Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price (21 page)

But there was one complication: by the time the first wagonload of weapons arrived, about ten o’clock on Monday morning, school was already in session. There were some twenty-five pupils inside the one-room building, along with a young schoolteacher named Lind Currie.

Cook, nonchalant as always, walked in and informed the teacher that he needed part of the schoolroom to store boxes of weapons. Equally startling was Cook’s request that Currie continue with his lessons; the teacher, Cook said, “should not be interrupted.”

Cook carried a rifle and had a bowie knife and two revolvers stuck in his belt. Tidd and Leeman were similarly armed, while the black men carried pikes. When this party appeared, Currie’s students grew wide-eyed and “very much alarmed,” the teacher later testified. As he drily informed Cook, his pupils “were not in a condition to engage in their usual duties.”

After trying to calm the students himself, Cook agreed to let them go and allowed Currie to escort home a frightened little boy. When the teacher returned, the wagon had been unloaded and was on its way back to the Kennedy farm for more weapons, leaving Cook and one of Lewis Washington’s former slaves to guard the school. Currie found Cook “rather cooler” than before, and guessed this was because the insurgent had learned that the teacher, who lived just a mile from Colonel Washington, was a slaveholding farmer as well.

Currie also realized he was now “detained” and had no choice other than to stay. But Cook was incapable of sustaining a chill. “He became rather more communicative, and spoke of a great many things,” Currie testified. Over the hours that followed, the two young men from Connecticut and Virginia engaged in “long and varied” conversation, on topics such as “the feeling entertained towards the south by the north generally.”

A CURIOUS INTIMACY ALSO developed between Terence Byrne and twenty-year-old William Leeman, the man assigned to escort the Maryland slave owner the rest of the way to Harpers Ferry. The two men hadn’t walked far from the school when rain began to pour down. “I had an umbrella,” Byrne later testified, “and proposed to him to sit up close to me, and my umbrella would be some protection to him.” As the hostage and his armed guard huddled together by the road, Leeman disclosed that his commander, “Captain Smith,” was actually the notorious John Brown of Kansas.

Byrne, already extremely anxious, now grew even more so. “I was fearful of a bloody civil war,” he said. “I was under the impression that, unless they were in great numbers, they would not be foolish enough to make an attack on the borders of two slaveholding States.”

But he also sensed that his young bodyguard had doubts about the mission. At Byrne’s house earlier that morning, while Cook speechified about the coming triumph of freedom, Byrne noticed that Leeman had hunched quietly by the fire, his head resting against the mantel and his cap drawn down. Now, as Leeman waited out the rain shower with his hostage, “he appeared to be very serious,” Byrne said. “I am inclined to think he was meditating his escape.”

The Marylander sensed no such anxiety in another member of Brown’s band he met that morning. When William Thompson, one of the Potomac bridge guards, passed Leeman and his captive on the road, he “came up smiling,” extended his hand, and said, “How are you, Byrne?” To which the Marylander replied with feigned heartiness: “Good morning, Mr. Thompson; I am well; how are you?”

The cheerful young man told Byrne about the situation in town, where a lull had prevailed since the early-morning gunfire. He had just given a similar message to the guards at the schoolhouse. “Thompson came up from the Ferry and reported that everything was all right,” Cook later stated. The courier then hurried back down to his post on the bridge.

This dispatch was delivered at about eleven o’clock on Monday morning. A short time later, Cook received a fresh report from the Ferry, though this one was not delivered in person. “I heard a good deal of firing,” Cook said, “and became anxious to know the cause.”

FROM THE MOMENT HE arrived in Harpers Ferry, Brown had sought to assure the townspeople that he did not regard them as his enemy. He had come to free slaves and intended to hurt no one, unless he met with resistance. Following the gunfire that broke out in the night, Brown repeatedly sent peace emissaries to frightened train passengers and citizens at the Wager House. He expressed regret for the shooting of the railroad porter, Heyward Shepherd, blaming it on “bad management” by his sentinels on the bridge and telling Conductor Phelps, “It was not his intention that any blood be spilled.”

He’d also indicated to his band that he anticipated some support from white townspeople. “From Brown,” one of them later stated, “I understood that there were laboring men at Harper’s Ferry who wished to get rid of slaves and would aid in running them off.” At the least, Brown appears to have believed that most whites would stay out of the fray rather than take up arms in defense of the slaveholding gentry.

This belief was bolstered by the intelligence he had received from Cook, who found the community welcoming, even to a Northerner who sometimes told his acquaintances of his sympathy for the free-state cause in Kansas. Relatively few townspeople owned slaves, and they seemed to
live and work peaceably alongside free blacks. Thomas Boerly, for instance, rented part of his property to a black family. The black baggage master, Heyward Shepherd, was employed at the B & O depot by the town’s mayor, who had also helped another free man buy his wife and children out of slavery.

But this interracial cooperation didn’t translate into sympathy for Brown’s cause. Nor were many people in Harpers Ferry aware of his intentions, at least initially. The shooting of a free black man confused matters, as did the mixed signals Brown seemed to convey. He said he meant no harm to citizens—yet seized their town at night, took hostages, claimed command of a vast army, and brought with him barrels of gunpowder and torches that one hostage described as “sticks wrapped with cotton waste and dipped in burning fluid.” His men also carried Sharps rifles, a new kind of carbine named for a gunsmith who had once worked at Harpers Ferry. Compact, quick-loading, and renowned for its range and accuracy, the Sharps was the deadliest firearm of its day, and the origin of the word “sharpshooter.”

Unsurprisingly, townspeople doubted Brown’s peaceful overtures—particularly after the shooting of Shepherd and then Boerly, news of which quickly reached the locals who had convened that morning on Camp Hill. As John Starry rode off to seek aid in the county seat, townsmen set about arming themselves.

