“I expect to effect a mighty conquest, even though it be like the last victory of Samson,” Brown had written Franklin Sanborn in 1858, eighteen months before Harpers Ferry. Even “in the
worst event
,” he wrote from prison, he knew the attack “would certainly PAY.” Whether or not his military plan succeeded, Brown believed his strike would shock the nation and shake down the pillars of slavery. And he was fully prepared to perish amid the rubble of a sinful society he had so long sought to destroy.
Brown’s readiness to die at Harpers Ferry was also evident in the way he staged the mission. He quickly took possession of George Washington’s sword and freed slaves belonging to the Founding Father’s great-grandnephew. Lest anyone miss this symbolism, Brown left an ersatz suicide note, in the form of his “Declaration of Liberty by the Representatives of the Slave Population of the United States of America.” The document not only quoted liberally from the 1776 model and cited the ways in which the promise of liberty had been betrayed, it promised a fight to the death and ended on an apocalyptic note: “Nature is mourning for its murdered, and Afflicted Children. Hung be the Heavens in Scarlet.”
The declaration, rolled into a scroll, was part of the vast cache that troops found at the Kennedy farm. In the four years preceding his attack, Brown had obsessively covered his tracks, using aliases and coded language, hiding his whereabouts, and constantly lecturing his accomplices on the need for absolute loyalty and secrecy. Yet he set off for Harpers Ferry on the night of October 16 leaving behind trunks and carpetbags filled with incriminating documents. He even carried some on his person.
In the event of his death at Harpers Ferry, Brown wanted to ensure that the world knew his full design. When he was miraculously spared, Brown implicated himself as he lay bleeding on the floor of the paymaster’s office. He spoke freely to his interrogators, even asking that the incendiary constitution he carried with him be read aloud. “It struck me at the time as very singular that he should so freely enter into his plans immediately,” wrote Andrew Hunter, who was present for the questioning. “He seemed very fond of talking.”
Though Brown refused to betray others, the paper trail he left at the Kennedy farm quickly did so, revealing a support network that included Gerrit Smith, his oldest benefactor. This careless exposure of his closest allies would seem out of character for Brown. But he gave a strong clue to his reasons for doing so in the advice he had offered years before to the League of Gileadites, the self-defense group he formed in 1851 to combat the Fugitive Slave Act.
“
If you are assailed
,” Brown advised the Springfield blacks, “
go into the houses of your most prominent and influential white friends with your wives, and that will effectually fasten upon them the suspicion of being connected with you, and will compel them to make a common cause with you, whether they would otherwise live up to their profession or not. This would leave them no choice in the matter
.”
By exposing his co-conspirators, Brown evidently hoped to pressure them to carry on the campaign should he die at Harpers Ferry. “Some would doubtless prove themselves true to their own choice; others would flinch,” he had told the Gileadites. In the case of Gerrit Smith and others of the Secret Six, the initial response
was
to flinch. But in a broader sense, Brown was proved right. His actions forced a choice on antislavery Northerners: were they true to their convictions, or not? Though reluctant at first, much of the northern public ultimately came around to Brown and his cause.
One reason they did so was also alluded to in the abolitionist’s advice to the Gileadites. “Nothing so charms the American people as personal bravery,” he wrote in the 1851 document. “The trial for life of one bold and to some extent successful man, for defending his rights in good earnest, would arouse more sympathy throughout the nation than the accumulated wrongs and suffering of more than three millions of our submissive colored population.”
EIGHT YEARS LATER, BROWN had followed his own advice almost to the letter. He demonstrated great bravery, earnestly defended his rights in court, and aroused tremendous sympathy. But he still faced the final sacrifice. “My present great anxiety is to get as near in readiness for a different field of action as I well
can
,” he wrote a friend on November 28, four days before his execution.
