Abraham Lincoln, a History — Volume 02 · Chapter 13Table of Contents Vol. II (12)
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But merely to conceive great enterprises is not to perform them, and every after-step of John Brown reveals his lamentable weakness and utter inadequacy for the heroic role to which he fancied himself called. His first blunder was in divulging all his plans to Forbes, an utter stranger, while he was so careful in concealing them from others. Forbes, as ambitious and reckless as himself, of course soon quarreled with him, and left him, and endeavored first to supplant and then betray him.
Realf, Testimony Mason Report, p. 91. Ibid., pp. 91-4.
Meanwhile, little by little, Brown gathered one colored and six white confederates from among his former followers in Kansas, and assembled them for drill and training in Iowa; four others joined him there. These, together with his son Owen, counted, all told, a band of twelve persons engaged for, and partly informed of, his purpose. He left them there for instruction during the first three months of the year 1858, while he himself went East to procure means.
"Atlantic," July, 1872, p. 51.
At the beginning of February, 1858, John Brown became, and remained for about a month, a guest at the house of Frederick Douglass, in Rochester, New York. Immediately on his arrival there he wrote to a prominent Boston abolitionist, T.W. Higginson: "I now want to get, for the perfecting of by far the most important undertaking of my whole life, from $500 to $800 within the next sixty days. I have written Rev. Theodore Parker, George L. Stearns, and F.B. Sanborn, Esquires, on the subject."
Sanborn, "Life and Letters of John Brown," p. 438.
Correspondence and mutual requests for a conference ensued, and finally these Boston friends sent Sanborn to the house of Gerrit Smith, in Peterboro, New York, where a meeting had been arranged. Sanborn was a young man of twenty-six, just graduated from college, who, as secretary of various Massachusetts committees, had been the active agent for sending contributions to Kansas. He arrived on the evening of Washington's birthday, February 22, 1858, and took part in a council of conspiracy, of which John Brown was the moving will and chief actor.
"Atlantic," July, 1872, p. 52. Sanborn in "Atlantic," March, 1875, p. 329; also, Mason Report, pp. 48-59.
Brown began by reading to the council a long document which he had drafted since his stay in Rochester. It called itself a "Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States," which, as it explained, looked to no overthrow of States or dissolution of the Union, but simply to "amendment and repeal." It was not in any sense a reasonable project of government, but simply an ill-jointed outline of rules for a proposed slave insurrection. The scheme, so far as any comprehension of it may be gleaned from the various reports which remain, was something as follows:
Mason Report, p. 55. Sanborn, "Life and Letters of John Brown," p. 438.
Blair, Testimony, Mason Report, pp. 121-5.
Somewhere in the Virginia mountains he would raise the standard of revolt and liberation. Enthusiasts would join him from the free States, and escaped blacks come to his help from Canada. From Virginia and the neighboring slave-States of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, fugitive slaves, with their families, would flock to his camps. He would take his supplies, provisions, and horses by force from the neighboring plantations. Money, plate, watches, and jewelry would "constitute a liberal safety or intelligence fund." For arms, he had 200 Sharps rifles, and 200 revolvers, with which he would arm his best marksmen. His ruder followers, and even the women and children, he would arm with pikes to defend the fortifications. He would construct defenses of palisades and earth-works. He would use natural strongholds; find secret mountain-passes to connect one with another; retreat from and evade attacks he could not overcome. He would maintain and indefinitely prolong a guerrilla war, of which the Seminole Indians in Florida and the negroes in Hayti afforded examples. With success, he would enlarge the area of his occupation so as to include arable valleys and low-lands bordering the Alleghany range in the slave-States; and here he would colonize, govern, and educate the blacks he had freed, and maintain their liberty. He would make captures and reprisals, confiscate property, take, hold, and exchange prisoners and especially white hostages and exchange them for slaves to liberate. He would recognize neutrals, make treaties, exercise humanity, prevent crime, repress immorality, and observe all established laws of war. Success would render his revolt permanent, and in the end, through "amendment and repeal," abolish slavery. If, at the worst, he were driven from the mountains he would retreat with his followers through the free States to Canada. He had 12 recruits drilling in Iowa, and a half-executed contract for 1000 pikes in Connecticut; furnish him $800 in money and he would begin operations in May.
