Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price (38 page)

Fittingly, the crucial battle occurred just seven miles from the Kennedy farm, where Brown and his men had launched their assault on slavery three years before. On September 17, 1862, after driving north across the Potomac, Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army met a massive Union force by Antietam Creek, outside the Maryland town of Sharpsburg. The clash left 23,000 dead and wounded men strewed across cornfields and sunken farm roads—the bloodiest single day of combat in American history. The roar of battle was so great that it could be heard ten miles away in Harpers Ferry.

Neither army was driven from the field. But a day after the battle, Lee led his battered army back into Virginia, ending the southern offensive. Lincoln then signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which was formally issued on January 1, 1863. As of that date, slaves in states “in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

The edict’s impact was more symbolic than real. The slaves declared free were under Confederate control, beyond the reach of the federal government. But the proclamation nonetheless marked a sea change in the war and its ultimate aims. “God bless Abraham Lincoln and give God the glory for the day of Jubilee has come,” Mary Brown wrote from North Elba six days after the proclamation.

Lincoln’s decree also stated that “the people so declared to be free” would be “received into the armed service of the United States.” Circulars were issued, one of them urging “able-bodied COLORED MEN” to “fight for the STARS AND STRIPES.” At the top, the announcement said “ALL SLAVES were made FREEMEN” by Lincoln; at the bottom appeared the original version of the “John Brown Song.”

At one point, Lincoln even looked to Brown’s attack as a tactical model. Told by Frederick Douglass that Southerners had doubtless kept news of the proclamation from their slaves, Lincoln proposed organizing “a band” of black scouts, “whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown.” They would go behind enemy lines, carrying news of emancipation and urging slaves “to come within our boundaries.”

But the advance of Union armies made this measure unnecessary. Hundreds of thousands of slaves flocked to freedom, and black enlistment boosted the Union Army and Navy by 200,000 men. Brown’s dream of arming blacks to fight for their freedom was realized not at Harpers Ferry, but in the trenches of Petersburg, Virginia, and the lowlands of South Carolina, where the first regiment of freed slaves was led by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the minister-warrior and most stalwart of the Secret Six.

“I had been an abolitionist too long, and had known and loved John Brown too well,” Higginson wrote, “not to feel a thrill of joy at last on finding myself in the position where he only wished to be.”

BY WAR’S END, BROWN’S prophecy before the gallows would also be fulfilled. And it was Lincoln, yet again, who recapitulated Brown’s vision, that the “crimes of this
guilty land
” could only be purged with blood. The president echoed this most eloquently in March 1865, after four years of battle and the deaths of over 600,000 men. “This mighty scourge of
war,” he said, was the “woe due” the nation for slavery. If God willed that the carnage continue “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” then this was the true and righteous judgment of the Lord.

Six weeks later, the fighting was finally over and Lincoln lay dead, shot in Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth, who had watched Brown hang. Harpers Ferry and Lincoln’s assassination became bookends to the great national bloodletting over slavery. And in death, the reluctant Emancipator was joined to the abolitionist he had distanced himself from six years before. “Lincoln and John Brown are two martyrs, whose memories will live united in our bosoms,” wrote a black newspaper editor in New Orleans.

Later that year, the nation ratified the first change to the U.S. Constitution since 1804. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery; the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, ratified a few years later, extended full citizenship rights to blacks. In 1859, Americans had howled at the absurdity of Brown’s constitution, particularly its provision for blacks holding political office. A decade later, one of the signatories to Brown’s document, Isaac Shadd, joined the first wave of black officeholders in the Reconstruction South, rising to the speakership of the Mississippi House of Representatives.

ANOTHER SIGNATORY TO BROWN’S constitution was Osborne Anderson, the black printer who had survived the fighting in Harpers Ferry. He recruited black soldiers in the Civil War and died soon after it, from tuberculosis. Shortly before his death, Anderson revisited Harpers Ferry with friends, “for the purpose of pointing out to them the field of their maneuvres under Capt. Brown.”

Three other men who escaped capture in 1859 also served in the war. Barclay Coppoc, whose brother Edwin hanged, enlisted at the war’s start and died soon after, when Confederates derailed his troop train. Charles Tidd, the Kansas veteran who had opposed Brown’s attack plan, enlisted in the summer of 1861 and died at the front six months later, from disease. Francis Meriam, the sickly Bostonian who had arrived at the Kennedy farm with much-needed money, became a captain of black troops
in South Carolina. Wounded in the leg, he survived the war, only to die a few months after its end.

The last of the escapees, Brown’s partly crippled son Owen, spent the war years in the North, far from the battlefield. But Annie Brown, who had joined her father and brothers as a fifteen-year-old, wanted desperately to serve. “What a pity it is that I belong to the
weaker sex
, for if I were
only
a
man
then I could go to war,” she wrote in a letter in 1862. “I want to go and would if they would accept me.”

The next year she found a way, returning south as a teacher of freed slaves in Union-held territory in Virginia. While there, she attended a black Sunday school that had been established on the seized plantation of Henry Wise, the former governor who had been so intent on hanging her father. His now freed slaves were among those being educated at missionary schools on his property.

As for Wise himself, he had finally gotten his wish to lead Virginians in battle. Appointed a brigadier general, he rashly predicted that “Yankees would break and run” at the first sight of advancing rebels. Instead, under his incompetent and cantankerous command, Wise’s men were routed in Virginia and North Carolina—rare Confederate defeats in the East during 1861 and 1862.

