Chapter 7. The Revolution of 1860

I

Like Dred Scott, John Brown lived the first fifty-odd years of his life in obscurity. Unlike Scott, he attained notoriety not through the law but by lawlessness. Except for a brief reappearance in the Kansas wars, however, Brown's activities for three years after 1856 were more mysterious than notorious. He made several trips east to raise money for the freedom fight in Kansas. As he shuttled back and forth, Brown evolved a plan to strike against slavery in its heartland. Like the Old Testament warriors he admired and resembled, he yearned to carry the war into Babylon. He studied books on guerrilla warfare and on slave revolts. Fascinated by the ability of small bands to hold off larger forces in mountainous terrain, Brown conceived the idea of a raid into the Appalachian foothills of Virginia. From there he would move southward along the mountains attracting slaves to his banner. In May 1858 Brown journeyed with eleven white followers to a community of former slaves in Chatham, Canada. Thirty-four blacks met secretly with Brown's group to adopt a "provisional constitution" for the republic of liberated slaves to be established in the mountains. The delegates elected Brown commander in chief of the army of this new nation.¹

John Brown had never shared the commitment of most abolitionists

1. Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown (New York, 1970), 243–47.

to nonviolence. Not for him was the Christ-like martyrdom of Uncle Tom. Brown's God was the Jehovah who drowned Pharoah's mercenaries in the Red Sea; his Jesus was the angry man who drove moneychangers from the temple. "Without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin," was his favorite New Testament passage (Hebrews 9:22). Bondage was "a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war" of masters against slaves, declared the preamble of Brown's Chatham constitution. Victory over these "thieves and murderers" could be won only by a revolution. "Talk! talk! talk!" exclaimed Brown in disgust after attending a meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. "That will never free the slaves. What is needed is action—action."²

Events during the 1850s had converted some abolitionists to Brown's view. Violence had won the Southwest from Mexico; threats of violence by southerners in Congress had opened most of it to slavery. Armed filibusters tried to win Cuba and Central America for slavery. Closer to home, the fugitive slave law did more than anything else to discredit nonviolence. Before 1850 Frederick Douglass had been a pacifist. "Were I asked the question whether I would have my emancipation by the shedding of one single drop of blood," he said in the 1840s, "my answer would be in the negative. . . . The only well grounded hope of the slave for emancipation is the operation of moral force." But a month after enactment of the fugitive slave law he changed his tune and advocated "forcible resistance" to the law. "Slave-holders . . . tyrants and despots have no right to live," said Douglass now. "The only way to make the fugitive slave law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers."³ One of Douglass's favorite sayings became, "who would be free must himself strike the blow." Like Frantz Fanon and other philosophers of anticolonial revolution a century later, Douglass came to believe that only through violence could the oppressed earn self-respect and the respect of their oppressors.

Many free soilers in Kansas also concluded that as the slave power had lived by the sword, it must die by the sword. In 1855 a New England Garrisonian, Charles Stearns, went to Lawrence, Kansas, to open a store. Having once served a term in jail rather than serve in the militia, Stearns retained his pacifist principles during his first months in the territory. But eventually he succumbed, as he explained in a letter

2. Ibid., 234, 271–72.

3. Carleton Mabee, Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 through the Civil War (New York, 1970), 291–95.

to his former mentor Garrison: "The cold-blooded murder, last night, of one of our best citizens, has decided me. I am sorry to deny the principles of Jesus Christ, after contending for them so long, but it is not for myself that I am going to fight. It is for God and the slaves." Another convert was Gerrit Smith, wealthy landowner and philanthropist of upstate New York. A vice president of the American Peace Society, Smith declared in 1856 that "hitherto I have opposed the bloody abolition of slavery." But when the slave power "begins to march its conquering bands into [Kansas] . . . I and ten thousand other peace men are not only ready to have it repulsed with violence, but pursued even unto death with violence."⁴

