Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price (18 page)

With meny good wishes I
remain for ever your love
.

C. Whipple

Good By

Into the Breach

O
n October 15, the Kennedy farm, which had served Brown’s men as a barracks, arsenal, summer camp, and safe house, acquired a new status: “HEAD-QUARTERS WAR-DEPARTMENT, Near Harpers Ferry.”

These words were emblazoned on military papers issued the men before battle. “In pursuance of the authority vested in US,” one of the documents stated, “We do hereby Appoint and Commission the said Watson Brown a Captain.” The commission was signed by “Secretary of War” John Kagi and “Commander in Chief” John Brown.

On Sunday morning, October 16, another formal induction took place at the “War Department” headquarters. Some of the men were newcomers to Brown’s band and unfamiliar with the constitution adopted at Chatham. So Aaron Stevens read the document aloud, with Brown administering an oath of loyalty. Brown also read a Bible chapter “applicable to the condition of the slaves,” and “offered up a fervent prayer to God to assist in the liberation of the bondmen.”

In the afternoon, Brown gave final orders for the mission ahead. The three men least fit for hard fighting would stay at the farm to guard weapons and bring them forward at the appropriate time: Owen Brown, crippled in one arm; Francis Meriam, the sickly Bostonian; and Barclay Coppoc, an Iowa Quaker with bad lungs who was judged less energetic and determined than his brother Edwin.

The others would march to Harpers Ferry, with Charles Tidd and John Cook slipping ahead to cut down telegraph lines. Kagi and Stevens would seize the night watchman on the railroad bridge over the Potomac River, and the rest would follow, along the wagon road that ran beside the tracks and over the Potomac. Once in Harpers Ferry, the invaders would fan out, securing another bridge, the U.S. armory and arsenal, and several plantations outside town.

Having received their orders, the men had only to wait for dark. “Throughout the entire day,” Osborne Anderson wrote, “a deep solemnity pervaded the place.” Of Brown’s twenty-one followers, all but two were in their twenties and only a third of them had seen real fighting in Kansas. None had participated in an operation as complex and ambitious as the one they were about to undertake.

On Sunday evening, Brown offered a few last words to his men. “You all know how dear life is to you, and how dear your life is to your friends,” he said. “Do not, therefore, take the life of any one if you can possibly avoid it; but if it is necessary to take life in order to save your own, then make sure work of it.”

Harpers Ferry in 1859, from a hill behind town, Potomac bridge at center

Finally, at eight o’clock, he gave the command: “Men, get on your arms; we will proceed to the Ferry.” As Brown climbed onto the horse-drawn wagon, Barclay Coppoc kissed and embraced his brother Edwin.

“Come, boys!” John Brown called out, leading the wagon away from the log house and onto the road to Harpers Ferry. The men walked in pairs, widely separated, keeping as quiet as possible. One of the men later told Annie Brown what this solemn procession had been like. “They all felt,” he said, “like they were marching to their own funeral.”

ON THE NIGHT OF October 16, Patrick Higgins was running late. A watchman on the B & O Railroad bridge across the Potomac, the Irishman was paid a dollar a day for twelve hours of guard duty. His shift was due to begin at midnight, at which time he would relieve a fellow guard, Bill Williams. But it was ten minutes after midnight when Higgins reached the Maryland end of the bridge; as he did, he noticed that the lamps hanging at the entrance had been extinguished. And there was no sign of Williams, who was supposed to stick a peg in a time clock every thirty minutes as he patrolled the bridge. Higgins saw that the last peg had been placed at ten thirty P.M., more than ninety minutes earlier.

Higgins waited twenty minutes before starting across the bridge to look for Williams. Designed by Benjamin Latrobe, the architect of the U.S. Capitol, the bridge was enclosed with weatherboard siding and a tin roof. It ran for over a thousand feet, so that crossing the covered span felt like passing through a long dark tunnel. While walking along the bridge, Higgins carried a lantern but no weapon, since his primary job was to watch for fire sparked by locomotives and to make sure track switches were correctly set.

As Higgins neared the Virginia end of the bridge, two men loomed in the dark, holding what looked like to him like spears and carrying short rifles beneath their long gray shawls.

“Which way?” one of the men asked him.

Unbeknownst to Higgins, this was a demand for a password. Higgins answered it literally: “Not far; I am at my station.”

In reply the stranger announced that Higgins was his prisoner and grasped the watchman’s lantern. The Irishman swung his free hand at his captor’s face, causing the stranger to stumble and let go of him. Higgins then ran to the end of the bridge and hurled himself through the window of a hotel by the railroad tracks, as two shots rang out behind him. “Lock your doors,” he told the hotel clerk, “there are robbers on the bridge.”

