CHAPTER 20
In Illinois, Abraham Lincoln decided to challenge a weakened Stephen A. Douglas when he announced his candidacy for another term in the U.S. Senate. Like other midwestern states, Illinois had a split personality. Its southern counties had been settled by Kentuckians and Missourians, its northern tier by New Englanders. Douglas was popular in the southern counties and disliked in the northern ones. But Douglas had also had the courage to repudiate a southern attempt to seize control of Kansas, giving him statewide appeal.
Kansas proslavery settlers had gathered in the town of Lecompton and cooked up a constitution, which they proclaimed as the law of the land. President Buchanan, remembering that he was elected by mostly southern votes, recognized it. “Kansas,” he announced, “was as much a slave state as Georgia or South Carolina.” After investigating the rigged election that supposedly approved the constitution, Senator Douglas condemned it as an unethical grab for power and called for new elections to determine Kansas’s status. The antislavery voters had won by a huge margin.
A furious Buchanan had declared war on Douglas inside the Democratic Party. Postmasters, marshals, and land agents appointed on the Senator’s say-so were dismissed in wholesale lots. When Douglas began his run for reelection, Buchanan fielded a third candidate, and he ordered Democratic newspapers and politicians to oppose the Little Giant in every possible way.1
• • •
The president had already used his long years in Washington to bring the Supreme Court into the quarrel about slavery in what he hoped was a decisive way. The court had been inclined to let stand a case brought by Dred Scott, a Missouri slave who was suing for his freedom because he had resided in Illinois, a free state, for several years with his master, an army doctor, before returning to Missouri. The state supreme court had rejected his appeal, because he had supposedly returned to Missouri voluntarily. Buchanan persuaded one of the associate justices, an old friend, to pressure the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case.
Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney wrote the majority opinion, which declared that Scott must remain a slave. Congress had no power to interfere with slavery in the territories, Taney argued, because the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. A slave was property and was never intended to be anything else. The “enslaved African race” was not included in the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that all men were created equal. Negroes were not regarded as citizens in the Constitution. The Maryland-born Taney sought to settle the dispute over slavery, once and for all.
Instead, the chief justice ignited another tremendous uproar. The decision made thousands of Northerners wonder if William Lloyd Garrison was right when he repeatedly burned the Constitution in public. New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley wondered why six million Southerners had more influence on the court than sixteen million Northerners. Since a majority of the court’s justices were Southerners like Taney, the myth of The Slave Power got yet another boost.2
• • •
In this atmosphere, Lincoln’s speech accepting the Republican nomination for Douglas’s U.S. Senate seat was one of the boldest of his life. When he read it to the state party’s leaders, they urged him not to deliver it. He went ahead, thrusting himself into the central issue confronting the nation. “We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated . . . with the confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation,” he said. Instead of ceasing, the agitation has “constantly augmented.” He was now convinced that “only a major crisis would end it.”
Then came words that reverberated around the nation. “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing—or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, North as well as South.”
Many people would seize on these words to claim that Lincoln foresaw—or even helped to start—the Civil War. Later generations would use it to justify the war’s million dead. But Lincoln was not talking about a crisis he believed was imminent. He thought his solution, confining slavery to the southern states, might take a long time to eliminate the evil institution. In some notes he made during his contest with Senator Douglas, which he never used in his speeches, Lincoln wrote: “I have not allowed myself to forget that the abolition of the slave trade by Great Britain was agitated a hundred years before it was a final success.”
Another thing worth remembering: Lincoln was keenly aware that he had a rival for the leadership of the Republican Party, Senator William Seward of New York. In 1856 Seward had made a speech, describing the tension between North and South as an “irrepressible conflict” that would only be decided by a “higher law.” This brinksmanship thrilled the abolitionist wing of the new party. The House Divided speech showed Lincoln, too, could play the scare tactics game. Like Seward, who immediately began denying that he favored a civil war, Lincoln rapidly backed away from his confrontational words.3
Even after the Dred Scott decision and President Buchanan’s interference in Kansas, Lincoln remained convinced that the Founding Fathers’ intention to eliminate slavery was still at work, in a slow but inexorable progress. Lincoln insisted in the debates about slavery at the Constitutional Convention and in the first sessions of Congress, “You will not find a single man saying that slavery is a good thing.” Why? “The framers believed that the Constitution would outlast slavery” if the peculiar institution were isolated in the states where it was legal.