Sanborn in "Atlantic," March, 1875, p. 329.
Redpath, "Life of John Brown," p. 206. Sanborn in "Atlantic," July, 1872, p. 52.
This, if we supply continuity and arrangement to his vagaries, must have been approximately what he felt or dreamily saw, and outlined in vigorous words to his auditors. His listening friends were dumfounded at the audacity as well as heart-sick at the hopelessness of such an attempt. They pointed out the almost certainty of failure and destruction, and attempted to dissuade him from the mad scheme; but to no purpose. They saw they were dealing with a foregone conclusion; he had convoked them, not to advise as to methods, but to furnish the means. All reasonable argument he met with his rigid dogmatic formulas, his selected proverbs, his favorite texts of Scripture. The following, preserved by various witnesses as samples of his sayings at other times, indicate his reasoning on this occasion: "Give a slave a pike and you make him a man. I would not give Sharps rifles to more than ten men in a hundred, and then only when they have learned to use them. A ravine is better than a plain. Woods and mountain-sides can be held by resolute men against ten times their force. Nat Turner, with fifty men, held Virginia five weeks; the same number, well organized and armed, can shake the system out of the State." "A few men in the right, and knowing they are right, can overturn a king. Twenty men in the Alleghanies could break slavery to pieces in two years." "If God be for us, who can be against us? Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."
Ibid., March, 1875, p. 329. Sanborn, "Atlantic," July, 1872, pp. 53-4.
Sanborn, "Life and Letters of John Brown," p. 439.
One of the participants relates, that—"When the agitated party broke up their council for the night, it was perfectly plain that Brown could not be held back from his purpose." The discussion of the friends on the second day (February 23) was therefore only whether they should aid him, or oppose him, or remain indifferent. Against every admonition of reason, mere personal sympathy seems to have carried a decision in favor of the first of these alternatives. "You see how it is," said the chief counselor, Gerrit Smith; "our dear old friend has made up his mind to this course and cannot be turned from it. We cannot give him up to die alone; we must support him." Brown has left an exact statement of his own motive and expectation, in a letter to Sanborn on the following day. "I have only had this one opportunity in a life of nearly sixty years ... God has honored but comparatively a very small part of mankind with any possible chance for such mighty and soul-satisfying rewards ... I expect nothing but to endure hardness, but I expect to effect a mighty conquest, even though it be like the last victory of Samson."
Realf, Testimony, Mason Report, p. 99.
Nine days later Brown went to Boston, where the conspiracy was enlarged and strengthened by the promises and encouragements of a little coterie of radical abolitionists.[3] Within the next two months the funds he desired were contributed and sent him. Meanwhile Brown returned West, and moved his company of recruits from Iowa, by way of Chicago and Detroit, to the town of Chatham, in Canada West, arriving there about the 1st of May. By written invitations, Brown here called together what is described as "a quiet convention of the friends of freedom," to perfect his organization. On the 8th of May, 1858, they held a meeting with closed doors, there being present the original company of ten or eleven white members and one colored, whom Brown had brought with him, and a somewhat miscellaneous gathering of negro residents of Canada. Some sort of promise of secrecy was mutually made; then John Brown, in a speech, laid his plan before the meeting. One Delany, a colored doctor, in a response, promised the assistance of all the colored people in Canada. The provisional constitution drafted by Brown at Rochester was read and adopted by articles, and about forty-five persons signed their names to the "Constitution," for the "proscribed and oppressed races of the United States." Two days afterwards, the meeting again convened for the election of officers; John Brown was elected commander-in-chief by acclamation; other members were by the same summary method appointed secretary of war, secretary of state, secretary of the treasury, and two of them members of congress. The election of a president was prudently postponed.
