Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price (10 page)
Authors: Tony Horwitz
Tags: #John Brown, #Abolition, #Civil War Period (1850-1877)
BOOK: Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price
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But they weren’t in thrall to Brown or to his strategy. In fact, several of the men voiced strong objections upon learning that Brown’s mysterious strike against slavery was aimed at Virginia. “Some warm words passed between him and myself in regard to the plan, which I had supposed was to be confined entirely to Kansas and Missouri,” one of the men later wrote. At this point, there was no mention of Harpers Ferry; Brown said only that the men would go east to prepare for their mission. Only “after a good deal of wrangling,” one of the dissidents wrote, did the nine men agree to go ahead.
In early December 1857, Brown, his son Owen, and the new volunteers loaded covered wagons with the weapons stored in a Tabor barn and began a slow trek east across Iowa. The “11 desperadoes,” as Owen referred to the band in his diary, walked beside the wagons, through heavy snow, and spent nights around a log fire, singing and picking at lice. They also held “Lyceums or discussions of some question,” one of the men wrote, usually a topic proposed by Brown and “he always presiding.”
Owen made notes on these extraordinary sessions in his journal. “Cold, wet and snowy; hot discussion upon the Bible and war,” he wrote.
“Warm argument upon the effects of the abolition of Slavery upon the Southern States, Northern States, commerce and manufactures, also upon the British provinces and the civilized world; whence came our civilization and origin? talk about prejudices against color; question proposed for debate—greatest general, Washington or Napoleon. Very cold night; prairie wolves howl nobly.”
“Warm argument upon the effects of the abolition of Slavery upon the Southern States, Northern States, commerce and manufactures, also upon the British provinces and the civilized world; whence came our civilization and origin? talk about prejudices against color; question proposed for debate—greatest general, Washington or Napoleon. Very cold night; prairie wolves howl nobly.”
In late December, the band reached a railhead in eastern Iowa and shipped their arms to Ohio, where Brown planned to train his men before embarking for Virginia in the spring. But, unable to sell his horse and wagons to raise money for the onward journey, he swapped them for winter board at a farm near Springdale, a mostly Quaker community that was a well-traveled stop on the Underground Railroad.
Quartered in the farmhouse attic, the men commenced training at what Owen wryly called their “War College.” Since Hugh Forbes was no longer available, the job of drillmaster fell to the Army deserter in Brown’s ranks, who went by the alias Colonel Whipple. He oversaw maneuvers in a field behind the farmhouse, including drills with wooden swords, and calisthenics to harden the men for mountain operations. They also studied Forbes’s manual on guerrilla tactics.
Neighboring Iowans weren’t sure what to make of these paramilitary exercises. As Quakers, they disapproved of violence, but they also hated slavery. Most locals believed the men were preparing to return to Kansas; others, curiously, thought the strangers were a band of Mormon spies.
Over time, however, relations became closer. On snowbound days and long winter nights, the men grew restless. Some played chess, checkers, and cards; others were skilled debaters and began holding mock legislative sessions in a local schoolhouse. Following parliamentary rules of order, the men introduced and voted on bills related to slavery, women’s rights, temperance, and other questions. These “legislatures” became popular entertainment for neighboring Iowans.
The men, all bachelors, also started courting local women. This led to the mock “censure” of one of Brown’s men, “for hugging girls in Springdale Legislature.” Another man evidently took far greater liberties. Months later, a Quaker couple wrote to demand details of his relationship with their daughter and ask whether she was “the worse for their intimacy.”
BROWN STERNLY DISAPPROVED OF such licentious behavior, but he wasn’t present to monitor it. Within a few weeks of the band’s arrival in Springdale, he went east to raise money. This time, he went about his fund-raising very differently. Rather than speak in public venues, seeking aid from all quarters, he cloaked his movements and sought discreet support from the few men he believed willing to back his “secret service.”
One of his first stops, in late January 1858, was at the Rochester, New York, home of Frederick Douglass. He stayed three weeks and seemed possessed by his mission, drawing up plans and drafting a “constitution” for the revolutionary state he intended to found in the mountains of Virginia. “His whole time and thought were given to this subject,” Douglass wrote. “It was the first thing in the morning, and the last thing at night; till, I confess, it began to be something of a bore to me.”
Brown’s feverish planning included sketches of mountain redoubts. “These forts were to be so arranged as to connect one with the other by secret passages, so that if one was carried another could be easily fallen back upon,” Douglass said. “I was less interested in these drawings than my children were.”
Brown was on fire in his correspondence as well. “Courage, courage, courage!” he wrote his wife and children in North Elba, in a letter filled with exclamation points, urging them to be stalwart as he undertook “the great work of my life.” He also remobilized John junior, who, in an effort to calm his shattered nerves, had turned to a quiet life of farming in Ohio. “Kansas is daugerotyped upon my heart,” John junior wrote that February, “a stormy yet glorious picture.”