Smith became a member of the "Secret Six" who backed John Brown's scheme to invade the South. Like Smith, the other five were men of means and standing: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Transcendental clergyman and writer; Theodore Parker, leading intellectual light of Unitarianism; Samuel Gridley Howe, a physician of international repute for his work with the blind and the deaf; George L. Stearns, a prosperous manufacturer; and Franklin B. Sanborn, a young educator and protege of Emerson. The cause that bonded these men was their support for the free-state activists in Kansas. Most of them had also participated in resistance to the fugitive slave law. Parker headed the vigilance committee in Boston, while Higginson had led the abortive attack to free Anthony Burns in 1854. Several of the Secret Six had stood by in impotent rage while the police, militia, army, and marines had marched Burns back to slavery.

This scene burned in their memories. Their work for Kansas fanned the flames. It also brought them into contact with John Brown. They were ready for his message of action. Like Frederick Douglass, they had come to believe that the slaves could achieve manhood and liberation only by striking a blow themselves. Slavery "is destined, as it began in blood, so to end," wrote Higginson in 1858. "Never in history was there an oppressed people who were set free by others." Perhaps unconscious of the irony, the Secret Six (all white men) considered John Brown (also white) the ideal leader of the slaves in their strike for freedom. This grim, hatchet-faced old warrior impressed these descendants of Puritans as "a high-minded unselfish, belated Covenanter," a "Cromwellian Ironside introduced in the nineteenth century for a special purpose."⁵

4. Ibid., 319, 318.

5. Liberator, May 28, 1858; Oates, To Purge This Land, 237.

In 1858 Brown revealed to the Secret Six his plans for an invasion of the southern Appalachians. With varying degrees of enthusiasm or skepticism they agreed to support him. Stearns diverted funds intended for Kansas to the purchase of guns and pikes to arm the slaves that Brown expected to flock to his standard. Under an assumed name Brown rented a farm in Maryland across the Potomac River from Harper's Ferry, Virginia. He planned to seize the U. S. armory and arsenal there and distribute its arms to the slaves as they joined up with him. Brown's shock troops for this purpose ultimately consisted of five black men and seventeen whites, including three of his sons. This was a pitifully small "army" to invade slave territory and attack U.S. property.

Brown did try to attract more black recruits. In particular he urged his old friend Frederick Douglass to join him as a sort of liaison officer to the slaves. Brown met Douglass secretly in an old quarry near Cham-bersburg, Pennsylvania, in August 1859. "Come with me, Douglass," he said. "I want you for a special purpose. When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them." But Douglass refused. He was convinced that Brown had embarked on a suicidal mission, "an attack on the federal government" that "would array the whole country against us." Harper's Ferry was a "perfect steel-trap," said Douglass. Situated on a peninsula formed by the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, surrounded on all sides by commanding heights, it was indefensible against a counterattack. You will "never get out alive," Douglass warned Brown. The old warrior could not conceal his disappointment at Douglass's refusal. Other black recruits on whom Brown had relied also failed to show up. One of them wrote apologetically from Cleveland: "I am disgusted with myself and the whole Negro set, God dam em!"⁶

As summer turned to fall and additional recruits did not arrive, Brown decided to go with what he had. A sort of fatalism stole over him. He wrote a "Vindication of the Invasion" in the past tense as if it had already failed. When he finally moved, in mid-October, he did so without previous notice to the slaves he expected to join him, without rations, without having scouted any escape routes from Harper's Ferry, with no apparent idea of what to do after capturing the armory buildings. It was almost as if he knew that failure with its ensuing martyrdom

6. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (Collier Books ed., New York, 1962), 317–20; Benjamin Quarles, Allies for Freedom: Blacks and John Brown (New York, 1974), 80.

would do more to achieve his ultimate goal than any "success" could have done. In any event, that was how matters turned out.