At war’s end, Wise was indicted for treason along with Robert E. Lee and other Virginia rebels. Lee sought amnesty, but Wise followed Brown’s example, denying any guilt and refusing to plead with his accusers. “I could stand prouder on the gallows even,” he wrote, “than I could
on any condition of servile submission
.”

The treason charge was eventually dropped, and Wise ultimately renounced the institution he had fought so hard to defend. “God knew that we could be torn away from our black idol of slavery only by fire and blood and the drawn sword of the destroying angel of war,” he stated in 1866, sounding very much like the man he’d hanged in 1859.

IN THE INTERVENING YEARS, Brown’s body had lain a-mouldering in North Elba, but his family was no longer with him. Mary left the struggling property behind in 1863, writing that she hoped to give her daughters “a chance to do something for themselves in a new country that they
cannot have here.” She headed west, writing soon after her departure: “I very much regret that I ever spent a cent on that farm.”

The little money Mary possessed was a legacy of her husband’s hanging. Abolitionists created a John Brown Fund to support the family, with donations coming from as far afield as Haiti. Mary received several thousand dollars, and when she and four children reached northern California in 1864, neighbors raised additional money to help her buy land and build a cottage.

She lived in California until her death twenty years later, in relative comfort and peace. But there was one gruesome postscript to her loss at Harpers Ferry. In 1882, when Mary was visiting Chicago, an Indiana doctor offered to return the remains of her son Watson, who had been killed near the engine house and carried off for dissection and display at the medical school in Winchester. The doctor had served in Virginia during the war and recovered Watson’s remains before Union troops burned the medical school to the ground in 1862.

“Four of his finger joints on one hand and all the toes of one foot had already been cut off and carried away by relic seekers,” a reporter wrote of Watson’s partly preserved body, consisting of the skeleton, nerves, and blood vessels. The body had a bullet hole corresponding to Watson’s fatal belly wound. The family collected the remains for belated burial in North Elba, beside Brown and another son, Frederick, killed in Kansas.

Owen Brown, the last of the twenty-one men who had joined his father at the Kennedy farm, died in 1889, having spent his final years as a hermit on a mountainside in California. But Annie Brown lived on, well into the twentieth century, outlasting her many siblings and everyone else directly connected to the 1859 plot.

“She was born to suffer and yet endure,” John Brown, Jr., had written six months after Harpers Ferry, when Annie was still afflicted with “bone-crushing sorrow,” not only for her father and brothers but for an unnamed sweetheart who, her siblings believed, was among those killed in the attack.

In 1864, Annie moved with her mother to California, where she continued to teach black children and married an older man. For a short time she seemed “wonderfully happy,” a friend wrote. But her husband became alcoholic, abusive, and unable to work, leaving Annie struggling
to support their eight children. “He just sits and smokes and growls and snarls nearly all the time,” Annie wrote Franklin Sanborn, whose school in Concord she had briefly attended. “I married the man for what I thought he was or might be, not for what he has proved to be.”

Brown’s four surviving sons in old age, Owen at lower right

Though desperately poor, in debt, and often ill herself, Annie did not want to become “an object of charity” to admirers of the Brown family. She sold the few relics and letters of value she possessed, “to buy bread and clothing for my children,” and she told her offspring little about her father or Harpers Ferry. Annie “wished to live their lives with
them—not the old, sad one that was gone,” she said, and so she “shut the past away.”

But as her children grew up and her siblings died, Annie began to talk and write freely about the ten weeks she had spent as housekeeper and “watchdog” for Brown’s band. That long-ago summer, her sixteenth, was the most stirring passage of Annie’s difficult life, and she recalled every detail, right down to her insect bites and the exact layout of the log house. Mostly, though, she spoke of the men she had concealed, vividly describing their appearance, idiosyncrasies, favorite songs, and fears of what lay ahead.

“People who never did a heroic deed themselves are very particular as to how heroes behave,” she wrote. Having “waited upon them, watched and cared for them,” she knew Brown’s men as “neither saints nor the worst of sinners.” They were high-spirited, vulnerable young idealists, as she had been herself.

Part of Annie had died with them in 1859, despite the fame and assistance accorded her family. Though abolitionists paid for her to attend fine schools and board with families like the Alcotts, “I used to lock myself in my room and lay and roll on the floor, in the agony of a tearless grief for hours at a time,” she wrote. “The honor and glory that some saw in the work, did not fill the aching void that was left in my heart, losing so many loved ones.”

Annie carried that grief into widowhood and old age. She was “easily upset,” a niece wrote of her aged aunt’s visits. “She always called herself ‘The Last Survivor.’” In 1926 there appeared a small dispatch from the Associated Press: “Death Comes to Last Brown of Harper’s Ferry.” At the age of eighty-two, Annie had died after a serious fall. Newspapers reported, incorrectly, that she had witnessed her father’s execution. But the coroner’s certificate revealed a curious detail. Sixty-seven years after Brown’s hanging, his loyal daughter had died of a broken neck.

THE TOWN ANNIE’S FATHER had attacked in 1859 never fully recovered from the trauma, either. As Brown had discovered, Harpers Ferry was easy to seize and hard to hold. It changed hands a dozen times in the Civil War, with passing armies repeatedly burning the river bridges and
bombarding the town from surrounding hills. “The larger portion of the houses all lie in ruins and the entire place is not actually worth $10,” a Massachusetts soldier wrote his mother in 1863.

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