Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price (16 page)

Douglass knew Brown’s plans had evolved, but up to this point, he had believed they were still aimed at siphoning off slaves in a gradual way that would alarm owners and undermine the institution. Now, during their conversation at the quarry, Brown instead unveiled his bold plan for seizing Harpers Ferry. Brown said this dramatic strike would “instantly rouse the country,” Douglass later wrote, serving as a “notice to the slaves that their friends had come, and a trumpet to rally them to his standard.”

Douglass, like the men at the Kennedy farm, “at once opposed the measure.” He argued that opening the campaign with an attack on a federal armory “would array the whole country against us,” rather than rallying Americans to the antislavery cause. Brown shrugged this off. “It seemed to him that something startling was just what the nation needed.”

Douglass raised military objections, too, arguing that Brown and his men would be easily surrounded in Harpers Ferry. Again, Brown seemed unperturbed. He said he could “find means for cutting his way out,” but wouldn’t need to, because he planned to take prominent citizens hostage. That way, if worse came to worst, he could “dictate terms” to his foes. This confidence astonished Douglass, who believed Virginians would blow Brown and his hostages “sky-high” rather than let abolitionists hold Harpers Ferry.

There in the old quarry, the two men debated through that day and part of the next, with Douglass, a formidable orator, mustering “all the arguments at my command.” None of them moved Brown. He was utterly fixed in his course. “Come with me, Douglass,” he finally said, wrapping his arms tightly around his friend. “I want you for a special purpose. When I strike the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them.”

But Douglass could see nothing but menace in Harpers Ferry. “All his arguments, and all his descriptions of the place, convinced me that he was going into a perfect steel trap,” Douglass wrote, “and that once in he would never get out alive.” Having escaped slavery as a young man, Douglass also had no illusions about his own prospects if he went along. “My
discretion or my cowardice,” he admitted, “determined my course.” He would not go with Brown.

As he got up to leave the quarry, Douglass turned to his companion, Shields Green, who, along with Kagi, had sat in on the conference. In Rochester, the fugitive slave from South Carolina had been moved by Brown’s antislavery fervor and said he intended to join him. Now, Douglass told Green: “Shields, you have heard our discussion. If in view of it, you do not wish to stay, you have but to say so, and you can go back with me.”

To Douglass’s surprise, Green coolly replied, in his Lowcountry patois, “I b’leve I’ll go wid de ole man.”

THOUGH DISAPPOINTED IN DOUGLASS’S decision, Brown at last had his first black recruit at the Kennedy farm. Shields Green’s addition to the ranks, however, greatly increased the risk of exposure. The narrow, hilly borderland between Pennsylvania and the Potomac River made a natural highway for fugitives, and it was closely watched by southern patrols and slave catchers who collected bounties for apprehending runaways. Soon after the meeting in the quarry, as Owen Brown was escorting Green from Chambersburg to the farmhouse in Maryland, they encountered several men who became suspicious and gave chase with dogs. Owen and Green—who, reversing the usual pattern, was trying to slip back into the South—had to bushwhack through the woods and hills to elude their pursuers.

Green also became a conspicuous presence at the Kennedy farm, where Annie Brown was already struggling to keep her “invisibles” out of sight. Only her father, her brothers, and Jeremiah Anderson ventured out freely, traveling in the wagon to Chambersburg for “freight” or to Harpers Ferry to pick up provisions. They otherwise mixed little with locals, though Brown attended the nearby church of a small German sect and at one point performed minor surgery on a neighbor, lancing a “wen” on her neck. In gratitude, the family gave Brown a mongrel pup named Cuffee. The dog, along with a cow and horse and a few pigs, gave the Kennedy farm an air of rural normality.