Lincoln did not succumb to the paranoid version of The Slave Power that was gripping so many minds in New England and the Yankee Midwest. He only said that people were understandably wondering if there was a conspiracy, after Dred Scott and Buchanan’s attempt to wangle a slave state label for Kansas. Lincoln felt Democratic Party explanations were in order to prevent the darkest, most worrisome conclusion. But he continued to hope that gradualism combined with compensated emancipation would take a steady toll on the evil institution. In 1859, he told another friend he was “quite sure it [slavery] would not outlast the century.” Lincoln did not—and could not—know that John Brown was looming on the horizon.4
• • •
Lincoln and Douglas met in seven debates during which Lincoln did not hide his antipathy to slavery. “If slavery is not wrong,” he said, “nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel.” But he was up against a tough opponent who had a rare ability to read the temper of the public mind of 1858. Douglas claimed he was indifferent to whether slavery was voted up or down in any territory or new state. He saw himself as an advocate of American freedom, even when there were times that free men made choices that disturbed other free men. This was a policy a lot of Americans preferred to unnerving ultimatums.5
In his speeches, Douglas repeatedly accused Lincoln of seeking equality between the two races, and even “amalgamation”—a word that scientists like Harvard’s Louis Agassiz had made frightening as well as reprehensible. Lincoln was aware that Illinois was a divided state, and his reply to this accusation should be understood in the context of his struggle to win the election. At one point he remarked that there was no need for him to campaign at all in northern Illinois, which backed him before he said a word, and no point in even visiting the southern counties, so firmly were they committed to the Democratic candidate. The election was decided in the mixed population of the central counties, where Douglas’s approach had a potentially fatal impact on Lincoln’s candidacy.
On the platform in these counties, Lincoln firmly and even vehemently denied he had anything like racial equality or amalgamation in mind. “I will say that 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.” Nor did he favor making blacks voters or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office. “There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social or political equality,” he said, sounding like a reincarnation of John C. Calhoun.6
These words were not far from Thomas Jefferson’s racist doubts about black and white equality and the improbability of peaceful proximity. Lincoln too favored colonization as the only practical solution, even though by 1858 it was evident that American blacks all but unanimously rejected it. With 500,000 free blacks and 4,000,000 enslaved, the American Colonization Society was sending only a few hundred blacks to Liberia each year. The New York Herald called the society “an old fogy affair.”
• • •
The outcome of Lincoln’s contest with Douglas showed that the Democrat’s racist attacks had hit home. The Little Giant carried seventeen out of twenty-five legislative districts in central Illinois. Lincoln’s attempt to make the Kansas-Nebraska Act a proslavery policy faltered when Douglas pointed to his opposition to the Lecompton Constitution. Those central districts gave Douglas the margin of victory in the Illinois legislature, which chose U.S. senators in accordance with the Constitution. Not until the twentieth century were senators elected by popular vote.
Lincoln assumed his defeat ended his political career. He spoke of being ready to “serve in the ranks” to help Republicans win an eventual victory and keep the territories free of slavery. But many Republicans who had listened to his speeches or read excerpts from them in the newspapers had other ideas. Some of them began backing him for president in 1860.7
• • •
On October 21, 1857, Colonel Robert E. Lee, now commander of the Second Cavalry Regiment in Texas, received dismaying news. His father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, had died. Lee’s two oldest sons, Custis and Rooney, were both on duty in the army. (As sons will, before and since, they had ignored their father’s advice and chosen military careers.) His third son, Robert Jr., was away at boarding school and was too young (fourteen) to deal with the crisis. Mary Custis Lee was a semi-invalid, crippled by arthritis. Colonel Lee requested leave and rushed to Arlington.