Though no longer fit for armed service, the son answered his father’s call to help with logistics. Brown gave him instructions about the weapons he’d shipped from Iowa, which were initially hidden beneath coffins in a furniture warehouse near John junior’s house. Brown also urged him to travel to Gettysburg, Chambersburg, and other towns in southern Pennsylvania to quietly seek out allies. “When you look at the location of those places you will readily perceive the advantage of getting up some acquaintances in those parts.”
Brown then spilled out another page of orders, asking John junior to visit Washington as well. “I want to get good maps, & State statistics of
the different Southern States,” he wrote. Brown was sometimes scolding of John junior, but he closed this letter with encouraging words for his fragile son: “I have no doubt you would by
diligence & patient perseverence
fully succeed in raising the wind.”
the different Southern States,” he wrote. Brown was sometimes scolding of John junior, but he closed this letter with encouraging words for his fragile son: “I have no doubt you would by
diligence & patient perseverence
fully succeed in raising the wind.”
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Theodore Parker
Brown deployed a similar mix of flattery and exhortation in his letters seeking financial support. To Thomas Wentworth Higginson—a militant minister who believed in breaking apart the Union to destroy slavery—Brown wrote: “I now want to get for the perfecting of
by far
the most
important
undertaking of my whole life from $500 to $800 within the next sixty days. Hope this is my last effort in the begging line.”
by far
the most
important
undertaking of my whole life from $500 to $800 within the next sixty days. Hope this is my last effort in the begging line.”
The fiery Higginson replied: “I am always ready to invest money in treason, but at present have none to invest.” He also pointed out that he was already attempting to raise money for the Underground Railroad.
“Rail Road business on a
somewhat extended scale
is the
identical
object for which I am trying to get means,” Brown shot back. He appealed to the minister’s considerable vanity as well. “I have been told you are both
a true
man
& a true
abolitionist,
” he wrote, at the same time questioning whether this was so of others in their circle.
somewhat extended scale
is the
identical
object for which I am trying to get means,” Brown shot back. He appealed to the minister’s considerable vanity as well. “I have been told you are both
a true
man
& a true
abolitionist,
” he wrote, at the same time questioning whether this was so of others in their circle.
The same day, Brown sent a separate letter to Theodore Parker—one of the men named in his note to Higginson—and played the identical game. “I have written to some of our mutual friends,” Brown told Parker, “but none of them understand my views so well as you do.” Brown added that he wasn’t certain these other friends were “deeply-dyed Abolitionists,” as Parker most assuredly was.
THESE SLY, STROKING APPEALS had their intended effect. In early 1858, Higginson, Parker, and four other men agreed to form a cadre to support Brown’s mission. Though the group would later become known as the Secret Six, it was composed of very public and prominent figures. Four were Harvard graduates, the most distinguished of them Parker, a leading Transcendentalist and radical Boston minister. Among other bold acts, he had harbored and then married a fugitive slave couple, handing the groom a sword to guard against slave catchers. Parker was also an eloquent orator—his was the famous declaration that the arc of the moral universe “bends towards justice.”
Higginson, a protégé of Parker’s, was another Harvard Divinity School graduate and clergyman, as well as a writer (he later became the mentor of Emily Dickinson). But his literary and spiritual pursuits were coupled with a temperament that resembled Brown’s. Higginson was one of the abolitionists who had battered down the door of a Boston courthouse in 1854 to free the fugitive slave Anthony Burns. He was also a boxing and bodybuilding enthusiast, intolerant of weakness and impatient for muscular action. In one letter to Brown, he wrote: “I long to see you with adequate funds in your hands, set free from timid advisers, & able to act in your own way.”
Samuel Gridley Howe was another well-bred man of action. The grandson of a participant in the Boston Tea Party, he graduated from Harvard Medical School and was inspired by Lord Byron to join Greece’s revolution against Turkey as a soldier-surgeon. He later aided Polish insurgents fighting Russia. Returning to Boston, Howe became a pioneer in the care of the
blind, deaf, and mentally disabled. He also married the poet Julia Ward Howe, who would immortalize Brown’s spirit in the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—and who was so dispirited by her dashing, unfaithful husband that she wrote, “Hope died as I was led, / Unto my marriage bed.”
blind, deaf, and mentally disabled. He also married the poet Julia Ward Howe, who would immortalize Brown’s spirit in the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—and who was so dispirited by her dashing, unfaithful husband that she wrote, “Hope died as I was led, / Unto my marriage bed.”
Samuel Gridley Howe
George Luther Stearns
While Parker, Higginson, and Howe brought ideological fire to Brown’s cause, George Luther Stearns provided money and guns. A self-made magnate, enriched by the manufacture of linseed oil and lead pipe, he was the Kansas Committee chair who had paid on his own to send Brown two hundred revolvers, while also pledging thousands of dollars. On his doctor’s advice, Stearns wore an extravagant beard to warm his chest and throat and protect them from bronchial problems. In other respects, he was the most conventional and businesslike of the Secret Six—in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “no boaster or pretender, but a man for up-hill work.”
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