This Chatham Convention cannot claim consideration as a serious deliberative proceeding. John Brown was its sole life and voice. The colored Canadians were nothing but spectators. The ten white recruits were mere Kansas adventurers, mostly boys in years and waifs in society, perhaps depending largely for livelihood on the employment or bounty, precarious as it was, of their leader. Upon this reckless, drifting material the strong despotic will, emotional enthusiasm, and mysterious rhapsodical talk of John Brown exercised an irresistible fascination; he drew them by easy gradations into his confidence and conspiracy. The remaining element, John Brown's son in the Chatham meeting, and other sons and relatives in the Harper's Ferry attack, are of course but the long educated instruments of the father's thought and purpose.
Stearns to Brown, May 14, 1858: Howe, Testimony, Mason Report, p. 177.
With funds provided, with his plan of government accepted, and himself formally appointed commander-in-chief, Brown doubtless thought his campaign about to begin; it was however destined to an unexpected interruption. The discarded and disappointed adventurer Forbes had informed several prominent Republicans in Washington City that Brown was meditating an unlawful enterprise; and the Boston committee, warned that certain arms in Brown's custody, which had been contributed for Kansas defense, were about to be flagrantly misused, dared not incur the public odium of complicity in such a deception and breach of faith. The Chatham organization was scarcely completed when Brown received word from the Boston committee that he must not use the arms (the 200 Sharps rifles and 200 revolvers) which had been intrusted to him for any other purpose than for the defense of Kansas. Brown hurried to Boston; but oral consultation with his friends confirmed the necessity for postponement; and it was arranged that, to lull suspicion, he should return to Kansas and await a more favorable opportunity. He yielded assent, and that fall and winter performed the exploit of leading an armed foray into Missouri, and carrying away eleven slaves to Canada—an achievement which, while to a certain degree it placed him in the attitude of a public outlaw, nevertheless greatly increased his own and his followers' confidence in the success of his general plan. Gradually the various obstacles melted away. Kansas became pacified. The adventurer Forbes faded out of sight and importance. The disputed Sharps rifles and revolvers were transferred from committee to committee, and finally turned over to a private individual to satisfy a debt. He in turn delivered them to Brown without any hampering conditions. The Connecticut blacksmith finished and shipped the thousand pikes. The contributions from the Boston committee swelled from one to several thousands of dollars. The recruits, with a few changes, though scattered in various parts of the country, were generally held to their organization and promise, and slightly increased in number. The provisional constitution and sundry blank commissions were surreptitiously printed, and captains and lieutenants appointed by the signature of John Brown "Commander-in-Chief," countersigned by the "Secretary of War."
Gradually, also, the commander-in-chief resolved on an important modification of his plan: that, instead of plunging at once into the Virginia mountains, he would begin by the capture of the United States armory and arsenal at Harper's Ferry. Two advantages seem to have vaguely suggested themselves to his mind as likely to arise from this course: the possession of a large quantity of Government arms, and the widespread panic and moral influence of so bold an attempt. But it nowhere appears that he had any conception of the increased risk and danger it involved, or that he adopted the slightest precaution to meet them.
Harper's Ferry was a town of five thousand inhabitants, lying between the slave-States of Maryland and Virginia, at the confluence of the Potomac and the Shenandoah rivers, where the united streams flow through a picturesque gap in the single mountain-range called the Blue Ridge. The situation possesses none of the elements which would make it a defensible fastness for protracted guerrilla warfare, such as was contemplated in Brown's plan. The mountains are everywhere approachable without difficulty; are pierced by roads and farms in all directions; contain few natural resources for sustenance, defense, or concealment; are easily observed or controlled from the plain by superior forces. The town is irregular, compact, and hilly; a bridge across each stream connects it with the opposite shores, and the Government factory and buildings, which utilized the water-power of the Potomac, lay in the lowest part of the point of land between the streams. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad crosses the Potomac bridge.
