Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price (29 page)

The defendants were required to stand during the reading of the seven-page indictment, which took a full twenty minutes. Brown stood with difficulty and Stevens had to be held up by two bailiffs before returning to his mattress. “He has the appearance almost of a dying man; breathing with difficulty and panting for breath,” one reporter wrote. The defendants pleaded not guilty and asked to be tried separately. Hunter elected to prosecute Brown first.

Brown sought a short delay, saying that his wounds had left him enfeebled and hard of hearing. But Judge Parker, eager to move the process along, denied this request (as he would almost every other defense request). Returned to jail during the lunch recess, Brown took to his bed and claimed he was too weak to get up for the afternoon session. So he was carried back to the courtroom on a cot, where he lay with his eyes closed and a blanket drawn to his chin, “determined to resist the pushing of his trial by all the means in his power,” the
Baltimore American
reported.

Brown’s theatrics heightened what was already a colorful courtroom scene. Hundreds of spectators packed the vast chamber, cracking
chestnuts and peanuts as they watched the legal drama. “The floor of the court, excepting within a few feet of the Judge, was inches deep, in places, with nut shells, and the noise of people moving about was like that which would be made by trampling on glass,” wrote a reporter for the
New York Herald
. One of the prosecutors chewed tobacco, a wad sometimes slipping from his mouth; he showed up in court with his face bruised from a brawl the night before. Even the judge appeared casual, “comfortably reclining in his chair, his legs resting upon the table before him, amid the chaos of law-books, papers, and inkstands.”

Charlestown courtroom with Brown on cot at left center

The legal proceedings were also irregular. Brown frequently lurched up from his cot to challenge a witness or make a pronouncement, before slumping back down and closing his eyes. His defense team kept changing: six different lawyers acted on his behalf in a trial that lasted less than five days. And the proceedings had barely gotten under way when a telegram arrived from a prominent citizen of Akron, Ohio, stating that a number of Brown’s relatives had been committed to “a Lunatic Asylum” or died insane.
“These facts can be conclusively proven by witnesses residing here, who will doubtless attend the trial if desired.”

THE INSANITY DEFENSE WAS a new but widely accepted doctrine in American courtrooms. In a sensational murder trial just months before Brown’s, a New York congressman, Daniel Sickles, had successfully pleaded temporary insanity after shooting his wife’s lover dead in a park in Washington, D.C. Brown, with his wild hair and even wilder scheme for slaves’ liberation, fit many people’s notion of a lunatic. “As mad as a March hare,” opined the
Chicago Press and Tribune
, offering a typical view of Brown a few days after his capture.

The telegram from Akron also contained a certain amount of truth. Nineteen Ohioans later supported it by submitting affidavits about Brown’s mental state. While these statements were collected in an obvious effort to win clemency for Brown, they attested to his family’s long history of mental illness. A number of relatives on his mother’s side had been committed to asylums. And two of Brown’s children, Frederick and John junior, were clearly disturbed, though their instability may have been inherited from their mother, Dianthe, who was described as mentally afflicted.

More telling, perhaps, were the words used to describe Brown in the affidavits and other accounts of people who knew him well. They frequently called him “excitable” or a “monomaniac”—a term that Herman Melville applied to Captain Ahab. In 1857, almost two years before the question of Brown’s mental health arose in court, a free-state official in Kansas had written a striking letter to Franklin Sanborn, reporting that Brown was acting so oddly that some free-staters “openly express[ed] the opinion that one of his old fits of insanity has returned upon him.”

Brown’s own writing also spoke to his violent mood swings; he oscillated between periods of giddy, frantic activity and sloughs of despond that left him almost paralyzed. To modern eyes, this might suggest manic depression. So would Brown’s recurrent grandiosity—his unassailable faith in his own plans and abilities, and his belief that he was “God’s instrument,” singled out for the liberation of slaves.

But diagnosing mental illness at a distance of a century and a half is a dubious exercise. Even if Brown gave signs of bipolar tendencies, there’s
no evidence he had hallucinations or other symptoms so severe that he could have been considered legally insane—in the parlance of Virginia’s antebellum code, “an idiot, lunatic,
non compos,
or deranged.”

In any event, Brown wanted no part of an insanity defense. As soon as his lawyer read the telegram from Ohio in court, he raised himself from his cot and objected. “I look upon it as a miserable artifice and pretext of those who ought to take a different course in regard to me,” he said. “I am perfectly unconscious of insanity, and I reject, so far as I am capable, any attempt to interfere on my behalf on that score.”

This pleased Virginians but left his lawyers little to argue in his defense. There was no real dispute over the facts of the case. Under Brown’s leadership, the insurgents had seized the armory, taken hostages, armed slaves, and killed five men and wounded many others. At Brown’s insistence, his lawyers elicited testimony that showed he had treated his hostages well and ordered his men not to shoot unarmed civilians. Brown felt this demonstrated that he never intended violence; he and his men had shed blood only in self-defense.

But to Virginians, this argument held no weight. At least one of those slain, Heyward Shepherd, was a noncombatant. And Brown could hardly have expected to seize the town, take hostages, and free and arm a legion of slaves without sparking a fight. The prosecution regarded Brown’s defense as “too absurd to require argument” and didn’t even bother to cross-examine the witnesses called on his behalf.

