Authors: Tony Horwitz
Tags: #John Brown, #Abolition, #Civil War Period (1850-1877)
Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price (37 page)
BOOK: Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price
5.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
She and Lydia returned to the jail the next morning for a breakfast consisting mostly of oysters, which Stevens had requested for his final meal. “He was talking to us as if he were to meet us again soon,” Dunbar wrote. “He sent for a brush and polished his shoes, saying he ‘wished to look well when he ascended the scaffold.’”
This was too much for his sister, who ran from the room and “wept convulsively.” Lydia’s anguish, Dunbar wrote, “more even than grief for him, moved me, and the tears forced themselves to my eyes.”
But Stevens remained stoic, urging them not to grieve, and soon after their departure he and Hazlett climbed atop their coffins for the wagon ride to the gallows. “Both exhibited great firmness,” the
New York Times
reported, and “persisted in refusing all the kindly offices of the ministry in their last moments.”
New York Times
reported, and “persisted in refusing all the kindly offices of the ministry in their last moments.”
Still, the man who had survived six bullet wounds was not easy to kill. When the drop came, “Hazlett seemed to die very easily,” a Baltimore
paper reported, but Stevens “struggled for a considerable time, and appeared to suffer very much.”
paper reported, but Stevens “struggled for a considerable time, and appeared to suffer very much.”
Like Brown, Stevens had left a message before going to the gallows, though his was not in writing. In accordance with Stevens’s and Hazlett’s wishes to be buried in “a free land,” their coffins were shipped to the New Jersey home of Rebecca Spring, who had taken such an interest in the prisoners. Before the burial in a nearby cemetery, Stevens’s coffin was opened to cut a lock of his hair. “Attached to the button-hole of Stevens’ coat by red and blue ribbons was a plain black India rubber ring,” the
New York Herald
reported, “but for whom it was intended his friends were not informed.” A woman at the funeral wrote Higginson, “It apparently was a last thought, conceived too late for explanation.”
New York Herald
reported, “but for whom it was intended his friends were not informed.” A woman at the funeral wrote Higginson, “It apparently was a last thought, conceived too late for explanation.”
Jennie Dunbar was present at Stevens’s funeral and was described in news reports as his fiancée. Annie Brown believed this to be true. She had grown close to Stevens at the Kennedy farm, had corresponded with him in prison, and met Dunbar a few months after his hanging, at a ceremony for Brown and his men in North Elba. While there, Dunbar told Annie that she had broken her engagement to Stevens in prison, just hours before his execution. According to Annie, Dunbar knew that “as soon as he entered the spirit world,” he would know she didn’t love him, and “her conscience would not let her deceive him.”
But Stevens was a persistent suitor, and he evidently died in hope, carrying a ring with him to the gallows. Two months later, his friends in Ohio held a “circle” to communicate with his spirit. At one point, the medium “seemed to suffer about the throat,” wrote a woman present at the séance, and “beckoned to Jennie to take a seat by her side.” The medium held Dunbar’s hand as Stevens reported that “he died very hard but it did not injure the soul.” He then “addressed Jennie very kindly.”
As Stevens had told her in his letters, he would await her in the Spirit-Land, bearing “the love of Soul, who’s depth is to the end of time.”
Immortal Raiders
They all called him crazy then; who calls him crazy now?
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU,
“The Last Days of John Brown,” 1860
T
he hanging of Stevens and Hazlett on March 16, 1860, was greeted with relief by the Virginians whom Brown and his men had attacked exactly five months before. “The curtain has at last fallen upon the closing scene of the Harper’s Ferry tragedy,” a Charlestown paper observed, “and we will indulge the hope, that with it terminates forever all organized interference with the constitutional rights of the South.”
he hanging of Stevens and Hazlett on March 16, 1860, was greeted with relief by the Virginians whom Brown and his men had attacked exactly five months before. “The curtain has at last fallen upon the closing scene of the Harper’s Ferry tragedy,” a Charlestown paper observed, “and we will indulge the hope, that with it terminates forever all organized interference with the constitutional rights of the South.”
But the execution of the last jailed insurgents terminated little except their lives and the duties of their guards. Nationally, Harpers Ferry and its aftermath had exposed a gaping crevasse; nothing now seemed capable of bridging it. The “knell of the Union” that Jefferson had first heard forty years earlier, during the debate over Missouri, could no longer be hushed.
Abraham Lincoln, who was emerging that March as a contender for the presidency, labored to hold the Union together. But in his failure to do so, and in his eventual conversion to Brown’s cause, he personified the nation’s transformation between 1859 and 1865. At the time of the Harpers Ferry attack, Lincoln was a second-tier candidate for the Republican nomination, so lightly regarded that newspapers often rendered his first name as “Abram.” Like many in the North, he admired Brown’s courage and antislavery conviction but condemned his resort to violence. He also
grasped the nation’s fear of disunion and war, and used Harpers Ferry to position himself as a safely moderate choice in the Republican field.
grasped the nation’s fear of disunion and war, and used Harpers Ferry to position himself as a safely moderate choice in the Republican field.