There he found little to comfort him. The old house was a decaying wreck with a leaky roof and bushes and weeds growing on its once stately lawns. His father-in-law’s will had freed the 196 slaves he owned on three plantations, in imitation of George Washington’s example, and left Arlington to Mary Custis Lee during her lifetime. After her death, the colonel’s son Custis Lee would inherit it. Grandfather Custis left the two other plantations to Rooney and Robert Jr. He also bequeathed $10,000 (the equivalent of perhaps $200,000 in twenty-first-century money) to each of the Lees’ four daughters. He had borrowed against Arlington and he wished these debts—about $10,000—repaid as soon as possible.
The will directed that the slaves should be freed within the next five years, or sooner if the bequests were made and the debts were paid. If Lee wanted to sell some of the land to raise money, he was free to do so. But the colonel was reluctant to choose this solution. On his small army salary, he was unlikely to have anything to leave his children. Their grandfather’s legacies were their only hope of acquiring a decent inheritance. Lee decided, pending approval of the courts, to make Arlington profitable first, pay the debts and the legacies, and then begin freeing the slaves. His wife, Mary, agreed that this was the best course.8
Both Lees were revealing a psychological flaw of southern slave owners—a reluctance, amounting to an inability, to understand the deep desire for freedom that was in the soul of almost every slave. They thought that Arlington’s sixty-three slaves, who had not been called upon for much labor in the years preceding their master’s death, would agree to work—and work hard—to turn the plantation into a profitable enterprise.
The opposite rapidly proved to be the case. The slaves were sullen, uncooperative, and often defiant. Some told Colonel Lee they considered themselves free and accused him of bad faith in detaining them. Lee had no experience in dealing with slaves, and he fell back on the routines he had learned in his decades in the U.S. Army. Orders were to be obeyed. Disobedience merited punishment.
This policy led to several run-ins with recalcitrant slaves that came close to violence. Mrs. Lee told a friend, “The attitude and bad conduct of these slaves . . . has wounded me sorely.” She was probably talking about Arlington’s house servants, who had seemed devoted to her. For many years, Mary Custis Lee had been a promoter of colonization. She set up a Sunday school at Arlington in which she and her daughters taught the slaves to read and write, and she urged them to consider Liberia as a possible homeland when they became free. In her diary she hoped that they could “carry the light of Christianity to that dark heathen country.” She saw this as an attempt to do something “for the benefit of those so entirely dependent upon one’s will and pleasure.”
Colonel Lee began hiring out some of slaves who refused to labor productively at Arlington to neighboring plantations, where overseers used to obedience would make them work, or else. This created another problem—almost all Arlington’s people belonged to three large families, and they protested at seeing their relationships disrupted, even when they were told it was a temporary arrangement.
Arlington’s proximity to Washington, DC, added yet another problem. Abolitionists were numerous in the capital, and they often made forays into Virginia and Maryland, pretending to be peddlers or travelers. They would talk to slaves, and if they sensed discontent they would urge them to run away. The Lee family discovered two of these activists conversing with Arlington’s slaves soon after Mr. Custis’s death.9
These uninvited visitors would have had no trouble getting the Arlington’s slaves to tell them that they were being denied their freedom. The slaves even concocted a touching story, in which the ailing Mr. Custis had summoned them to his bedside and told them they would be free when he died.
In 1859, three slaves made a dash for freedom—Wesley Norris, his sister Mary, and a cousin, George Parks. They were caught in Maryland on their way to the free state of Pennsylvania and were returned to Arlington. Lee hired them out to plantations in eastern Virginia, where a successful second escape would be difficult.
Several days later, two letters appeared in the New York Tribune. Both accused Colonel Lee of ordering his overseer to strip the slaves and whip them on their return to Arlington. When the overseer refused to whip the young woman, the letter writer claimed, “Mr. Lee himself administered the thirty nine lashes to her.”
Lee’s only response to these stories was a letter to his son Custis: “The N.Y. Tribune has attacked me for my treatment of your grandfather’s slaves. I shall not reply. He has left me an unpleasant legacy.” Generations of historians have dismissed these letters as abolitionist propaganda. But a recent Lee biographer has found evidence that convinced her they may be substantially true.
