Cloudsplitter (93 page)

In the meantime, back at Harpers Ferry, at 1:25 A.M., precisely as scheduled, the Baltimore-bound B & O passenger train rolls in, and when it has hissed to a noisy stop at the station, the night clerk from the hotel next door skitters low from the door of the railroad station, and before the conductor can step down from the train to the platform, the man has leapt aboard, bearing the startling news that gunmen are out on the Potomac bridge and have shot a watchman, who lies bleeding inside the hotel! Worse, the other three town watchmen are nowhere about and may even have been murdered! And here’s something else: when the clerk slipped unseen into the station by a rear window adjacent to the hotel, he tried to telegraph the stationmaster in Charles Town and discovered that the wires had been cut. There is something very strange, something
dangerous,
happening, and until now, with no idea of how many gunmen might be out there or where they may be hiding, no one but the night clerk has dared to leave the hotel or been able to raise a general alarm.

The conductor, A. J. Phelps, takes immediate charge and directs the engineer and the baggagemaster, who carries a pistol, to step from the train and investigate the bridge, for it may have been sabotaged. Who knows but what these gunmen are train robbers and have blocked the bridge somehow? If the tracks appear clear, he says, they straightway will pass across the river and, at the station in Monococy in Maryland, will telegraph the news of these startling events over to Charles Town, the county seat, where there is a federal marshal’s office and a regiment of town militia available for help.

Sleepy passengers peer out their windows, wondering why the delay, as the engineer and the baggagemaster, his pistol at the ready, walk slowly along the station platform, step down to the railbed, and crunch over the cinders and gravel towards the dark mouth of the covered bridge. When the pair are about fifteen feet from the entrance, Watson speaks to them from the darkness ahead. Drop your pistol, sir, and both of you walk slowly towards us. Keep your hands in full view. You’re under a hundred guns, gentlemen, and are now our prisoners. You won’t be harmed, if you do as we say.

The baggagemaster lets his pistol fall to the railbed, and the two men, as instructed, extend their hands as if ready to be manacled and walk forward. Meanwhile, behind them, up on the platform, a Negro man named Hayward Shepherd, a freedman employed at the station as the night baggageman, has stepped from the office to the platform to see what is going on, and Phelps, the conductor—too far from the bridge for him or the clerk or anyone on the train to see in the darkness that the engineer and the baggagemaster have been all but taken prisoner—orders him to go and assist them in their investigation. Shepherd jumps to the ground and hurries to join the two, who have disappeared inside the bridge. When he, too, has neared the entrance and is now beyond earshot of the men on the platform, he hears a calm, low voice from the darkness, Watson Brown’s, ordering him to stop and listen. Shepherd, a middle-aged bachelor affectionately called “Uncle Hay” by the white citizens of the town, stops and listens. In a conversational tone, Watson tells him what Father has instructed all of us to say to the Virginia freedmen. We have come from Kansas to free the slaves. You may join us in this enterprise or not. But if you refuse to join us, we will treat with you as with any white man who refuses to join us. We will be forced to consider you our enemy.

For a second, Shepherd hesitates, as if not quite getting Watson’s meaning, and then abruptly he turns and runs. Watson—or perhaps it is Stewart Taylor, or maybe some other raider, standing in the shadows of the storefronts nearby; any one of us could have done it—fires his rifle, and Shepherd falls, mortally wounded by a single bullet in the spine, running through to the chest. With everyone watching him and no one daring to move to help—not Watson or Stewart inside the covered bridge, not their two prisoners, not the several raiders hiding in the shadows along the street or Father standing unseen at the gate of the armory, not the men up on the platform by the station or the passengers staring in horror from the windows of the train: no one who sees it can make himself come forward to help the fallen man—as Shepherd lifts his bloody chest from the cinders and with his arms slowly drags his numbed, dying body away from the bridge towards the station. After what seems like a long while, he succeeds in getting to a protected place below the platform that is close enough for Phelps and the hotel clerk safely to reach down and draw him up to it, where they quickly pull his body inside the station as if he were already a dead man.