“John Brown’s effort was peculiar,” he told leading Republicans at New York’s Cooper Institute in February, 1860. “It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed.”
Reiterating the Republican position on slavery—to oppose the institution’s spread but “to let it alone where it is”—he addressed southern fears directly. “You charge that we stir insurrections among your slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper’s Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise.”
Brown was indeed no Republican, and Lincoln no abolitionist. Though the two men shared certain traits, including a Calvinist upbringing on the frontier, Lincoln had very different views on race and emancipation. Born in the slave state of Kentucky, he believed the institution would die of its own accord, and he favored resettling freed blacks in Africa, just as Jefferson and others had proposed decades earlier.
“I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” he stated during his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas. Citing a “physical difference between the races” that made such equality impossible, he added: “I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
Such attitudes were broadly in line with the white northern mainstream and served Lincoln well in the anxious aftermath of Harpers Ferry. So did the militancy of the Republican frontrunner, Senator William Seward, of New York, who was famous for having spoken of “an
irrepressible conflict
” that would make the nation all slaveholding or entirely free. Southerners and their northern allies repeatedly cited this remark after Harpers Ferry. In their telling, Seward had called for an abolitionist crusade, of which Brown and his men were the inevitable vanguard.
irrepressible conflict
” that would make the nation all slaveholding or entirely free. Southerners and their northern allies repeatedly cited this remark after Harpers Ferry. In their telling, Seward had called for an abolitionist crusade, of which Brown and his men were the inevitable vanguard.
Lincoln had many political assets, including his “Rail-Splitter” image of backwoods self-reliance. But his deft handling of the slavery issue, amid the fallout from Harpers Ferry, did much to secure his surprise,
third-ballot victory over Seward at the Republican convention in May 1860. The party also wrote into its platform Lincoln’s rebuke of Brown, adopting a resolution to “denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.”
third-ballot victory over Seward at the Republican convention in May 1860. The party also wrote into its platform Lincoln’s rebuke of Brown, adopting a resolution to “denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.”
IN THE SOUTH, HOWEVER, Republicans’ pledge of noninterference with slavery fell on deaf ears. Fire-eaters, emboldened by the secessionist fever that broke out after Brown’s hanging, led a walkout at the Democratic convention when delegates refused to endorse extreme guarantees for slaveholders. In the end, the two factions nominated separate candidates, while disaffected moderates formed a third party and nominated a Tennessean who drained support from both Democratic candidates.
The Republicans, needing only to hold their northern base, ran a cautious campaign; Lincoln gave no speeches and barely left Springfield, Illinois. This made electoral sense, but it served to further isolate North from South. There was little national discussion of the brewing crisis, and almost no Republican presence below the Mason-Dixon Line, where Southerners dismissed or wildly misrepresented Lincoln’s views on slavery. All that mattered was his denunciation of the institution as a great evil, and his leadership of a “Black Republican” party that Southerners had long since caricatured as an abolitionist cabal, intent on waging a “war of extermination” against slavery everywhere.
The depth of the sectional divide became apparent that fall, when Lincoln won all but one northern state, in most cases easily. This gave him enough electoral votes to win the presidency in the crowded field, even though he received less than 40 percent of the popular vote and had almost no support in the South (in eleven states, Republican ballots weren’t even available).
Mary Chesnut, the South Carolina diarist, was on a train the day after the election when news of Lincoln’s victory swept her car. The response was electric, she wrote, with everyone agreeing a Rubicon had been crossed. The election result would reprise, on a national level, the terror in Virginia the previous fall.
“Now that the black radical Republicans have the power I suppose they
will Brown us all,” one passenger cried. Chesnut added in her diary: “No doubt of it.”
will Brown us all,” one passenger cried. Chesnut added in her diary: “No doubt of it.”
SOUTH CAROLINIANS DIDN’T WAIT to have their fears confirmed. Six weeks after the election, delegates meeting in Charleston voted unanimously to repeal the state’s ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788: “The union now subsisting between South Carolina and the other States, under the name of ‘The United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.”
Six other Deep South states quickly followed South Carolina out of the Union. In formal declarations explaining their secession, the states often cited Harpers Ferry and made clear their core grievance. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” Mississippians stated. “There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union.”
In February 1861, the secessionists formed the Confederate States of America and elected Jefferson Davis as president. They also adopted a “Provisional Constitution,” outlining the laws of their breakaway government. Sixteen months earlier, Southerners had pointed to Brown’s Provisional Constitution as evidence of treason. Now they were in rebellion themselves.