Leaving three men to guard his base, Brown led the other eighteen into Harper's Ferry after dark on October 16. They quickly captured the armory complex defended by a single watchman. Brown sent a patrol into the countryside to pass the word among slaves and bring in several hostages, including a great grandnephew of George Washington. Having done this much, Brown sat down to wait—presumably for those black bees to swarm. But the only slaves to come in were a few brought by the patrol. Ironically, the first casualty was a free Negro baggage-master at the railroad station who was killed by Brown's bridge guard in the dark when he walked out on the trestle looking for the night watchman. Brown stopped the eastbound midnight train and held it for several hours, but then unaccountably let it proceed—to spread the alarm.

By midmorning on October 17, residents of Harper's Ferry were sniping at Brown's men while Virginia and Maryland militia converged on the town. During the afternoon eight of Brown's men (including two of his sons) and three townsmen were killed while seven of the raiders escaped (two of them were later captured). Brown retreated with his survivors and prisoners to the thick-walled fire-engine house, where he made a stand. During the night a company of U. S. marines arrived, commanded by two cavalry officers, Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart. After the militia had declined the honor of storming the engine house, Lee sent in the marines. They attacked with battering ram and bayonets, not firing a shot in order to avoid risk to the hostages. With the loss of one man the marines killed two raiders and captured the others including Brown, who was wounded by an officer's dress sword. Less than thirty-six hours after it started, John Brown's strange effort to free the slaves was over.

But the repercussions resounded for years. Passions ran high in Virginia, where mobs clamored for Brown's blood. To forestall a lynching the state of Virginia hastily indicted, tried, and convicted Brown of treason, murder, and fomenting insurrection. The judge sentenced him to hang one month later, on December 2. The other six captured raiders also received swift trials; four of them (including two blacks) were hanged on December 16 and the remaining two on March 16, 1860. The matter of Brown's northern supporters provoked great interest. Brown had left behind at the Maryland farmhouse a carpetbag full of documents and letters, some of them revealing his relationship with the Secret Six. Of those gentlemen, Parker was in Europe dying of tuberculosis, and Higginson stood firm in Massachusetts, making no apology for his role and defying anyone to arrest him. But the other four beat an abject retreat. Stearns, Howe, and Sanborn fled to Canada, while Gerrit Smith suffered a breakdown and was confined for several weeks in the Utica insane asylum.

The Canadian exiles returned after Brown was hanged, but when the Senate established an investigating committee chaired by James Mason of Virginia, Sanborn again headed north to avoid testifying. From Canada he wrote Higginson imploring him "in case you are summoned . . . do not tell what you know to the enemies of the cause." Higginson expressed contempt toward such behavior. "Sanborn, is there no such thing as honor among confederates? . . . Can your clear moral sense . . . justify holding one's tongue . . . to save ourselves from all share in even the reprobation of society when the nobler man whom we have provoked on into danger is the scapegoat of that reprobation—& the gallows too?"⁷

Sanborn refused a summons from the Mason committee and resisted an attempt by the sergeant at arms of the Senate to arrest him. Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw voided the arrest warrant on a technicality. Howe and Stearns did go to Washington and faced the Mason committee. For some reason the committee never called Higginson—probably because by February 1860 Mason's resolve to uncover a northern conspiracy had weakened, and he did not want to give Higginson a national platform to proclaim his sentiments. Perhaps for the same reason, Howe and Stearns found the committee's questions "so unskillfully framed that they could, without literal falsehood," deny prior knowledge of Brown's plan to attack Harper's Ferry. A historian reading their testimony, however, will be convinced that they told several falsehoods. In any event, the Mason committee found no conspiracy, and no one except the men actually present with Brown at Harper's Ferry was ever indicted.⁸

Reaction in the South to Brown's raid brought to the surface a paradox that lay near the heart of slavery. On the one hand, many whites

7. Tilden G. Edelstein, Strange Enthusiasm: A Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New Haven, 1968), 232, 226.