Prepare yourselves for sad ironies, Father forewarned us, often enough for us to have expected it. But it has come nonetheless as a dismaying shock. Men, the cruel perversity of slavery will snap back betimes and will try to bite us in our face, he told us. We have to be hard, hard. This surely is what he meant: that in the liberation of the slaves, the first to die may well be neither a white man nor a slave, but a free Negro.

This sad event has the immediate good effect, however, of closing down the train and trapping its passengers inside it, with Conductor Phelps and the hotel clerk retreating to the station, and the guests, those few wakened by this, the second gunshot of the night, holing up inside the hotel. For the time being, the town is still ours. A little after four A.M., Aaron Stevens’s party comes clattering down Potomac Street, the trap driven by Tidd, with Colonel Washington and Mr. Allstadt and his son in it, and the farm wagon driven by Cook, with the seven liberated slaves huddled in back. Stevens, who carries General Washington’s pistol and sword wrapped in a blanket, and the other raiders, Anderson, Leary, and Green, are on horseback, their mounts taken from Allstadt’s farm.

As soon as they have arrived at the armory yard, Father tells the newly freed slaves who he is, Osawatomie Brown of Kansas, which, as he expected, evokes in them a certain fearfulness, until he reveals that his principal ally is the famous Negro Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave himself, and this seems to impress and calm them somewhat, for these are Virginia ex-slaves and rebellious types, surely, or they would not have come in with Stevens and his men, and being from a border town, they no doubt have had secret access to abolitionist information and literature. He places pikes into their hands and stations them inside the firehouse to guard the growing number of hostages. For now, these white men are your prisoners, he says. Treat them honestly, for they are hostages, whom we will deploy if we need to bargain for our continued safety, and as we will be freeing them later, we want them to tell other white people the truth about us, that we want not revenge but liberty.

The seven Negroes, a woman and six men, several of them barefoot in the cold night, take up their pikes and hesitantly, as if they have no choice in the matter, follow their former masters into the firehouse, while Father straps on George Washington’s scabbard and sword and adds to his pair of old service revolvers the General’s engraved pistol and tooled leather holster. In all his armament, he is a formidable sight, a warrior chieftain, and with his Old Testament beard and fierce gray eyes and his battered straw hat and Yankee farmer’s woolen frock coat and his—to the Negroes, to all people, in fact—peculiar way of speaking, he is a paradoxical one as well: a man out of time, without a shred of vanity or the slightest regard for convention, and though an old man, he is as overflowing as a boy with single-minded purpose and high principles, armed and clothed for no other task in life than this night’s bloody work. The rest of the men, if they put their rifles down, and the ex-slaves, if they put away their pikes, could easily fold back into the general populace and disappear from sight, here or anywhere in America; but not Father: he is Osawatomie Brown of Kansas, and no American, white or black, Northern or Southern, would mistake him for anybody else.

Although they are far fewer than he expected by now and seem somewhat confused and fearful, the arrival of these, the first of the freed slaves, has excited Father, and he orders Cook to drive one of the wagons over to the Maryland side, to the schoolhouse where I and my two men, Barclay Coppoc and Frank Meriam, will have cached the remainder of our arms, one hundred fifty rifles and another hundred pistols and most of the thousand sharpened pikes. Cook is to bring one-third of the pikes back into town, for, surely, by morning there will be mutinous slaves thronging to the armory yard. The remainder of the weapons are for me and my men to distribute first amongst the insurrectionary slaves who come in from Maryland, and then we are to carry the remainder up into the mountains for eventual dispersal there. By daylight, on both sides of the river, we will have hundreds of escaped slaves to arm, Father says, and must be ready for them in both places, or they will not believe that we are serious.

For now, until further orders, the raiders who are inside the town are merely to hold their positions—Kagi and his men, Copeland and now Leary, over at the rifle factory on Hall’s Island, Oliver and Will Thompson posted at the Shenandoah bridge, Watson and Taylor still holding the bridge across the Potomac, and Hazlett and Edwin Coppoc guarding the arsenal; the rest of the men stand at the ready here at the center of town, in and around the armory grounds and the firehouse.