In 1866, Wesley Norris published a letter in a Baltimore newspaper, reiterating that he had been whipped. This version omitted the story of Lee personally lashing Norris’s sister, Mary. Norris cited the name of the constable and other details, including how much money Colonel Lee paid the lawman. These additional facts have convinced Lee’s biographer that Norris’s letter was not an abolitionist creation and the previous letters were substantially true.10
Contradicting this conclusion is a vehement letter that Lee wrote to a friend in 1866, calling the charge slander. “There is not a word of truth in it. No servant, soldier or citizen that was ever employed by me can with truth charge me of bad treatment.”11
• • •
During his twenty-six months at Arlington, Colonel Lee was a harassed and unhappy man. He was both master and overseer, constantly involved in disputes with the slaves, with planting and harvesting corn and other crops, and with crucial repairs to the Arlington mansion and the slave quarters. Mrs. Lee’s arthritis continued to worsen, and it was soon evident that she would be crippled for life.
In the midst of these travails the colonel received a summons to the White House, where President Buchanan ordered him to leave immediately for Harpers Ferry to put down some sort of insurrection in or near the federal arsenal there.
In his confrontation with John Brown, Colonel Lee kept his emotions under tight control, as every combat leader is trained to do. As we have seen, Lee was present when Brown was interviewed by Virginia’s Governor Henry Wise and other politicians. The colonel heard the intruder’s distortions of his mission and his warning that slavery was a problem that the South had better solve soon. The next day Lee supervised the transfer of Brown and his surviving men to Charlestown, Virginia, the county seat, where they would stand trial.
Lee looked through the papers that Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart had seized at Brown’s headquarters on the Kennedy farm. With typical inattention to details, Brown had left behind a carpetbag containing four hundred letters, compromising his Boston backers, Gerrit Smith, and many other people. Lee decided that any conclusions about this evidence were beyond his authority and forwarded the documents to Washington, DC, without comment.
At nine o’clock on the night Lee hoped to leave Harpers Ferry, he received a message that raiders had descended from the nearby mountains and had massacred a family in Pleasant Valley, Maryland, a village about five miles away. The colonel and Lieutenant Stuart rushed there with twenty-five marines but found the town peaceful. Colonel Lee returned to the Ferry, finished his official report on Brown’s capture, and left on the 1:15 a.m. train.
The report virtually dismissed John Brown and his grandiose scheme. “The result,” Lee wrote, “proves the plan was the attempt of a fanatic or a madman.” Lee was probably playing down Brown’s attack, hoping to calm jittery civilians. He was much too intelligent not to recognize the significance of this murderous foray, especially since the seized letters revealed that it had been financed by wealthy northern backers.12
The colonel would soon learn that Pleasant Valley’s panic was spreading through Maryland, Virginia, and the rest of the South. Everywhere seldom-summoned militias were hastily ordered to start drilling. A college in Richmond organized a group of “minutemen,” invoking the heroes of 1776. One of the nation’s leading Republican newspapers, the New York Times, was soon reporting that Virginians were “almost insane with terror as their telegraph lines hummed with exaggerated and frantic alarms.”13
Anyone who said a word against slavery in the South in the weeks after John Brown’s foray was threatened with expletive-thick violence. Northerners, especially New Englanders, were regarded with special hostility and suspicion. One man in Pulaski County, Virginia, was hanged from a tree until he was close to death for no apparent reason beyond his Yankee accent. The Times called for calm in both South and North and condemned the abolitionists as people “who do not love the slave as much as they hate the white.”14
The Richmond Enquirer cited a story in the New York Herald, a paper it praised for “its open, fearless and powerful denunciations of the fanatics . . . of the North.” The Herald warned “another insurrection is in preparation, more bloody and extensive than the first.” In support of this alarm bell, the Enquirer quoted the abolitionist Washington Era, the first publisher of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The paper claimed that Brown’s aborted upheaval would soon be “extended to other southern states, where the black population are more numerous in proportion to the whites”—a good summary of Brown’s overall plan. It would be hard to suggest more explosive words. They aroused the South’s worst fear—a race war.15
Robert E. Lee’s friend and Arlington neighbor, Constance Gary Harrison, had a typical southern woman’s reaction to John Brown. Harpers Ferry was far away from Fairfax County. She belonged to a family that was among the first in Virginia to emancipate their slaves. “There seemed to be no especial reason to share the apprehension of an uprising by the blacks” she wrote, years later. “In the daytime it seemed impossible to associate suspicion with those familiar black or tawny faces that surrounded us . . . What subtle influence would transform them into tigers thirsting for our blood? The idea was preposterous. But when evening came again . . . rusty bolts were drawn and rusty firearms loaded . . . Peace . . . had flown from the borders of Virginia.”16
• • •
In the North, abolitionists seized on the stories about the South’s panic and claimed that the much-touted courage of the slave-owning cavaliers was a myth. One of the first to speak out was the British-born journalist, James Redpath, an early booster of John Brown. In the Boston Atlas, he declared that Brown had first exposed the South’s spinelessness in Kansas. Harpers Ferry demonstrated that the typical slave owner was “only a cowardly braggart, after all.” Proof was the “daily accounts” of the South’s “shrinking and quaking.”