But maintaining this façade required constant vigilance. One day, while Annie and her father went to church, those left keeping watch weren’t careful enough. Green, a garrulous man who in Rochester had cleaned
clothes for a living, came down from the loft to help Martha with the ironing. No one noticed the approach of their nosy neighbor, Mrs. Huffmaster. Coming to the door, she saw Green, as well as two unfamiliar white men, before Martha managed to hustle her out onto the porch.

When Brown returned from church, he immediately sent Annie to find out what their neighbor knew, and to “buy her off” with some milk. Mrs. Huffmaster told Annie she thought the black man was a fugitive, escaping with the aid of the white strangers she’d seen. Annie tried to convince her “they were some friends of ours, but that they had gone where she would not see them and asked her to not say anything.” The woman promised to do so, but “used her power over me every time she thought of anything she wanted, that we had,” Annie wrote. “We lived in constant fear and dread after that.”

The men also lived in even greater confinement to avoid another sighting. Most mornings, they gathered downstairs as Brown read from the Bible and led them in prayer. Then they would retreat to the loft and stay cooped up all day, coming down only for meals. If Mrs. Huffmaster approached the farmhouse as they were eating, Annie or Martha would intercept her on the porch while the men hurried upstairs, “taking the dishes, victuals, tablecloth and all with them.”

Only at night were the men free to roam outside. And only in certain weather did they feel safe enough to break the quiet. “When there was a thunderstorm they would jump about and play, making all kinds of noise,” Annie wrote, “as they thought no one could hear them.”

A WEEK OR TWO after the arrival of Shields Green, a second black volunteer came to the farm: Dangerfield Newby, who differed in several key respects from the other men. He was about forty, much older than his fellow recruits, and he hadn’t been with Brown in Kansas or Iowa or Canada. For Newby, the mission ahead was also unusually personal. Virginia-born, he’d been freed in 1858 after his owner moved to Ohio. But Newby’s wife and children remained enslaved in Virginia, some fifty miles from Harpers Ferry. “He was impatient to have operations commenced,” Annie wrote, “for he was anxious to get them.”

Newby had already gone to great lengths to try and free his family. A
blacksmith and canal worker, he’d saved money and asked others for contributions so he could buy his wife and children from their owner. By the summer of 1859, he had certificates of deposit in an Ohio bank worth more than $700—a considerable sum for a former slave, equal to about $17,000 today. But Harriett Newby’s owner, who had earlier agreed to a price, raised it or decided not to sell. Harriett responded with a series of wrenching letters to her husband.

Dangerfield Newby, ca. 1858

“Oh, Dear Dangerfield
com
this fall with out fail
monny
or no
monney,
” she wrote in April 1859. “I want to see you so much. That is the one bright hope I have before me.” A house slave, she had to care night and day for her mistress, who had just given birth. “Nothing more at present but remain Your affectionate wife, Harriett Newby.”

A few weeks later, she wrote again, this time to report that her own baby “commenced to
Crall
to-day; it is very delicate.” The infant, a girl, was their sixth child. “Dear Dangerfield, you cannot
amagine
how much I want to see you. It is the grates Comfort I have is thinking of the
promist
time when you will be here oh that bless hour when I shall see you once more.”

By summer, Harriett was desperate. “I want you to buy me as soon as possible, for if you do not get me some body else will,” she wrote. “It is said Master is in want of money. If so, I know not what time he may sell me
an
then all my bright
hops
of the
futer
are blasted, for
their
has ben one bright hope to cheer me in all my troubles, that is to be with you.” Their little girl, she added, wasn’t walking yet but could “step around” by holding on to things. Harriett closed: “you mus write soon and say when you think you can Come.”

This letter was dated August 16, 1859. By the time it reached northern Ohio, where Dangerfield Newby had met some of John Brown’s men and decided to join their cause, he had already set off, leaving his bank deposits behind. Money or no money, he was coming to Virginia that fall.

