Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price (30 page)

Samuel Howe, like Smith, was frequently named in letters published after Brown’s capture. Yet he, too, loudly disclaimed any association with Harpers Ferry. “That event was unforeseen and unexpected by me,” he wrote from Canada in a statement published by the
New York Tribune.
“It is still, to me, a mystery, and a marvel.”

This disavowal enraged the combative preacher Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the only member of the Secret Six who didn’t leave the country or take refuge in an asylum. It was “the extreme of baseness,” he wrote, for the Six to deny knowledge of Brown’s enterprise, and he judged Howe’s disingenuous letter and Smith’s alleged insanity as “two sad results of the whole affair.”

He also complained to Sanborn, who returned from Canada but kept urging Higginson to stay quiet about their role in the insurrection. “Sanborn is there no such thing as
honor
among confederates?” Higginson fired back, disgusted that Brown and his men had suffered while “silent safe partners make haste to secure our good reputation by a
lie!
” He refused
to destroy Sanborn’s letters, and signed one of his own: “There is no need of burning this.”

Henry David Thoreau

WHILE HIGGINSON STEWED IN private, another New Englander went boldly public in defense of Brown. A few days after the Harpers Ferry attack, Henry David Thoreau told townspeople in Concord that he planned to give a speech supporting the jailed abolitionist. Though many citizens of the freethinking town had backed Brown strongly just months before, they now dreaded any association with Harpers Ferry. Local abolitionists discouraged Thoreau from speaking and town selectmen refused to ring a bell announcing his lecture. Undaunted, Thoreau rang the bell himself—on October 30, the eve of the abolitionist’s conviction—before delivering a stirring oration that was published under the title “A Plea for Captain John Brown.”

Harking back to his famous essay “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau cast Brown as an exemplar of principled resistance to authority. “Is it possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?” he asked.
“Are laws to be enforced simply because they are made?” Brown, he said, had resisted unjust laws and stood up for human dignity, “knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. In that sense he was the most American of us all.”

Thoreau contrasted this individual heroism with the “cackling of political conventions” and the cravenness of the northern public, particularly “the herd” of commentators who condemned Brown or pronounced him “insane.” Thoreau also mocked his Yankee neighbors who saw everything in terms of gain, and therefore felt that Brown had thrown his life away. “No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to,” Thoreau said.

He reserved his greatest praise for the words spoken by Brown to the Virginians who had questioned him at the armory soon after his capture. All of the many antislavery speeches by northern congressmen, combined and boiled down, Thoreau said, “do not match for manly directness and force, and for simple truth, the few casual remarks of crazy John Brown” as he lay bleeding on the floor of the paymaster’s office. As Thoreau memorably put it: “He could afford to lose his Sharpe’s rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,—a Sharpe’s rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.”

THREE DAYS LATER, ON November 2, Brown would show himself fully worthy of Thoreau’s praise. Brown was now well enough to walk, though with difficulty, and during the court session that day he sat instead of lying on a cot. “It was late, and the gaslights gave an almost deathly pallor to his face,” one reporter wrote. “He was like a block of stone.” Brown remained impassive as the judge denied a defense motion seeking to overturn his verdict. Then the court clerk told Brown to rise and asked him if he had anything to “say why sentence should not be pronounced upon him.”

This caught Brown off guard. He’d expected to be sentenced with the other prisoners, once they’d all been convicted. “He seemed to be wholly unprepared to speak at this time,” one reporter wrote. If so, Brown recovered very quickly. Leaning slightly forward and resting his hands on a table, he spoke in a clear, distinct voice.

“I have, may it please the Court, a few words to say,” he began. “In the
first place I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, of a design on my part to free slaves. I intended certainly to have made a clean thing of that matter, as I did last winter when I went into Missouri and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moving them through the country and finally leaving them in Canada. I designed to have done the same thing again on a larger scale. That was all I intended. I never did intend murder or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection.”

This summary wasn’t altogether true. In Missouri, one of Brown’s men had shot a slaveholder dead. And the attack on Harpers Ferry was clearly intended as more than a large-scale reprise of his slave rescue. Brown later admitted as much in a letter, telling the prosecutor Andrew Hunter that he misspoke in court “in the hurry of the moment.” His intent at Harpers Ferry had been to arm slaves to defend themselves within the South, rather than to “run them out of the slave States.”

But the point was legally moot. As he continued speaking in court, Brown no longer sought to question the specifics of the prosecution’s case. He even declared himself “entirely satisfied” with his treatment and praised the “truthfulness and candor” of the witnesses. What he challenged instead was the very basis of his indictment. Why was it a crime to try to free slaves?

“Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved,” Brown said in his courtroom speech, “had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.”

