they boarded a ferry. BROWN’S RESCUED NEGROES LANDED IN CANADA, read the March 18 headline in the
New York Tribune
. The long journey from bondage to freedom had taken eighty-two days and covered eleven hundred miles, mostly by wagon. One of the formerly enslaved women, the
Tribune
reported, had been owned by six different masters. Another had given birth since being freed in Missouri. “The child has been christened John Brown,” the newspaper said.

The infant’s white namesake could hardly have composed a more laudatory narrative. “Osawatomie Brown” had hugely enlarged his celebrity as a bold and seemingly invincible warrior who took the fight to his enemies. Best of all, he had turned the hated Fugitive Slave Act on its head. Instead of slave catchers trespassing on free territory, Northerners had invaded a slave state to liberate bondspeople. Brown had acted, he wrote a newspaper editor that March, because the “most ready and effectual way” to fight for freedom was “to meddle directly with the peculiar institution.”

THE MISSOURI RESCUE ALSO reinvigorated the Secret Six, whose faith had flagged due to delays in Brown’s mission and his ceaseless demands for money. “He has begun the work in earnest,” Sanborn wrote Higginson. “I think we may look for great results from this spark of fire.” Gerrit Smith, who had completely lost his nerve the year before, was now exultant, seeing the Missouri raid as a rehearsal for the plan Brown intended “to pursue
elsewhere
.”

Brown’s thoughts ran along a parallel track. He resumed his preparations even before completing the trek from Kansas. On reaching Iowa, he wrote the Secret Six that he was now ready with new men to “set his mill in operation,” and wanted the cash promised him the year before. “The entire success of our experiment ought (I think) to convince every
capitalist
.”

In mid-March, immediately after putting the fugitives on a ferry to Canada, Brown rushed to Cleveland. There he delivered a fund-raising lecture and theatrically auctioned off horses he’d “liberated” from Missouri. He also scoffed at posters in Cleveland advertising the president’s reward for his arrest, saying he “would give two dollars and fifty cents for the safe delivery of the body of James Buchanan in any jail of the Free States.”

Continuing east, Brown collected fresh funds from Gerrit Smith and stayed with Franklin Sanborn in Concord, where he spoke at the town hall before Emerson, Thoreau, and other luminaries. “The Captain leaves us much in the dark concerning his destination and designs for the coming months,” Bronson Alcott wrote in his diary. “Yet he does not conceal
his hatred of slavery, nor his readiness to strike a blow for freedom … . I think him equal to anything he dares,—the man to do the deed, if it must be done.”

John Brown in Boston, May 1859

Alcott also noted Brown’s changed appearance, writing that his long white beard gave him a “soldierly air, and the port of an apostle.” Others who saw him that spring were struck not only by his facial hair but by his fevered manner. John Forbes, a Boston businessman at whose home Brown stayed, thought his guest’s “glittering gray-blue eyes” had “a little touch of insanity.” Amos Lawrence, another businessman, wrote in his diary that Brown exhibited a “monomania” about “stealing negroes.”

These impressions may have been influenced by Lawrence’s disapproval of the Missouri raid, and by Brown’s ague, which continued to trouble him. But one of the men closest to Brown during the 1859 slave rescue also questioned the abolitionist’s state of mind. George Gill was a young adventurer and former whaler who had joined Brown’s band in Iowa and become secretary of the treasury in his provisional government. At the Chatham Convention, Gill wrote, a preacher kept exclaiming of Brown, “This is the Moses, whom God has sent to conduct the children of Israel through the Red Sea.” Other blacks often hailed Brown in similar terms; “it would elate him through and through.”

The Missouri rescue completed Brown’s identification with Moses: the long-bearded prophet leading slaves to freedom as Pharaoh’s legions gave chase. Gill was intimately involved in this latter-day Exodus. He was the man on patrol who first encountered Jim Daniels, bringing the desperate slave to Brown’s attention; he also took part in the Missouri raid and traveled by his commander’s side during much of the long journey north.

“He seemed strangely attached to me,” Gill wrote. “I was a verdant innocent-looking fellow with but little to say to him.” But this quiet young follower came to wonder whether success had gone to his leader’s already swollen head. “In time he believed that he was Gods chosen instrument—and the
only one
,” Gill later wrote. “Whatever methods he used, God would be his guard and shield, rendering the most illogical movements into a grand success.”

By the time the convoy reached eastern Iowa, Gill had fallen sick and was unable to continue. A few months later, the call came for him to mobilize for the long-delayed Virginia mission. To Brown’s great surprise and disappointment, his once-loyal lieutenant and treasury secretary never appeared.

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