A posse of policemen, Redpath sneered, should have been able to capture or kill Brown and his men in ten minutes. Instead, “fifteen states had trembled for fifteen days” and “they are not done quaking yet. I am very much afraid diapers will be needed before the trial of Old Brown shall be finished.” All in all, Redpath concluded, “As a demonstration of the South’s cowardice John Brown’s exploit is a brilliant success.”17
Again, it would be difficult to write anything that was more likely to arouse southern men to fury. Redpath was already hard at work on a biography of Brown, full of the same insults to Southerners, which would be a best seller in 1860.
William Lloyd Garrison called Brown’s raid “misguided, wild and apparently insane.” But it was “well intended.” While the father of abolitionism remained opposed to “war and bloodshed even in the best of causes,” he nonetheless hoped that no one “who glories in the Revolutionary struggle of 1776 denies the right of the slaves to imitate the example of our fathers.” As usual, Garrison blended his pacifism with hopes of violence by ignoring the bloodshed and death that permeated the Revolutionary War. His hatred of white Southerners and his indifference to the horrors of a race war remained impenetrable.18
• • •
Republican politicians, including Abraham Lincoln, were especially vehement in their denunciations of John Brown, showing their sensitivity to the political danger of abolitionists in their crowded tent. Presidential candidate Lincoln went out of his way to say Brown was “no Republican.” Democrats and their newspapers did their utmost to use Brown to prove that the Republicans should not be trusted with national power.
The New York Herald headlined the raid “THE ABOLITION OUTBREAK IN VIRGINIA” and said it was “the first act in the great drama of national disruption plotted by that demagogue, William H. Seward.” To substantiate this smear, editor James Gordon Bennett ran a copy of Seward’s 1856 Irrepressible Conflict speech, as if he had given it yesterday. In this rancid atmosphere, it is easy to see why President Buchanan’s claim that Brown exemplified a disease in the public mind had little or no impact.19
• • •
When Brown’s trial for murder and treason began, this negative public attitude underwent a slow but ultimately momentous change. The terrorist of Harpers Ferry portrayed himself as a man inspired by God. He resisted his lawyers’ attempts to have the court declare him insane. Though he had recovered from his superficial wounds, Brown claimed that he was too weak to stand or sit. He lay on the floor on an improvised bed, an image of helpless suffering. For Brown, the trial was a stage on which he performed for the entire nation. He was achieving his wish to die and simultaneously fulfilling his lifelong hunger for fame, after so many failures.
It took the jury only forty-five minutes to find Brown guilty of treason against the state of Virginia, conspiring and advising with slaves to rebel, and murder in the first degree. Still prone on his pallet, Brown showed no emotion as he heard these words. His lawyers asked for an arrest of judgment, a formality that had no hope of success. The judge said he would rule on the motion the following day. He had to preside at the trial of one of Brown’s confederates that afternoon.
The next day, Brown was brought to the courtroom when darkness was falling. This time he walked the short distance from the jail, displaying what a New York Tribune reporter called “considerable pain.” He sat down beside his lawyers, and the judge dismissed the arrest of judgment plea. He asked Brown if he had anything to say before he pronounced the sentence. After a moment’s silence Brown rose to his feet. Overhead, glowing gas lamps gave his face what the same reporter called “an almost deathly pallor.”