Brown accepted his conviction under Virginia law. But he invoked another, higher code. “This Court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things ‘whatsoever I would men should do to me I should do ever so to them.’ It teaches me, further, to ‘remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.’ I endeavored to act up to these instructions.”

He had abided by the Golden Rule and the scriptural injunction to care for the afflicted. This was all he had done. To do otherwise would have been a much greater crime. “I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, was no wrong but right.”

This brought Brown to the climax of his speech—in effect, to the climax of his long struggle against slavery. “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I submit. So let it be done!”

BROWN SPOKE, IN ALL, for about three or four minutes. If his words had any effect on the judge, there was no sign of it. Parker moved immediately to sentencing. “You have been found by an impartial jury of your countrymen to be guilty of the offenses charged against you,” he said. “In mercy to our own people—to protect them against similar invasions upon their rights—in mercy and by way of warning to the infatuated men of other States who, like you, may attempt to free our negroes by forcing weapons into their hands, the judgment of the law must be enforced against you.”

Judge Parker then declared: “The sentence of the law is that you, John Brown, be hanged by the neck until you are dead.” Furthermore, “for the sake of the example,” the execution should occur in public rather than in the jail yard. He set December 2, a month hence, as the date for the hanging. “And may God have mercy on your soul.”

Earlier in the court session, the many spectators crowded in the room had uttered execrations, calling Brown a “damned black-hearted villain” and other slurs. But they listened to his speech and sentencing with solemnity and silence. Then, after the judge had spoken, one man broke the quiet by clapping his hands. “This indecorum was promptly suppressed and much regret was expressed by citizens at its occurrence,” a reporter wrote. The crowd also remained silent as the defendant returned to prison.

The first press reports on Brown’s sentencing were likewise muted. Correspondents in the court faithfully recorded his words but made little
comment on them. One wrote that Brown’s “composure, and his quiet and truthful manner” commanded respect and even some sympathy. Another thought he “spoke timidly—hesitatingly, indeed—and in a voice singularly gentle and mild.” A Virginian in the court described Brown’s tone as “indifferent” and quoted only the speech’s opening line.

The courtroom clerk didn’t even bother to reproduce that much. His official record consisted of ten words. Brown, upon being asked if he had reason why judgment should not be passed against him, “said he had nothing but what he had before said.”

In a sense, the clerk was right: Brown
had
said all of this before, in letters and in reply to his interrogators at the armory. Many elements of his speech, particularly his invocation of the Golden Rule, were decades-old touchstones for him. Brown may not have been fully prepared when the court called on him to speak in his own defense, but he’d been rehearsing for this moment his entire life.

And he had, at last, found the perfect stage, before a mostly hostile audience and a collection of correspondents who quickly transmitted the scene across the land. Brown’s public speaking style often lacked punch, but in print, his words and manner carried tremendous force. In a speech of just six hundred words, without notes or apparent preparation, he had cut through decades of cant and equivocation over slavery. Moreover, he had done so, not from the safety of a northern pulpit or editorial page, but while standing in a slave state courtroom, on trial for his life.

“Has anything like it been said in this land or age,” marveled a Philadelphia minister, writing the next day “with joy unutterable” to an abolitionist friend. “Slavery & Freedom brought face to face standing opposite; the one all black wrong, the other white as an angel.”

In essence, Brown’s speech had turned the case against him on its head. He had put his accusers on trial and pronounced
them
guilty, of crimes before God. He had also denied Virginians the righteous satisfaction of hanging a convicted felon. Feeling “no consciousness of guilt,” he told the court, he would gladly go to the gallows for “the ends of justice,” in solidarity with the slaves he had sought to free. Instead of pleading for his life, he made his death sentence a triumph. So let it be done!

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most eminent intellectual of his day, hailed Brown’s speech as one of the finest in history, and he would later call it
and the Gettysburg Address “the two best specimens of eloquence we have had in this country.” This praise reflected the strong shift in northern opinion that occurred following Brown’s conviction and sentencing. Emerson, like many others, had initially viewed Harpers Ferry with horror, writing that Brown “lost his head” and committed a “fatal blunder” in attacking Virginia. Now, moved by Brown’s words—and those of his neighbor Thoreau—Emerson reconsidered his earlier stance and became one of the abolitionist’s greatest champions.

Like Thoreau, Emerson trafficked in ideal types. Years before, in an essay titled “Heroism,” he had conjured an “unschooled man” who feels rather than thinks and “finds a quality in him that is negligent of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of reproach.” Unafraid of suffering and censure, and heedless of learned authority, Emerson’s hero also had to be persistent: “When you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself to the world.” Above all, heroism demanded certitude and self-reliance, right to the end. “Its ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood and wrong, and the power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents.”

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