On the 4th of July, 1859, John Brown, under an assumed name, with two sons and another follower, appeared near Harper's Ferry, and soon after rented the Kennedy Farm, in Maryland, five miles from town, where he made a pretense of cattle-dealing and mining; but in reality collected secretly his rifles, revolvers, ammunition, pikes, blankets, tents, and miscellaneous articles for a campaign. His rather eccentric actions, and the irregular coming and going of occasional strangers at his cabin, created no suspicion in the neighborhood. Cautiously increasing his supplies, and gathering his recruits, he appointed the attack for the 24th of October; but for some unexplained reason (fear of treachery, it is vaguely suggested) he precipitated his movement in advance of that date. From this point the occurrences exhibit no foresight or completeness of preparation, no diligent pursuit of an intelligent plan, nor skill to devise momentary expedients; only a blind impulse to act.
On Sunday evening, October 16, 1859, Brown gave his final orders, humanely directing his men to take no life where they could avoid it. Placing a few pikes and other implements in his one-horse wagon, he started with his company of eighteen followers at 8 o'clock in the evening, leaving five men behind. They cut the telegraph wires on the way, and reached Harper's Ferry about 11 o'clock. He himself broke open the armory gates, took the watchmen prisoners, and made that place his headquarters. Separating his men into small detachments, he took possession of, and attempted to hold, the two bridges, the arsenal, and the rifle-factory. Next he sent six of his men five miles into the country to bring in several prominent slaveowners and their slaves. This was accomplished before daylight, and all were brought as prisoners to Brown at the armory. With them they also brought a large four-horse farm wagon, which he now sent to transfer arms from the Kennedy farm to a school-house on the Maryland side of the Potomac, about one mile from the town.
Meanwhile, about midnight of Sunday, they detained the railroad train three hours, but finally allowed it to proceed. A negro porter was shot on the bridge. The town began to be alarmed. Citizens were captured at various points, and brought to swell the number of prisoners at the armory, counting forty or fifty by morning. Still, not until daylight, and even until the usual hour of rising on Monday morning, did the town comprehend the nature and extent of the trouble.
What, now, did Brown intend to do? What result did he look for from his movement thus far? Amid his conflicting acts and contradictory explanations, the indications seem clear only on two or three points. Both he and his men gave everybody to understand without reserve that they had come not to kill whites, but only to liberate slaves. Soon, also, he placed pikes in the hands of his black prisoners. But that ceremony did not make soldiers of them, as his favorite maxim taught. They held them in their hands with listless indifference, remaining themselves, as before, an incumbrance instead of a reënforcement. He gave his white prisoners notice that he would hold them as hostages, and informed one or two that, after daylight, he would exchange them for slaves. Before the general fighting began, he endeavored to effect an armistice or compromise with the citizens, to stop bloodshed, on condition that he be permitted to hold the armory and retain the liberated negroes. All this warrants the inference that he expected to hold the town, first, by the effect of terror; secondly, by the display of leniency and kindness; and supposed that he could remain indefinitely, and dictate terms at his leisure. The fallacy of this scheme became quickly apparent.
As the day dawned upon the town and the truth upon the citizens, his situation in a military point of view was already hopeless—eighteen men against perhaps 1000 adults, and these eighteen scattered in four or five different squads, without means of mutual support, communication, or even contingent orders! Gradually, as the startled citizens became certain of the insignificant numbers of the assailants, an irregular street-firing broke out between Brown's sentinels and individuals with firearms. The alarm was carried to neighboring towns, and killed and wounded on both sides augmented the excitement. Tradition rather than definite record asserts that some of Brown's lieutenants began to comprehend that they were in a trap, and advised him to retreat. Nearly all his eulogists have assumed that such was his original plan, and his own subsequent excuses hint at this intention. But the claim is clearly untenable. He had no means of defensive retreat—no provisions, no transportation for his arms and equipage, no supply of ammunition. The suggestion is an evident afterthought.
Whether from choice or necessity, however, he remained only to find himself more and more closely pressed. By Monday noon the squad in the rifle-works, distant one mile from the armory, had been driven out, killed, and captured. The other squads, not so far from their leader, joined him at the armory, minus their losses. Already he was driven to take refuge with his diminished force in the engine-house, a low, strong brick building in the armory yard, where they barricaded doors and improvised loop-holes, and into which they took with them ten selected prisoners as hostages. But the expedient was one of desperation. By this movement Brown literally shut himself up in his own prison, from which escape was impossible.