8. C. Vann Woodward, "John Brown's Private War," in Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge, 1960), 51–52; Jeffrey S. Rossbach, Ambivalent Conspirators: John Brown, the Secret Six, and a Theory of Slave Violence (Philadelphia, 1982), 236–66.

lived in fear of slave insurrections. On the other, southern whites insisted that slaves were well treated and cheerful in their bondage. The news of Harper's Ferry sent an initial wave of shock and rage through the South, especially when newspapers reported that among the papers found in Brown's carpetbag were maps of seven southern states designating additional targets. For several weeks wild rumors circulated of black uprisings and of armed abolitionists marching from the North to aid them. By the time of Brown's execution, however, many in the South uttered a sigh of relief. Not only had the rumors proved false, but southerners also gradually realized that not a single slave had voluntarily joined Brown. The South's professed belief in the slaves' tran-quility was right after all! It was only Yankee fanatics who wanted to stir up trouble.

The problem of those Yankee fanatics would soon cause southern opinion to evolve into a third phase of unreasoning fury, but not until the antislavery reaction to Harper's Ferry had itself gone through two phases. The first northern response was a kind of baffled reproach. The Worcester Spy, an antislavery paper in Higginson's home town, characterized the raid as "one of the rashest and maddest enterprises ever." To William Lloyd Garrison the raid, "though disinterested and well intended," seemed "misguided, wild, and apparently insane."⁹ But such opinions soon changed into a perception of Brown as a martyr to a noble cause. His behavior during and after his trial had much to do with this transformation. In testimony, letters, interviews, and above all in his closing speech to the court he exhibited a dignity and fortitude that impressed even Virginia's Governor Henry Wise and the fire-eater Edmund Ruffin. Throughout the trial Brown insisted that his object had not been to incite insurrection but only to free slaves and arm them in self-defense. This was disingenuous, to say the least. In southern eyes it was also a distinction without a difference. In his closing speech prior to sentencing, Brown rose to a surpassing eloquence that has echoed down the years:

I deny everything but what I have all along admitted: of a design on my part to free slaves. . . . Had I interfered in the manner which I admit . . . in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the socalled great . . . every man in this Court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.

9. Worcester Spy, Oct. 20, 27, 1859, quoted in Edelstein, Strange Enthusiasm, 222; Liberator, Oct. 21, 1859.

This Court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction. . . . 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 say, let it be done.¹⁰

These words moved Theodore Parker to pronounce Brown "not only a martyr . . . but also a SAINT."They inspired Ralph Waldo Emerson to prophesy that the old warrior would "make the gallows as glorious as the cross."¹¹ Brown understood his martyr role, and cultivated it. "I have beenwhipped as the saying is," he wrote his wife, "but am sure I can recover all the lost capital occasioned by that disaster; by only hanging a few moments by the neck; and I feel quite determined to make the utmost possible out of a defeat." Like Christ, to whom Brown unabashedly compared himself, he would accomplish in death the salvation of the poor he had failed while living to save. Brown spurned all schemes to cheat the hangman's rope by rescue or by pleading insanity. "I am worth inconceivably more to hang," he told his brother, "than for any other purpose."¹²

Extraordinary events took place in many northern communities on the day of Brown's execution. Church bells tolled; minute guns fired solemn salutes; ministers preached sermons of commemoration; thousands bowed in silent reverence for the martyr to liberty. "I have seen nothing like it," wrote Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard. More than a thousand miles away in Lawrence, Kansas, the editor of the Republican wrote that "the death of no man in America has ever produced so profound a sensation. A feeling of deep and sorrowful indignation seems to possess the masses."¹³A clergyman in Roxbury, Massachusetts, declared

10. From the report of Brown's speech in the New York Herald, Nov. 3, 1859, printed in Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800–1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (Boston, 1910), 498–99.