I have, may it please the court, a few words to say.
In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, of a design on my part to free slaves. I intended certainly to have made a clean thing of that matter, as I did last winter when I went into Missouri, and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moving them through the country and finally leaving them in Canada. I designed to have done the same thing on a larger scale. This was all I intended. I never did intend murder, or treason, or destruction of property, or to excite slaves to rebellion or to make insurrection.
I have another objection, and that is that it is unjust that I should suffer such a penalty. Had I interfered in the manner in which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved—for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case—had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so called great, or on behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have for this interference, it would have been all right; every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.
The 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 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. I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, on behalf of His despised poor, I did no wrong, but right. 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 millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded as wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I say let it be done.20
These words would have a huge impact on thousands of people in the North. They testify to John Brown’s genuine sympathy for the slave. But they were intertwined with egregious evasions and lies. As Brown’s maps and correspondence proved, he had planned a huge slave insurrection. That was why he had seized the federal arsenal with its thousands of guns and had brought with him hundreds of pikes. Even the minor claim of freeing slaves in Missouri without so much as snapping a gun was untrue. Brown or one of his sons had killed a slave owner in a shootout.
The second paragraph was an appeal to hatred of the rich and successful, which demagogues have been using since ancient Greece and Rome. The closing paragraph was an interpretation of the Bible that was beyond the recognition of any serious reader of that book. Shortly after Brown’s capture, he was visited by a Catholic priest, who asked him how he could claim that the Bible countenanced his claim of divine sanction for a slave insurrection. The priest quoted verses from St. Paul, in which the apostle urged slaves to be obedient to their masters. Brown exploded into fury and replied that if the Bible said such a thing, the book was worthless trash.
The judge condemned Brown to hang. He met his fate with unflinching courage, convinced that his sacrifice was part of God’s providential plan. During the two weeks while Charlestown prepared for his execution, he received hundreds of letters. He answered them with the same conviction of his innocence before his God.
One letter Brown did not answer came from Mahala Doyle, the widow and mother of three of the men he had murdered in Kansas. She told him she felt “gratified to hear that you were stopped in your fiendish career at Harpers Ferry, with the loss of your two sons.” She hoped he would appreciate her grief when Brown “arrested my husband and two boys, and took them out in the yard and shot them dead in my hearing.” The crime was especially unforgiveable because they had never owned a slave “or expected to own one.” She only wished that her surviving son could be at Charlestown to tie the rope around Brown’s neck.21
• • •
While Brown was on trial, wealthy Virginia slave owner Edmund Ruffin was hard at work on a very different task. He had rushed to Harpers Ferry and joined his friend, Governor Henry Wise, in interviewing Brown on the day he was captured. Ruffin had persuaded Wise to give him a sizeable number of Brown’s pikes. He saw these weapons as convincing proof that Virginia should secede as soon as possible.
With a fanatic’s energy, Ruffin distributed the pikes to key people throughout the South. Every state governor received one. With each pike was a letter from Ruffin asking if the recipient appreciated what Brown’s wealthy abolitionist backers had given him to arm the slaves. Could the South stay in the same country with people who could complacently look forward to seeing these weapons thrust into the bodies of helpless women and children?
Ruffin was fanatical on the subject of secession. Otherwise he was a very intelligent man. He had studied how Southerners should and could farm their bountiful acres more scientifically, adding chemicals to prevent the soil from becoming depleted. If more farmers took his advice, the South’s annual income, already far superior to the North’s, would continue to grow. Among plantation owners he was already famous. Governors would pay attention to a letter from him. When it was reinforced with one of Brown’s pikes, Ruffin’s message would not be forgotten anytime soon.22
• • •
John Brown’s courtroom performance had a huge impact on newspaper readers in the North. Above all it captured the passionate sympathy and admiration of the group that would win John Brown widespread vindication in New England and the Midwest—the thinkers and writers of Concord. Henry David Thoreau led the way. He was transfixed by Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry. He all but babbled in his journal: Brown was Jesus. He was a Puritan who had died in Cromwell’s army. Above all he was a Transcendentalist—with Emersonian faith in the power of the individual soul to ignore churches and sacred texts and achieve its own brand of salvation.