First, someone realized that not all the government weapons were under the watch of the invaders. A few weeks earlier, when flooding threatened the low ground by the Shenandoah, scores of rifles had been moved from the arsenal to a storeroom on the armory grounds, which stretched for half a mile beyond Brown’s headquarters by the gate. Two townsmen succeeded in reaching the storeroom and they returned with rifles, percussion caps, and a few bullet molds.

Meanwhile, women and children helped gather all the lead they could find, including pewter plates and spoons, to melt on stoves and form into ammunition. “Father and the others were putting bullets into their pockets, hot from the moulds,” recalled Jennie Chambers, a fifteen-year-old armorer’s daughter and schoolgirl in Harpers Ferry.

Another relative of Jennie’s, George Chambers, was the proprietor of the Gault House, a wooden saloon near the Wager House that overlooked
both the arsenal and the armory grounds. Chambers posted himself in an upper story of the ramshackle building and began delivering sporadic harassing fire. A few others followed suit.

Though no one was hit, this sniping forced Brown’s men to take cover and dodge between their separate posts at the bridges, armory, arsenal, and the more distant Hall’s Rifle Works, where John Kagi was posted. As local opposition emerged, Brown’s second-in-command sent a messenger to the armory, urging that Brown and his force withdraw from Harpers Ferry before it was too late. Kagi received no answer.

TEN MILES WEST OF Harpers Ferry, James Hooff was working in a field that morning, supervising slaves as they seeded and harrowed, when John Starry “rode out in haste.” The doctor told him “whites and Negroes had possession of the Ferry & were killing the citizens,” Hooff wrote in his diary. The farmer immediately mounted his horse, gathered “all the arms I could get,” and rode off to nearby Charlestown, the seat of Jefferson County.

Others did the same, alerted by Starry, by an overseer at Lewis Washington’s plantation, and by tolling bells in Charlestown, a sound that on non-church days normally signified an emergency such as a fire. The town was also the base for a modestly equipped and trained militia. One of its principal roles was to act as a slave patrol and guard against revolt—a source of keen anxiety following Nat Turner’s insurrection, when many such civilian units were organized and the Virginia Military Institute established.

While Brown anticipated sympathy from some factory workers in Harpers Ferry, he could expect none from the farming heartland of Jefferson County, centered on Charlestown. Just three months before Brown’s attack, the town had enacted a new ordinance forbidding “any negro” to be on the street after nine P.M. In addition: “Not more than five negroes shall at any one time stand together on a sidewalk, or at or near the corner of a street, and negroes shall never stand on a sidewalk, to the inconvenience of white persons having to pass by, and any negro who shall violate this order will be punished by stripes not exceeding fifteen.” Slaves were regularly auctioned at the door of the county courthouse in Charlestown. So were free blacks, sold into slavery “for remaining in the Commonwealth
contrary to law.” (Freed blacks were required to leave Virginia within a year, unless granted a special permit.)

By ten A.M. on the morning of October 17, about a hundred volunteers had gathered in Charlestown, some of them militiamen, many not. All were ready to oppose the shadowy interracial mob that had kidnapped their neighbor Lewis Washington and taken hold of Harpers Ferry. Boarding a train, they disembarked at a rail spur halfway to their destination, so the cars could be sent to bring additional militia from Winchester, a short distance west. Couriers were also dispatched to other Virginia towns.

When the Charlestown contingent marched into Harpers Ferry, at about eleven thirty A.M., they joined a group of local men on Camp Hill who had found enough guns and bullets to fight. Officers in the Charlestown militia took charge of this combined force, now numbering about 150, and divided it into five units. One squad was sent on a flanking maneuver and ordered to cross the Potomac a mile above the Ferry so it could attack the B & O bridge from the Maryland side. Another snaked down through town to slip into the Gault House and reinforce its saloonkeeper turned sniper, George Chambers. A third party occupied other tall buildings near the government works. The remainder went to secure the Shenandoah bridge and the road leading to Hall’s Rifle Works, half a mile from Brown’s headquarters at the armory.

These maneuvers were executed in heavy mist and rain by men who—except for a handful of Mexican War veterans—had never seen combat. They were haphazardly armed and knew nothing of their foes, apart from wild rumors that suggested the insurgents numbered in the hundreds, including “armed bands of maddened blacks.”

The twenty men sent to flank Brown’s force had to work their way north of town and pole across the shallow Potomac in flatboats. Reaching the Maryland bank, they then crept along a towpath toward the railroad bridge, unable to see the Virginia shore because of the mist. To their left loomed a cloud-shrouded cliff; they feared that insurgents stood atop it, waiting to shower down boulders or bullets.

“Every man,” one of the Charlestown volunteers later wrote, “felt when he reached the Maryland end of the Potomac Bridge that he had literally ‘run the gauntlet,’ and we were all glad to be alive.”

The Virginians then poured onto the bridge, firing wildly. Brown’s sentinels, badly outnumbered and caught by surprise, quickly fell back across the Potomac toward Harpers Ferry. Spilling out of the covered bridge on the Virginia side, they ran for the armory, only sixty yards away. The last stretch was open pavement, exposed to the fire of gunmen who had occupied the upper stories of buildings overlooking the street.

Some of Brown’s men at the armory and arsenal rushed from their sheltered posts to defend their retreating comrades. In the confused moments that followed, one of the insurgents raced down Shenandoah Street, between the arsenal and armory. From a window high above, a gunman fired down at him, apparently having loaded his rifle with a crude slug or spike instead of a bullet. The steeply angled shot tore through the running man’s neck and throat, dropping him dead on the pavement.

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