The next day, he expressed his determination to die without clerical comfort. “I have asked to be spared from having any
mock
;
or hypocritical prayers made over me
, when I am publicly
murdered
,” he wrote, “& that my only
religious attendants
be poor
little, dirty, ragged, bare headed, & barefooted Slave boys; & Girls
; led by some old
grey headed Slave Mother
.”
Brown also readied himself for a final parting from his family. On November 30, he sat down to compose “what is probably the last letter I shall ever write to any of you.” Most of the long letter consisted of religious and moral exhortation. “John Brown writes to his children to abhor with
undiing hatred
, also: that ‘sum of all vilanies;’ Slavery.” He urged his “dear
shattered
:
& broken
family” to “cling to one another: “love
the whole remnant
of our once great family.”
Brown, of course, was largely responsible for his clan’s shattered state. He would soon add Mary to the lengthening list of widows in North Elba, and of the seven sons who had fought with him in Kansas and Virginia, three were now dead and two (Owen and John junior) were being hunted by authorities. Brown’s guilt over having led, or misled, Oliver and Watson to their deaths at Harpers Ferry may have contributed to his trepidation over seeing Mary.
Understandably, she had expressed annoyance over being turned back in early November, a short way from Charlestown. “You have nursed and taken care of me a great deal; but I cannot even come and look at you,” she wrote on November 13. Meanwhile, two other women had gone to “minister to your wants, which I am deprived of doing.”
One of these women was the wife of a Boston judge who had gone with her husband to Charlestown during the trial and then briefly visited Brown in jail, where she mended his coat. The other was a New Jersey abolitionist, Rebecca Spring, who had impulsively headed to Charlestown
with her son, bringing autumn leaves to brighten Brown’s cell. “I do not want to do or say anything to disturb your peace of mind,” Mary wrote her husband, “but O, I would serve you gladly if I could.”
Rather than return all the way to North Elba, Mary had remained within close reach, mostly staying with abolitionist supporters in Philadelphia. A reporter who interviewed her that November described her as “tall, large, and muscular, giving the impression at first sight of a frame capable of great strength and long endurance.” Though “quiet and retiring,” she made an acute observation when asked about her husband’s sanity. “He is always cool, deliberate, and never over hasty; but he has always considered that his first perceptions of duty, and his first impulses to action, were the best and safest to be followed. He has almost always acted upon his first suggestions.”
While in Philadelphia, Mary enlisted the aid of an abolitionist minister to compose a letter to Governor Wise. “I do not ask for his life, dear as it is to us, and right worthy and honorable as I know him to be,” she wrote the Virginia executive. “I ask for myself & my children that, when all shall be over, the mortal remains of my husband & his sons may be delivered to me for decent & tender interment among their kindred.”
There was no assurance that this modest request would be granted. Like seven other insurgents killed at Harpers Ferry, Oliver had been dumped in an unmarked grave, at an undisclosed location; Watson’s body had been carried off by medical students. Wise was strongly urged to dispose of their father in similar fashion. Medical students at the University of Virginia requested Brown’s body for dissection, as did a Mississippi physician, who planned to display the skeleton: “I will rattle it through the New England States until I frighten every Scoundrel Abolitionist out of the country.”
Even more ghoulish was the request of an anatomy professor at the Medical School of Virginia, in Richmond, who wrote the day after Brown’s conviction: “We desire if Brown and his coadjutors are executed to add their heads to the collection in our museum. If the transference of the bodies will not exceed a cost of five dollars each we should also be glad to have them.” Wise took note of this request, writing to Andrew Hunter the next day: “The Court may order the bodies to be given over to surgeons.”
But Wise was evidently moved by Mary Brown’s appeal, for he discarded any further consideration of handing her husband’s body over for dissection or display. “Madam,” he wrote her with characteristic chivalry, “Sympathizing as I do with your affliction, you shall have the exertion of my authority and personal influence to assist you in gathering up the bones of your sons and your husband.”