Thoreau announced that he would give a lecture on his hero. The local Republican Party and Concord’s antislavery committee begged him not to speak. He ignored them and denounced the “hypocritical and diabolical” American government. He compared Brown to a meteor that had plunged into the complacent America of 1859. The Pottawatomie butcher was “the bravest and humanest man in the country.”
Thoreau aroused the more cautious and realistic Emerson. The Sage abandoned all inclinations to find a peaceful solution to slavery. He described John Brown as “that new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death. . . . the new saint who would make the gallows as glorious as the cross.”23
Those last words swiftly acquired the status of Emerson’s paean to Concord Bridge, in which he had said the militiamen of 1775 “fired the shot heard round the world.” James Redpath dedicated his bestselling biography of Brown to Emerson, Thoreau, and Wendell Phillips, whom he called “Defenders of the Faithful who when the mob shouted Madman said Saint.”24
• • •
Less glorious and far less transcendental was the behavior of John Brown’s backers, the six men who had sent him money and encouragement. Their letters, seized in Brown’s carpetbag, began appearing in several leading newspapers. The New York Herald called for the arrest and prosecution of Gerrit Smith as an accessory to Brown’s crime. The paper claimed that the carpetbag contained an uncashed check for $100 from Smith. It seemed likely that similar punishment would be demanded for the other five.
While the imprisoned Brown calmly awaited death, panic and cowardice characterized his backers. Gerrit Smith had never been stable—two of his brothers were incarcerated in a New York state mental hospital. He began reeling toward a similar destination.
Smith babbled to friends and family that he had been responsible for the bloodshed at Harpers Ferry. He talked of going to Charlestown and joining Brown in his prison cell. One of his close friends, Edwin Morton, who lived with him and knew in intimate detail Smith’s role in Brown’s plot, decamped for England. Smith grew more and more incoherent, and his family decided he might be safer in the asylum for the insane at Utica.
After John Brown’s execution eliminated him as a witness in a treason trial, Smith emerged from the asylum and spent the rest of his life denying that he had ever talked to Brown about a slave insurrection. The millionaire backed up his lies with threats of lawsuits for defamation, which caused accusers to retreat. This after-the-fact behavior arouses suspicion that Smith’s breakdown was designed to keep federal marshals at bay.25
In Boston, Franklin Sanborn rushed to consult John Albion Andrew, one of the best attorneys in the city (and a passionate abolitionist). Andrew advised him to head for Canada. Samuel Gridley Howe, the storied liberator of Greece, fled in the same direction, as did wealthy George Stearns. They stayed there until John Brown was executed.
In mid-November, Howe published an hysterical denial in a Boston paper, claiming that the event “at Harpers Ferry was unforeseen and unexpected by me.” He found it hard to reconcile the assault with John Brown’s “characteristic prudence, and his reluctance to shed blood or excite servile insurrection.” The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, another member of the Secret Six, as Brown’s backers were now being called, sent him a blazing reproach: “Is there no such thing as honor among confederates?”26
Higginson dared federal authorities to arrest him. He was ready to defend himself and go to prison if necessary. Meanwhile he joined a plot to liberate Brown from his Charlestown prison cell. Nothing came of it but a lot of frantic letter writing and pleas for money from the plotters.
The only other member of the group who stood his ground was the Reverend Theodore Parker. He wrote a public letter declaring that he had always approved of slave insurrections. But he was in Rome, Italy, dying of tuberculosis, and had little to fear from federal warrants.
Frederick Douglass was not one of John Brown’s backers, but Brown had invited him to join the raid and had spelled out all the details only a few weeks before the doomed venture. Douglass’s name was in several letters in Brown’s abandoned carpetbag. As a black man, he had good reason to fear that with race prejudice virulent in the North as well as the South, the Buchanan administration might fasten on him as a collaborator or even instigator. The former slave decided he might be safer in England and headed for the nearest ship.27
• • •
On December 2, 1859, the day of John Brown’s execution, tension ran high in Charlestown. Governor Henry A. Wise took no chances. He had been bombarded with hundreds of letters threatening or vowing that Brown would be rescued. Wise requested the return of Colonel Lee and a contingent of federal troops to guard the approaches to the city. Around the execution site he arrayed hundreds of Virginia militiamen.