HIGGINS’S PARTNER, BILL WILLIAMS, had been similarly surprised and confused two hours earlier. First, a pair of armed strangers accosted him on the bridge, and then seventeen more men appeared, two of whom he recognized: the affable John Cook, who worked at a canal lock close to the bridge, and Isaac Smith, the bearded New York farmer who had crossed the Potomac from time to time since July. When Smith and his men told Williams that he was now their prisoner, he at first thought they were joking.

The men escorted Williams from the covered bridge and straight into Harpers Ferry, moving past the railroad depot and up to the granite and iron gate of the nearby armory. Its night watchman, Daniel Whelan, heard a wagon approaching and stepped out of his guardhouse just inside the armory gate. Whelan saw someone trying to open the padlocked entrance and thought this must be the head watchman. As he moved forward to help, a stranger called on him to open the gate; when he refused, armed men threatened him and used a crowbar to break in.

“I was nearly scared to death with so many guns about me,” Whelan later testified. Though he guarded a gun factory, Whelan carried only a sword. Like the bridge guards, he was mainly charged with watching for fire, in his case by making sure the armory’s many forges had been safely extinguished at the end of the workday. In fact, the entire government works at Harpers Ferry—a massive complex that included the main armory, a second rifle factory, and the arsenal where finished weapons were stored—was protected only by walls, fences, and a few elderly or unskilled men, such as Whelan.

Brown was well aware of this, because John Cook had scouted the armory and talked to its employees. “I knew Cook well,” Whelan testified, and it was Cook who took the watchman’s sword as other men swarmed into the armory yard on the night of October 16.

But Whelan quickly saw that Cook was not in charge. “The head man of them,” an older bearded figure Whelan didn’t know, posted guards by the gate and dispatched his other men out of the yard to secure the arsenal across the street, as well as Hall’s Rifle Works, half a mile away, and the bridge across the Shenandoah River. All this was swiftly accomplished, without firing a shot or raising an alarm.

By midnight, Brown and his band of eighteen men had control of Harpers Ferry’s guns (about a hundred thousand in all), rail lines, and river bridges, and they had cut telegraphic contact with the outside world. For the moment, Brown had reason to feel buoyant about the bold scheme he’d plotted in secret for so many years. And for the first time he shared it publicly, albeit before an audience of only two: the captured watchmen, Bill Williams and Daniel Whelan, alone with him in the armory yard.

“I want to free all the Negroes in this state,” he told his prisoners, further warning them, “if the citizens interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood.”

BROWN HAD WORRIED ALL summer that his plan would be exposed—by prying neighbors, by his men’s indiscretions, or as a result of some other slip. But on the night of October 16, 1859, he caught Harpers Ferry entirely unawares. One reason was the sheer audacity and outlandishness of his attack. Southerners might dread a repetition of Nat Turner’s uprising in 1831, but they had no reason to suspect that a war of liberation would be launched by a white man leading a small interracial band, striking an industrial mountain town where slaves were scarce.

A significant portion of Harpers Ferry wasn’t even Virginia soil—much of the town belonged to the U.S. government, which owned not only the sprawling gun works but the town hall, dozens of houses and commercial buildings, and the grounds of schools, churches, public squares, and graveyards. Blacks, barred from skilled factory jobs, made up less than 10 percent of the population, and a third of them were free—unusual ratios for a southern town. Also atypical was the large sprinkling of immigrants and northern-born workmen. All told, in a community of almost three thousand, only about fifty male slaves were available for Brown to free and arm.

But Harpers Ferry was peculiar in another respect: it lay close to a very different landscape. Just west of town, the area’s steep shale cliffs and river gorges gave way to the gently rolling farmland of the Shenandoah Valley. This part of Jefferson County, Virginia, was fairly typical of the upcountry South, a mostly rural society with a few wealthy landowners, a large class of yeoman farmers, and 40 percent of its population enslaved. It was into this territory that Brown, after securing the gun works and bridges in Harpers Ferry, dispatched a wagonload of men to begin the real work of liberation.

AT ABOUT ONE THIRTY on the morning of October 17, Lewis Washington awoke to a low voice calling his name from the hallway outside his bedroom. A forty-six-year-old widower with grown children, Washington lived at Beallair, his 670-acre estate five miles west of Harpers Ferry. He described himself as a farmer, but this was misleading. The great-grandnephew of George Washington, he was also a close associate of Virginia’s governor, an honorary colonel, and one of the wealthiest and most prominent citizens of Jefferson County.

When Washington heard someone summoning him in the night, he thought a traveling friend had arrived late and been let in a back door “by the servants.” These “servants” were, of course, his slaves, who were a commodity as well as a workforce in antebellum Virginia. In just the past year, Washington had sold nine slaves for $7,300 and “hired” two servants, meaning he paid another slave owner for the year’s use of their labor. Washington recorded these transactions in his diary, alongside his notations about the purchase and sale of bacon, potatoes, and cord wood. In July 1859, he noted in the same diary that he was decamping for a mountain spa until September, leaving his overseer and slaves to toil in the summer heat.

Lewis Washington and his home, Beallair

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