A desultory fire was kept up through doors and loop-holes. But now the whole country had become thoroughly aroused, and sundry military companies from neighboring towns and counties poured into Harper's Ferry. Brown himself at length realized the hopelessness of his position, and parleyed for leave to retreat across the river on condition of his giving up his prisoners; but it was too late. President Buchanan also took prompt measures; and on Monday night a detachment of eighty marines from the Washington navy-yard, under command of Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee, of the United States army, the same who afterwards became the principal leader of the Confederate armies in the rebellion, reached the scene of action, and were stationed in the armory yard so as to cut off the insurgents from all retreat. At daylight on Tuesday morning Brown was summoned to surrender at discretion, but he refused. The instant the officer left the engine-house a storming-party of marines battered in the doors; in five minutes the conflict was over. One marine was shot dead in the assault; Brown fell under severe sword and bayonet wounds, two of his sons lay dead or dying, and four or five of his men were made prisoners, only two remaining unhurt. The great scheme of liberation built up through nearly three years of elaborate conspiracy, and designed to be executed in defiance of law, by individual enterprise with pikes, rifles, forts, guerrilla war, prisoners, hostages, and plunder, was, after an experimental campaign of thirty-six hours, in utter collapse. Of Brown's total force of twenty-two men, ten were killed, five escaped, and seven were captured, tried, and hanged. Of the townspeople, five had been killed and eight wounded.
Sanborn in the "Atlantic," Dec. 1875. p. 718.
While John Brown's ability for military leadership was too insignificant even for comment, his moral and personal courage compelled the admiration of his enemies. Arraigned before a Virginia court, the authorities hurried through his trial for treason, conspiracy, and murder, with an unseemly precipitancy, almost calculated to make him seem the accuser, and the commonwealth the trembling culprit. He acknowledged his acts with frankness, defended his purpose with a sincerity that betokened honest conviction, bore his wounds and met his fate with a manly fortitude. Eight years before, he had written, in a document organizing a band of colored people in Springfield, Massachusetts, to resist the fugitive-slave law: "Nothing so charms the American people as personal bravery. 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 sufferings of more than three millions of our submissive colored population." Even now, when mere Quixotic knight-errantry and his own positive violation of the rights of individuals and society had put his life in forfeit, this sympathy for his boldness and misfortune came to him in large measure. Questioned by Governor Wise, Senator Mason, and Representative Vallandigham about his accomplices, he refused to say anything except about what he had done, and freely took upon himself the whole responsibility. He was so warped by his religious training as to have become a fatalist as well as a fanatic. "All our actions," he said to one who visited him in prison, "even all the follies that led to this disaster, were decreed to happen ages before the world was made." Perverted Calvinistic philosophy is the key which unlocks the mystery of Brown's life and deeds.
He was convicted, sentenced, and hanged on the 2d of December. Congress met a few days afterwards, and the Senate appointed an investigating committee to inquire into the seizure of the United States armory and arsenal. The long and searching examination of many witnesses brought out with sufficient distinctness the varied personal plottings of Brown, but failed to reveal that half a dozen radical abolition clergymen of Boston were party to the conspiracy; nor did they then or afterwards justify their own conduct by showing that Christ ever counseled treason, abetted conspiracy, or led rebellion against established government. From beginning to end, the whole act was reprehensible, and fraught with evil result. Modern civilization and republican government require that beyond the self-defense necessary to the protection of life and limb, all coercive reform shall act by authority of law only.
Mason Report, p. 18.