Among the men in uniform was a contingent from the Virginia Military Academy under the command of Thomas Jackson, one of the West Pointers who had distinguished himself in Mexico. In the militia’s ranks wearing a borrowed uniform was a well-known actor, John Wilkes Booth, who had a passion for politics and sided with the South’s view of the quarrel. Colonel Lee, sticking to his public statement that Brown was an irrelevant fanatic, told friends he was bored with “the Harpers Ferry War” and would welcome a return to Texas, where he might accomplish something fighting Comanches.28
Elsewhere, church bells rang in dozens of New England cities and in the Yankee portion of the Midwest. It was the culmination of a campaign to turn Brown into a hero-saint. In the weeks before the hanging, there were huge meetings in Boston and other cities, at which orators held forth on Brown’s courage and self-sacrifice. At one conclave, Ralph Waldo Emerson again compared him to Jesus Christ. At Natick, Massachusetts, Henry C. Wright, a Garrisonian abolitionist who had abandoned pacifism, declared that Christ, who had failed to end slavery in America in spite of three decades of prayers and appeals in His name, was a “dead failure” compared to John Brown, who would be “a power far more efficient.” The similarity of these frantic theological somersaults to the public frenzy that gripped Massachusetts during the witch trials of 1692 is striking.29
In many meeting places, a large reproduction of John Brown’s speech to the judge was displayed like a banner. Some people followed William Lloyd Garrison’s example, disapproving of John Brown’s tactics but praising the prospect of “slave insurrections everywhere.” In Cleveland, Ohio, speakers admitted that Brown had mistaken “the method, the time and the place” for his attack. But it was now clear that slavery could only be subdued by giving it “war to the knife, with the knife to the hilt.”
A passion for a violent solution to slavery was sweeping the abolitionist citizens of the nation. No one stoked the conflagration better than John Brown. As he left his prison cell for the trip to the gallows, he handed his jailer a note. I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away, but with Blood. A reporter who was expert in the art of faking it wrote in the New York Tribune that Brown paused on the way to the gallows to kiss a baby in the arms of a grieving black woman. It was one more lie in the campaign to elevate him to spurious sainthood. A painting would later memorialize this nonevent.30
• • •
When Congress reconvened in late December 1859, a Senate committee headed by Senator James M. Mason of Virginia opened a probe of the Harpers Ferry raid. Mason was a grandson of George Mason, who had been a passionate foe of the slave trade at the Constitutional Convention. Three decades of abolitionist abuse had turned the descendant into a disciple of John C. Calhoun. The committee summoned numerous witnesses, including Colonel Lee, who was asked only a few perfunctory questions about the final assault on Brown and his surviving defenders.
The committee sent a federal marshal to Massachusetts with a warrant for Franklin Sanborn, but he eluded him. The next day Sanborn got a writ from the state Supreme Court declaring that the committee had no authority in the Bay State. The politicians also summoned Samuel Gridley Howe and George Stearns, who had returned from Canada. After conferring with attorney John Albion Andrew, who was running for governor of Massachusetts, they decided to testify. Andrew had concluded the politicians had a strange lack of desire to find out anything significant.
Both Howe and Gridley swore to tell the truth, and then lied steadily about their relationship with John Brown. Stearns solemnly assured the senators, “I never supposed he contemplated anything like what occurred at Harpers Ferry.” Having it both ways, Stearns added, “I should have disapproved of it [Brown’s raid] if I had known of it. But I have since changed my opinion.”31
Why did Chairman Mason let these men get away with perjury? Probably for the same reason that he did not summon the defiant Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The atmosphere in Congress and in Washington, DC, was already so tense that the committee feared an outbreak of violence. Almost every member of both houses of Congress was carrying a gun. In the crowded galleries, there were undoubtedly more weapons. John Brown’s fanaticism seemed to be in charge, North and South.