Virginians, however, balked at joining the Confederacy, at least initially. This hesitation irked Henry Wise, who was eager as always to be at the forefront. As delegates in Richmond debated secession that April, the former governor secretly convened a band of conspirators, appointing himself as commander. Their mission: to seize the federal armory at Harpers Ferry before the U.S. government fortified it.
The next day, having dispatched his men, Wise returned to the secession meeting and brandished a pistol, telling delegates: “Blood will be flowing at Harper’s Ferry before night.” On April 18, six days after South Carolinians shelled Fort Sumter and exactly eighteen months after Brown’s capture, Wise’s allies took over the government works at Harpers Ferry, amid cries of treason from townspeople who wanted Virginia to stay in the Union. Delegates in Richmond voted to secede that same day and belatedly sent troops to assist in Wise’s raid. The newly Confederate
state acquired thousands of federal guns and hauled the factory’s machines and tools to an armory in Richmond.
state acquired thousands of federal guns and hauled the factory’s machines and tools to an armory in Richmond.
Burning of the arsenal at Harpers Ferry
Before surrendering the government works, federal guards torched the arsenal, and in June, Confederates completed the job, burning the stripped armory and rifle factory. Born with John Brown at the turn of the nineteenth century, the Harpers Ferry armory had outlived him by less than two years. One of its few surviving structures was the little brick engine house that had served as his headquarters.
The men who had led U.S. marines in the attack on the engine house, Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart, were now Confederate officers, opposing federal troops. So was Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, who had watched Brown hang. In 1862, Jackson returned to Harpers Ferry and won a battle that resulted in the largest surrender of U.S. troops in American history until World War II.
But the town itself was no longer much of a prize. Earlier that year, Union troops had retaliated against Confederate sniper fire from the town by burning the Wager House, the Gault House saloon, and other buildings from which Virginians had battled Brown and his men. The major
who carried out the burning was Hector Tyndale, an abolitionist who had escorted Mary Brown when she traveled to Virginia in 1859 to bring home her husband’s remains.
who carried out the burning was Hector Tyndale, an abolitionist who had escorted Mary Brown when she traveled to Virginia in 1859 to bring home her husband’s remains.
THE MEMORY OF BROWN’S body also lived on, in song. Early in the war, Massachusetts troops marched to the tune of a popular hymn, improvising their own lyrics, which ran, in part:
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave …
He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord,
His soul is marching on!
He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord,
His soul is marching on!
The poet Julia Ward Howe first heard the marching song in the fall of 1861. Married to Samuel Howe of the Secret Six, she regarded Brown as a “holy and glorious” martyr and was moved to compose new lyrics. Though her version of the song made no mention of Brown, it was infused with his crusading spirit.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are
stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are
stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was to become the anthem of the Union, a righteous call to answer God’s trumpet and crush the serpent’s head. But in one respect, her lyrics—like the man she honored—were ahead of their time. In late 1861, when Howe composed the “Battle Hymn,” the Union hadn’t yet embraced the stirring line “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”
Through six months of war, Abraham Lincoln had held to his long-standing pledge of noninterference with slavery in the South. He was fighting to preserve the Union, not to free slaves. For Lincoln, this wasn’t simply a matter of principle or constitutional duty. The northern public wasn’t ready to fight for emancipation, and he needed the support of
slaveholding border states such as Maryland and Kentucky, which hadn’t seceded and were crucial to the war effort.
slaveholding border states such as Maryland and Kentucky, which hadn’t seceded and were crucial to the war effort.
But slaves themselves quickly upset Lincoln’s policy. They fled their owners and streamed to Union-held positions in the South. Many expressed eagerness to join the northern fight. Abolitionists urged Lincoln to free and enlist these refugees, and some officers in the field effectively did so, refusing to return them to their owners and employing the fugitives at forts and camps.
Still, Lincoln wouldn’t budge from his policy. Fugitive slaves were “contraband of war”—property seized from the enemy—and nothing more. He would not wage a war for liberation.
“Emancipation,” the president declared in December 1861, “would be equivalent to a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale.”
BUT LINCOLN WAS A self-questioning man; unlike Brown, he was willing to reconsider his views when they butted against circumstance. In 1862, as the South secured one battlefield victory after another, he reversed course, intent on doing whatever was necessary to win the war. Assailing slavery would bring the North both manpower and European support, while at the same time weakening the southern war effort. Once he decided to change his policy, Lincoln awaited an elusive northern victory to announce it, lest his shift seem an act of desperation.
BOOK: Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price
5.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Other books
Designer Desires by Kasey Martin
Rescue Party by Cheryl Dragon
Where Serpents Sleep by C. S. Harris
True Perfection [Aspire 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) by Allyson Young
Fear of Frying by Jill Churchill
The Border Hostage by Virginia Henley
The Braxtons of Miracle Springs by Michael Phillips
One Chance by T. Renee Fike
Above His Proper Station by Lawrence Watt-Evans
Opposing Force: Book 01 - The God Particle by Anthony Decosmo