It is close to six A.M. The rain has ceased, and the heavy storm clouds have moved off, and as dawn approaches, the sky turns slowly to a fluttery, gray, silken sheet, with the high, wooded ridges in the east and north silhouetted against it. The brick storefronts and houses and offices of the town and the narrow, cobbled streets glisten wetly from the night’s rain, and when the first light of the rising sun spreads across the eastern horizon, the faces of the buildings here below turn pink and seem almost to bloom, as if in the darkness of the night they existed only in a nascent form, not quite real.

Before long, the first of the armory workers, all unsuspecting, come drifting into the center of town in twos and threes from their small wood-frame houses above the cliffs on Clay Street, and as they walk through the iron gate into the yard, Father and the others grab them and make them hostages in the firehouse, until he has close to forty men crowded into the two large rooms and has to station several of his raiders inside with the freed slaves to help guard them. Then, by daylight, just as Father said it would, word of the raid gets out. Dr. John Starry, a local physician, is the first to raise the alarm. Summoned to the hotel hours earlier to care for the wounded watchman and the dying Hayward Shepherd by a courageous Negro barman who, at risk of his life, slipped out a side door of the hotel and down dark alleyways to the physician’s house, Dr. Starry bandages the watchman’s forehead and is at Shepherd’s side when the poor man dies, after which, accompanied by the barman who brought him there, he succeeds in returning to his home undetected, where at once he rouses his family and neighbors. Then he rides to the home of the Superintendent of the Armory, A. M. Kitzmiller, bringing the scarcely-to-be-believed news. The armory, arsenal, and rifle works and a large group of hostages, including Colonel Lewis Washington, are all in the hands of an army of abolitionist murderers that is led by none other than Osawatomie Brown and aided by a wild gang of escaped, spear-carrying slaves! There is a full-scale insurrection under way! Brown has trained cannon on the square, the doctor reports, and is moving all the arms from the town into the interior!

Soon the bell of the Lutheran church atop the hill starts to clang, summoning the citizens to an emergency meeting, and a rider has been sent to Shepherdstown to call out the local militia, and a second has been dispatched to Charles Town for the Jefferson Guards, formed for the express purpose of meeting precisely this circumstance after the Turner rebellion back in ‘31.

Father and his men, when they hear the church bell ringing on and on for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, know what is happening. Don’t be frightened, boys, don’t panic. There’s still plenty of time, he assures the men. The hostages and practically every rifle in the town are in our hands. And the Lord is watching over us. We won’t go down, boys, but if the Lord requires it of us, then it will be as Samson went. These people know that, and they don’t want it, so we’re still safe enough here.

It is full daylight, around seven A.M., when Father strides through the gate of the armory yard and approaches the railroad station and calls out for Mr. Phelps, the conductor. Come here, sir! I wish to parley with you! Phelps pokes his head out the door but refuses to come forward. I have decided to let you move the train on to Baltimore, Father declares. But tell your employer, and tell all the civil and military authorities, that this is the last train I will permit in or out of Harpers Ferry, at the extreme peril of those men we have taken prisoner, until we have finished with our business here.

Phelps nods, and he and the engineer and the baggagemaster return to the train, fire it up, and take it slowly towards the covered bridge and across the Potomac into Maryland. From the schoolhouse on the heights opposite, I watch the train far below snake its way out of the bridge and wind along the north bank of the river towards Baltimore and Washington beyond, and I know that within minutes, as soon as the train has reached the station at Monocacy, news of the raid will reach the main offices of the B & O. An hour later, in Richmond, an aide to Governor Henry Wise will disturb the Governor’s breakfast with astonishing news, and shortly afterwards, in Washington, D.C., an adjutant general will burst into the office of the Secretary of War, who will read the wire from Governor Wise requesting federal troops and will at once ask for an emergency meeting with President Buchanan. More in line with Father’s purposes—and I know this, too—by evening, every newspaper in the land will be shouting the news of our raid:

F
EARFUL AND
E
XCITING
I
NTELLIGENCE
! N
EGRO
I
NSURRECTION
I
N
H
ARPERS
F
ERRY
, V
IRGINIA
, L
ED BY
J
OHN
B
ROWN OF
K
ANSAS
!!
M
ANY
S
LAIN
, H
UNDREDS
T
AKEN
H
OSTAGE
, F
EDERAL
A
RMS
S
EIZED
!!!