11. Woodward, "John Brown's Private War," 54.

12. Robert Penn Warren, John Brown, The Making of a Martyr (New York, 1929), 428–29; Oates, To Purge This Land, 335.

13. Nevins, Emergence, II, 99; Oates, To Purge This Land, 356.

that Brown had made the word Treason "holy in the American language"; young William Dean Howells said that "Brown has become an idea, a thousand times purer and better and loftier than the Republican idea"; Henry David Thoreau pronounced Brown "a crucified hero."¹⁴

What can explain this near-canonization of Brown? Some Yankees professed to admire Brown for daring to strike the slave power that was accustomed to pushing the North around with impunity. "This will be a great day in our history," wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his diary on the day of Brown's execution, "the date of a new Revolution,—quite as much needed as the old one." When the Virginians hanged Brown they were "sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon." This was the spirit that two years later made "John Brown's Body" the favorite marching song of the Union army. But there was more to it than that. Perhaps the words of Lafayette quoted at a commemoration meeting in Boston got to the crux of the matter: "I never would have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived that thereby I was helping to found a nation of slaves."¹⁵ John Brown had drawn his sword in an attempt to cut out this cancer of shame that tainted the promise of America. No matter that his method was misguided and doomed to failure. "History, forgetting the errors of his judgment in the contemplation of his unfaltering course . . . and of the nobleness of his aims," said William Cullen Bryant, "will record his name among those of its martyrs and heroes." Most of Brown's eulogists similarly distinguished between his "errors of judgment" and "the nobleness of his aims." Though "Harper's Ferry was insane," stated the religious weekly The Independent, "the controlling motive of his demonstration was sublime." It was "the work of a madman," conceded Horace Greeley even as he praised the "grandeur and nobility" of Brown and his men.¹⁶

The distinction between act and motive was lost on southern whites. They saw only that millions of Yankees seemed to approve of a murderer who had tried to set the slaves at their throats. This perception provoked a paroxysm of anger more intense than the original reaction to the raid. The North "has sanctioned and applauded theft, murder,

14. Woodward, "John Brown's Private War," 58; Nevins, Emergence, II, 99; Oates, To Purge This Land, 354.

15. Warren, John Brown, 437; Villard, John Brown, 560.

16. Nevins, Emergence, II, 99; Woodward, "John Brown's Private War," 48–49.

treason," cried De Bow's Review. Could the South afford any longer "to live under a government, the majority of whose subjects or citizens regard John Brown as a martyr and a Christian hero?" asked a Baltimore newspaper.¹⁷ No! echoed from every corner of the South. "The Harper's Ferry invasion has advanced the cause of disunion more than any event that has happened since the formation of the government," agreed two rival Richmond newspapers. It had "wrought almost a complete revolution in the sentiments . . . of the oldest and steadiest conservatives. . . . Thousands of men . . . who, a month ago, scoffed at the idea of a dissolution of the Union . . . now hold the opinion that its days are numbered." A North Carolinian confirmed this observation. "I have always been a fervid Union man," he wrote privately in December 1859, "but I confess the endorsement of the Harper's Ferry outrage . . . has shaken my fidelity and . . . I am willing to take the chances of every possible evil that may arise from disunion, sooner than submit any longer to Northern insolence."¹⁸

To reassure the South that sympathy for Brown was confined to a noisy minority, northern conservatives organized large anti-Brown meetings. They condemned "the recent outrage at Harper's Ferry" as a crime "not only against the State of Virginia, but against the Union itself. . . . [We] are ready to go as far as any Southern men in putting down all attempts of Northern fanatics to interfere with the constitutional rights of the South."¹⁹ Democrats saw an opportunity to rebuild their bridges to the South and to discredit Republicans by linking them to Brown. Harper's Ferry, said Stephen Douglas, was the "natural, logical, inevitable result of the doctrines and teachings of the Republican party." Democrats singled out Seward for special attack, for they expected him to win the Republican presidential nomination. Seward was the "arch agitator who is responsible for this insurrection," they asserted. His "bloody and brutal" irrepressible conflict speech had inspired Brown's bloody and brutal act.²⁰

17. Oates, To Purge This Land, 323; Villard, John Brown, 568.

18. Richmond Enquirer and Richmond Whig, quoted in Henry T. Shanks, The Secession Movement in Virginia, 1847–1861 (Richmond, 1934), 90; William A. Walsh to L. O'B. Branch, Dec. 8, 1859, in Avery O. Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism 1848–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1953), 311.