Upon politics the main effect of the Harper's Ferry incident was to aggravate the temper and increase the bitterness of all parties. Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi; Mason, of Virginia; and Fitch, of Indiana, Democratic members of the Senate investigating committee, sought diligently but unsuccessfully to find grounds to hold the Republican party at large responsible for Brown's raid. They felt obliged to report that they could not recommend any legislation to meet similar cases in the future, since the "invasion" of Virginia was not of the kind mentioned in the Constitution, but was "simply the act of lawless ruffians, under the sanction of no public or political authority." Collamer, of Vermont, and Doolittle, of Wisconsin, Republican members of the committee, in their minority report, considered the affair an outgrowth of the pro-slavery lawlessness in Kansas. Senator Douglas, of Illinois, however, apparently with the object of still further setting himself right with the South, and atoning for his Freeport heresy, made a long speech in advocacy of a law to punish conspiracies in one State or Territory against the government, people, or property of another; once more quoting Lincoln's Springfield speech, and Seward's Rochester speech as containing revolutionary doctrines.
Dec, 2, 1859. George Willis Cooke, "Life of Emerson," p. 140.
James Redpath, "Echoes of Harper's Ferry," p. 41.
In the country at large, as in Congress, the John Brown raid excited bitter discussion and radically diverse comment—some execrating him as a deservedly punished felon, while others exalted him as a saint. His Boston friends particularly, who had encouraged him with voice or money, were extravagant in their demonstrations of approval and admiration. On the day of his execution religious services were held, and funeral bells were tolled. "The road to heaven," said Theodore Parker, "is as short from the gallows as from a throne; perhaps, also, as easy." "Some eighteen hundred years ago," said Thoreau, "Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links." Emerson, using a yet stronger figure, had already called him "a new saint, waiting yet his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross."
Lecture at Brooklyn, November 1, 1859. "Echoes of Harper's Ferry," p. 48.
Letter to Committee of Merchants, December 20, 1859. Ibid., p. 299.
Amid this conflict of argument, public opinion in the free-States gravitated to neither extreme. It accepted neither the declaration of the great orator Wendell Phillips, that "the lesson of the hour is insurrection," nor the assertion of the great lawyer Charles O'Conor, that slavery "is in its own nature, as an institution, beneficial to both races."
This chapter would be incomplete if we neglected to quote Mr. Lincoln's opinion of the Harper's Ferry attempt. His quiet and common-sense criticism of the affair, pronounced a few months after its occurrence, was substantially the conclusion to which the average public judgment has come after the lapse of a quarter of a century:
Lincoln, Cooper Institute Speech, Feb. 27, 1860.
Slave insurrections are no more common now than they were before the Republican party was organized. What induced the Southampton insurrection, twenty-eight years ago, in which at least three times as many lives were lost as at Harper's Ferry? You can scarcely stretch your very elastic fancy to the conclusion that Southampton was "got up by Black Republicanism." In the present state of things in the United States, I do not think a general or even a very extensive slave insurrection is possible. The indispensable concert of action cannot be attained. The slaves have no means of rapid communication; nor can incendiary freemen, black or white, supply it. The explosive materials are everywhere in parcels; but there neither are nor can be supplied the indispensable connecting trains.
Much is said by Southern people about the affection of slaves for their masters and mistresses; and a part of it, at least, is true. A plot for an uprising could scarcely be devised and communicated to twenty individuals before some one of them, to save the life of a favorite master or mistress, would divulge it. This is the rule; and the slave revolution in Hayti was not an exception to it, but a case occurring under peculiar circumstances. The gunpowder plot of British history, though not connected with slaves, was more in point. In that ease, only about twenty were admitted to the secret; and yet one of them, in his anxiety to save a friend, betrayed the plot to that friend, and, by consequence, averted the calamity. Occasional poisonings from the kitchen, and open or stealthy assassinations in the field, and local revolts extending to a score or so, will continue to occur as the natural results of slavery; but no general insurrection of slaves, as I think, can happen in this country for a long time. Whoever much fears or much hopes for such an event will be alike disappointed....
John Brown's effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. 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. That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts related in history, at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution. Orsini's attempt on Louis Napoleon, and John Brown's attempt at Harper's Ferry were, in their philosophy, precisely the same. The eagerness to cast blame on old England in the one ease, and on New England in the other, does not disprove the sameness of the two things.