Though the trial testimony did little but confirm Brown’s guilt, it provided moments that aroused the hundreds of white spectators. One witness testified to Brown’s words about his provisional government, including mention of “an intelligent colored man elected as one of the members of the House.” This notion caused a “sensation” in the courtroom, one reporter wrote. Another witness, John Allstadt, who had been taken hostage with his slaves and clearly loathed Brown, testified that the blacks in the engine house “were doing nothing, and had dropped their spears: some of them were asleep nearly all the time.” The southern audience laughed, delighted by this stereotypical portrayal of blacks as lazy and docile.

A few witnesses expressed nobler sentiments. The Maryland officer, Captain John Sinn, was called by the defense and ended his testimony by
stating: “As a Southern man, he came to state the facts about the case, so that Northern men would have no opportunity of saying that Southern men were unwilling to appear as witnesses in behalf of one whose principles they abhorred.”

The last day of testimony brought one final surprise—the arrival of two eminent lawyers who had been recruited by Brown’s supporters in the North. The trial had been so hasty that the attorneys arrived without having had a chance to so much as study the indictment. They’d also missed hearing the prosecution witnesses. But the judge was intent on forging ahead and allowed the prosecution to begin its closing arguments that same afternoon. When the defense’s turn came, it could do little but argue technical points about jurisdiction and appeal to the jury to show “moral courage” and maintain Virginia’s reputation for “chivalry unstained.”

The closing arguments ended at one thirty on the afternoon of Monday, October 31, two weeks to the day after Brown’s men had been trapped at the engine house. The jurors withdrew, but returned after just forty-five minutes, having put ballots in a hat and found their opinion was unanimous. The courtroom was now so packed that the crowd spilled into the hallway and outside the building’s front door.

“Gentlemen of the Jury,” the court clerk asked, “what say you, is the prisoner at the bar, John Brown, guilty or not guilty?”

“Guilty,” the foreman replied.

“Guilty of treason, and conspiring and advising with slaves and others to rebel and murder in the first degree?”

“Yes.”

There was no sound in the courtroom, “not the slightest expression of elation or triumph,” reported the
New York Herald
. Brown, who had listened to the day’s proceedings from his cot, often with his eyes shut, sat up to hear the verdict. Once it was read he “said not even a word, but, as on any previous day, turned to adjust his pallet, and then composedly stretched himself upon it.”

Though the judge did not sentence Brown until a few days later, the verdict left little doubt about his fate. Convicted of three capital crimes, he appeared certain to hang. It also seemed likely that he would go to the gallows quickly, in company with his co-conspirators. The court began
trying them immediately after Brown’s verdict was handed down on Monday afternoon, and it would hastily convict three more of the insurgents before the week was out.

As the judge and prosecutor had hoped, Virginia was dispensing justice in “double quick time.” Even the temporary telegraph office in Charlestown closed a few days after Brown’s conviction, in expectation of a swift and uneventful conclusion to the affair.

BROWN, HAVING FAILED TO sway the Virginia jury, had thus far fared poorly in the North as well. Conservative, pro-southern organs like the
New York Herald
blasted Brown and his allies as “Nigger-Worshipping Insurrectionists.” The middle-of-the-road
New York Times
called Brown “a fanatic;
sui generis,
” and later termed him “a wild and absurd freak.”

Papers strongly aligned with the antislavery cause were critical, too, and they sought distance from Brown’s violent abolitionism. Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune
called Harpers Ferry a “deplorable affair” and “the work of a madman,” adding that “the way to Universal Emancipation lies not through insurrection, civil war and bloodshed, but through peace, discussion, and the quiet diffusion of sentiments of humanity and justice.” William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the radical but nonviolent
Liberator,
was sternly disapproving, calling the Harpers Ferry attack “misguided, wild, and apparently insane.”

Worse still, Brown’s innermost core of supporters had all but deserted him. Just after Brown’s capture, Franklin Sanborn broke the news in a letter to another member of the Secret Six, Theodore Parker, who was in Italy sick with tuberculosis. “Our old friend struck his blow in such a way,—either by his own folly or the direction of Providence—that it has recoiled and ruined him, and perhaps those who were his friends,” Sanborn wrote on October 22. By then, the teacher had fled Concord for Quebec, writing en route to Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “According to the advice of good friends and my own deliberate judgment I am to try change of air for my old complaint.” Sanborn ended his note: “Burn this.”

Two other members of the Secret Six soon followed Sanborn to Canada,
even though a lawyer advised them that they were safe from arrest in Massachusetts. Frederick Douglass also fled north, and then left Canada for England on a previously planned trip. Though not a member of the Secret Six, Douglass was linked to Brown in papers found at the Kennedy farm, and Virginia authorities sought to apprehend him. “I have always been more distinguished for running than fighting,” Douglass wrote in a letter from Canada to a New York newspaper, “and tried by the Harper’s Ferry insurrection test, I am most miserably deficient in courage.”

Douglass, at least, was forthright about his flight, and he called Brown “noble and heroic.” Very different was the response of Gerrit Smith, the philanthropist who had bankrolled Brown from the start. He immediately destroyed all correspondence linking him to Brown and then, amid press speculation that he might be indicted, became so agitated that he was committed to the New York State Lunatic Asylum. Diagnosed as suffering from acute mania, Smith was treated with cannabis and morphine and quickly recovered his wits—though not, apparently, his memory. He denied any knowledge of, or complicity in, Brown’s Virginia campaign, later stating that he had “but a hazy view of nearly the whole of 1859.”

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