Wise added that he took “not the slightest pleasure in the execution of any whom the laws condemn.” He signed himself, “With tenderness and truth,” and enclosed a copy of the order he’d written the same day to the commanding officer in Charlestown, instructing him to protect Brown’s body “from all mutilation,” place it “in a plain, decent coffin,” and send it to Harpers Ferry for collection by Mary Brown.
GOVERNOR WISE WROTE THIS letter in Richmond on November 26, the same day Brown wrote Mary from Charlestown, saying that he was “entirely willing” to have her visit before his hanging. Upon receiving these encouraging dispatches, Mary immediately set off by train, with three Philadelphians, arriving in Harpers Ferry late on November 30, less than forty-eight hours before her husband’s execution.
She was lucky to have gotten that far. In a final spasm of hypervigilance, Wise had cordoned off Jefferson County to guard against a last-minute rescue attempt. The authorities also feared the execution would become a public circus, undignified and hard to control. “I want you to take measures at once, to break up the exhibition and sale to passengers on our trains, at Harper’s Ferry, of the pikes, or other weapons,” W. P. Smith of the B & O wired a railroad agent. “I think this pike trade only adds to the excitement.”
The railroad had to contend not only with souvenir sellers but also with “excursionists” who wanted to come “see Brown hung.” One Boston tour operator requested reduced rates for a large party of Northerners and promised they would behave “with propriety.” But he and others were turned away. “Under cover of such a crowd of pretended spectators, hundreds of armed assassins, coming with a view of attempting a rescue, could introduce themselves,” Andrew Hunter warned the railroad, asking that no group tickets be sold.
On November 28, Virginia authorities went much further. Wise announced that the state would take control of the railroad line through Charlestown, “for the use and occupation of Virginia troops alone.” He posted detectives at depots and on trains at other points, to guard against invasion. At Wise’s instruction, military and civil authorities also issued a proclamation stating: “STRANGERS found within the County of Jefferson, and Counties adjacent, having no known and proper business here, and who cannot give a satisfactory account of themselves, will be at once arrested.”
Wise, in effect, had declared martial law across a large swath of Virginia. Yet even this wasn’t enough. Citing “information from various quarters” of plans to invade Virginia and rescue Brown, he wrote President Buchanan asking him to “take steps to preserve peace between the states.” He sent copies of this dispatch to the governors of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, adding: “Necessity may compel us to pursue invaders of our jurisdiction into yours.”
Even the pliant Buchanan bucked at Wise’s extraordinary request. The governor’s alarm was “almost incredible,” the president wrote in reply, and he was “at a loss to discover any provision in the constitution or laws of the United States” authorizing him to guard one state from another. As a token gesture, Buchanan agreed to send federal artillery to protect the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, but otherwise declared the security in place “sufficient for any emergency.”
Undeterred, Wise secured the state borders on his own, ordering men posted “on the line of frontier” along the Potomac and Ohio Rivers. He also called out still more militia, bringing the total in Charlestown to about sixteen hundred men, equal to the civilian population. “The town looks to-day as if the times were revolutionary,” a
New York Herald
correspondent reported on November 29. “Drums beating, music playing, flags waving, sentinels pacing.” Even the new commander in charge of the area thought the force excessive. “There is no absolute need for half we have,” he wired the governor.
The newly arrived troops included cadets from the Virginia Military Institute, accompanied by a professor, Major Thomas J. Jackson, who would soon earn the nickname Stonewall. His future Confederate commander,
Robert E. Lee, also returned to the scene, in charge of the artillery sent by Buchanan. As before, Lee regarded fears of
“the enemy”
to be greatly overblown, and he showed little enthusiasm at the prospect of serving again in Harpers Ferry.
On the morning of December 1, Lee was introduced to Mary Brown, who was seeking clearance to visit her husband in jail. Lee referred her to the general in overall command of Virginia’s troops. “It is a matter over which I have no control & wish to take none,” Lee explained in a letter to his wife later that day.