SEPTEMBER AT THE KENNEDY farm brought cooler weather, the arrival of the pikes from Connecticut, and a sobering atmosphere as the mission drew near. On the first of the month, in a letter from a place he identified only as “Post of Duty,” Aaron Stevens declared his love for the Ohio music teacher, Jennie Dunbar: “if I live to get through
with this
and you live I hope I shall have the pleasure of hearing
you play and sing again
if nothing more.” In a postscript, he added: “you may not get a letter from me for some time … hoping to meet you again in this world.”

A few days later, Dauphin Thompson wrote his brother and sister from “Parts unknown.” He described sitting in the door of a small cabin on the Kennedy farm, where four of the men took up residence once the pikes had arrived and been stored in the outbuilding’s loft. “Probably you will hear from us about the first of october if not before,” he wrote, referring to the “operations” that would soon commence. “I suppose the folk think we are a set of fools but they will find out we know what we are about.”

Watson Brown wrote to his wife, Belle, who was back in North Elba with Frederick, a newborn named for the uncle killed in Kansas. “I think of you all day, and dream of you at night,” Watson wrote. “I would gladly come home and stay with you always but for the cause which brought me here,—a desire to do something for others, and not live wholly for my own happiness.”

Other men confided their growing apprehension to the two young women at the farm. “They nearly all seemed to be impressed with the idea that they were going to their death,” Annie wrote. One man, Steward Taylor, described his own end for her, having seen it in a vision or dream. “He knew he would be shot at the taking of Harper’s Ferry, and be one of the first ones too.”

With the arrival of Osborne Anderson from Canada in September, Brown had seventeen soldiers on hand, still fewer than the twenty-five or so he believed was the minimum needed. Desperately short of funds, he had to borrow $40 from one of his men. Even so, as the end of the month approached, Brown took a step that signaled the attack was imminent. He sent Martha and Annie home to North Elba.

For the women as well as the men, it was a difficult parting. Martha, now several months pregnant, would be separated from her husband. Annie, though homesick, had become “very intimate” with her invisibles, she later wrote. She shared with the men not only the extremely close quarters, but also faith in their cause and the secret of their mission. This was a heady and romantic experience for a teenaged farm girl. So was the attention of so many young men, most of whom were striking in appearance, at least to judge by their photographs and Annie’s descriptions of them as “tall,” “fine-looking,” “gentlemanly,” “very attractive,” or “really handsome.”

Her sister Ruth later said that Annie’s “first lover” was one of the men at the Kennedy farm, though she didn’t say which. If Ruth was correct, then the likeliest candidates were Annie’s young neighbor from North Elba, Dauphin Thompson (“a perfect blond,” she called him, “good size, well-proportioned—a handsome young man”); the darkly attractive Jeremiah Anderson (to whom, Annie’s family later hinted, she “took a fancy”); and the passionate Kansas fighter Charles Tidd, of whom Annie later wrote to Franklin Sanborn, “I know your sister thought we were ‘lovers.’” Annie denied this. “A soldier could understand the tie that bound us without explanation.”

Whether these ties were soldierly, sisterly, or otherwise, the women’s presence at the Kennedy farm had been a great solace to the men. They enjoyed teasing Martha and Oliver as “Mother and Father,” played pranks on Annie, and confided in her about “mothers, sisters, friends, and
homes.” The women also brightened the men’s confinement by gathering flowers, wild fruit, and nuts. “We were, while the ladies remained, often relieved of much of the dullness,” Osborne Anderson wrote.

Other books

I'll Be Seeing You Through Time (The Dimension Keepers) by Conner, Jennifer

Trinidad by Leon Uris

Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind by Anne Roiphe

Hot Finish by Erin McCarthy

The Helavite War by Theresa Snyder

Confessions of a Recovering Slut by Hollis Gillespie

Abigail – The Avenging Agent: The agent appears again by Rose Fox

Cooking Up Trouble by Judi Lynn

Under a Tell-Tale Sky: Disruption - Book 1 by R.E. McDermott

Her by Felicia Johnson