19. Villard, John Brown, 563; Philip S. Foner, Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict (Chapel Hill, 1941), 161–62.

20. Oates, To Purge This Land, 310; Villard, John Brown, 472; Nevins, Emergence, II, 104.

Fearing political damage, Republican leaders hastened to disavow Brown. Seward condemned the old man's "sedition and treason" and pronounced his execution "necessary and just." Even though Brown "agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong," said Lincoln, "that cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason." Governor Samuel Kirkwood of Iowa decried Brown's "act of war" as "a greater crime" than even "the filibuster invaders of Cuba and Nicaragua were guilty of," though "in the minds of many" Brown's raid was "relieved to some extent of its guilt [because] the blow was struck for freedom, and not for slavery."²¹

Southerners did not like this comparison of Brown with the filibusters. They also detected a sting in the tail of Lincoln's and Kirkwood's remarks ("agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong . . . blow was struck for freedom"). To southern people the line separating Lincoln's moral convictions from Brown's butchery was meaningless. "We regard every man," declared an Atlanta newspaper, "who does not boldly declare that he believes African slavery to be a social, moral, and political blessing" as "an enemy to the institutions of the South." As for the supportive resolutions of northern conservatives, they were so much "gas and vaporing." "Why have not the conservative men at the North frowned down the infamous black-republican party?" asked De Bow's Review. "They have foreborne to crush it, till now it overrides almost everything at the North." On the Senate floor Robert Toombs warned that the South would "never permit this Federal government to pass into the traitorous hands of the Black Republican party." "Defend yourselves!" Toombs thundered to the southern people. "The enemy is at your door, wait not to meet him at your hearthstone, meet him at the doorsill, and drive him from the temple of liberty, or pull down its pillars and involve him in a common ruin."²²

John Brown's ghost stalked the South as the election year of 1860 opened. Several historians have compared the region's mood to the "Great Fear" that seized the French countryside in the summer of 1789 when peasants believed that the "King's brigands are coming" to slaughter them.²³Keyed up to the highest pitch of tension, many slaveholders

21. Seward and Kirkwood quoted in Villard, John Brown, 564–68; CWL, III, 502.

22. Atlanta Confederacy, quoted in Nevins, Emergence, II, 108n; DeBow's Review, 29 (July 1860), reprinted in Paul F. Paskoff and Daniel J. Wilson, eds., The Cause ofthe South: Selections from DeBow's Review 1846–1867 (Baton Rouge, 1982), 219–20; CG, 36 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 93.

23. Ollinger Crenshaw, The Slave States in the Presidential Election of 1860 (Baltimore, 1945), chap. 5; Woodward, "John Brown's Private War," 67–68; Oates, To Purge This Land, 322–23.

and yeomen alike were ready for war to defend hearth and home against those Black Republican brigands. Thousands joined military companies; state legislatures appropriated funds for the purchase of arms. Every barn or cotton gin that burned down sparked new rumors of slave insurrections and abolitionist invaders. Every Yankee in the South became persona non grata. Some of them received a coat of tar and feathers and a ride out of town on a rail. A few were lynched. The citizens of Boggy Swamp, South Carolina, ran two northern tutors out of the district. "Nothing definite is known of their abolitionist or insurrectionary sentiments," commented a local newspaper, "but being from the North, and, therefore, necessarily imbued with doctrines hostile to our institutions, their presence in this section has been obnoxious." The northern-born president of an Alabama college had to flee for his life. In Kentucky a mob drove thirty-nine people associated with an antislavery church and school at Berea out of the state. Thirty-two representatives in the South of New York and Boston firms arrived in Washington reporting "indignation so great against Northerners that they were compelled to return and abandon their business."²⁴ In this climate of fear and hostility, Democrats prepared for their national convention at Charleston in April 1860.