A Disease in the Public Mind (38 page)

     
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.