Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price (24 page)

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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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These were Thompson’s final words. Unable to find a rope, Hunter and Chambers raised their guns and fired. “Before he fell, a dozen or more balls were buried in him,” Hunter said. The gunmen then threw Thompson into the river, where he somehow managed to flail forward a few feet before another fusillade stilled him. Hunter expressed no regret for the killing, stating in court that he was “fired and excited by the cowardly, savage manner in which Mr. Beckham’s life had been taken.”
Nor were the vigilantes satisfied: they marched back into the Wager House to take revenge on Aaron Stevens as well. Lying badly wounded in bed, Stevens folded his arms across his chest and stared in silent contempt at the men threatening to kill him. Since he was “probably dying,”
Hunter testified, “we concluded to spare him, and start after others, and shoot all we could find.”
 
 
THE MAJORITY OF BROWN’S remaining men were sixty yards away, in and around the squat brick engine house, just behind the armory gate. From there, the armory complex stretched more than five hundred yards north, between raised railroad tracks and the Potomac on one side and a high wall on the other. If well-patrolled, the facility was hard to breach. But the armory’s northern end now lay far beyond Brown’s sight or reach, and late that afternoon, it was occupied by newly arrived volunteers from Martinsburg, a Virginia town twenty miles from Harpers Ferry. Most of the reinforcements were railroad men who worked on heavy-tonnage trains, and they were led by a Mexican War veteran, Captain Ephraim Alburtis.
At about four o’clock, Alburtis marched his force south through the armory yard until they came under fire from Brown’s men, a few of whom had taken up sheltered positions outside the engine house. The Martinsburg men returned fire and pressed forward, driving the defenders back inside their fortress.
At midday, Brown had moved his ten most prominent hostages into the engine house, leaving the other thirty or so prisoners in the adjoining guardroom. With the help of Alburtis’s men, these prisoners smashed a window and escaped around the side of the building as shooting continued at the front.
At this point, Alburtis later stated, he felt “we could have ended the business” with a coordinated assault by his men and those positioned outside the armory gate. But their efforts were piecemeal, and a brief charge at the gate in support of the Martinsburg men was repulsed.
The ill-organized gunmen besieging the armory also came under fire from an unexpected direction. All that afternoon, John Cook had listened to the gunshots in Harpers Ferry from his post at the Maryland schoolhouse, a mile or so away. He had strict orders to remain there, guarding the arms with one of Lewis Washington’s freed slaves. He also kept watch on the schoolteacher, Lind Currie, who later said that Cook initially showed no anxiety about the sound of battle from across the river. Whenever
gunfire erupted, Currie testified, Cook would turn to his fellow guard and say, “There, that’s another one of your oppressors gone.”
But as the day went on and the firing became “very rapid and continuous,” Cook couldn’t sit still any longer. On the promise that the teacher would say nothing of what he’d seen, Cook released Currie and then headed down to the Potomac. From two women he spoke to at a canal lock, Cook learned that “our men were hemmed in, and that several of them had been shot.” Determined to do what he could to help them, Cook scrambled up the precipitous ridge rising behind the Potomac’s Maryland bank.
From there, he could see that Brown’s force was encircled and that gunmen on the high ground in Harpers Ferry, directly opposite him, were firing down at his comrades in the armory. Raising his rifle, he took aim across the river. “I thought I would draw their fire on myself,” he later explained.
The men he targeted were about half a mile distant. They quickly returned fire. Several rounds were exchanged across the river until smoke from Cook’s gun helped his foes locate him. A bullet cut the tree limb Cook was clutching for balance, pitching him down the steep ridge, “by which I was severely bruised and my flesh somewhat lacerated.”
But his ploy had worked. Cook not only drew fire away from the armory, he spooked the Virginians, who knew little about Brown’s overall force and feared he might yet command a large body of men in Maryland. In the drizzly late-day gloom, townspeople also worried that continued assaults on the engine house would endanger the hostages inside. The Martinsburg men and the other attackers drew back. Eight of them had been wounded in the fray, including two shot in the face and two others permanently disabled.
Brown’s much smaller force had also sustained casualties. His men fired most of their shots while kneeling and aiming through a crack in the engine-house doors. This presented a narrow but predictable target to gunmen outside. During the battle that afternoon, one hostage reported, a man crouching at the door was shot in the chest and tumbled back, exclaiming “It’s all up with me.” Another man was also hit while shooting from the same position.
“We could not administer to their needs,” wrote one of their comrades, Edwin Coppoc, “for we were surrounded by the troops who were
firing volley after volley, so that we had to keep up a brisk fire in return to keep them from charging upon us.”
One of the men shot by the door was twenty-three-year-old Steward Taylor, who had told Annie Brown about visions of his death at Harpers Ferry. Before meeting it, Coppoc wrote, “he suffered very much and begged us to kill him.” Coppoc also described the second casualty: Brown’s youngest son, Oliver, who, in the minutes after being shot, “spoke no word, but yielded calmly to his fate.”
Oliver was just twenty, and in early October he had escorted his pregnant wife, Martha, part of the way home from the Kennedy farm. “You can hardly think how I want to see you, or how lonesome I was the day I left you,” he wrote her upon his return to the Maryland hideout. But he took solace in her picture. “I have made a morocco case for it and carry it close to my body.” He would doubtless have been carrying Martha’s picture a week later, as he lay dying on the floor of the engine house.
Their child, born early the following year, was named Olive in memory of her father. But the baby lived only two days, and Martha soon fell ill with childbed fever. “She had been a wife, a mother, and a childless widow at seventeen,” Annie Brown wrote. Martha now declared she had nothing more to live for; she gave away her few possessions, and died a month after giving birth. “She was willing to go,” Mary Brown wrote, “said she wanted to go where Oliver & her baby was.”
 
 
BY FOUR THIRTY OR five o’clock on that Monday afternoon, the firing at Harpers Ferry had petered out. As it did so, the antagonists cautiously opened negotiations. Despite the day’s vicious fighting, the two sides now parleyed in a decorous and formal manner. One emissary approached the engine house carrying an old umbrella with a white handkerchief tied to the ferrule. “Who commands this fortification?” he demanded. Another appeal, this one written, came from Colonel Robert Baylor, a Virginia officer who had taken overall command of the troops that had converged on the town. Addressing Brown as “Captain,” the note discussed “terms of capitulation” and the release of prisoners. “Sir,” Colonel Baylor wrote, “I say to you, if you will set at liberty our citizens, we will leave the government
to deal with you concerning their property, as it may think most advisable.”
In reply, Baylor received an astonishing proposal, one that Brown had twice tried to deliver under flag of truce earlier that day. “In consideration of all my men, whether living or dead, or wounded, being soon safely in and delivered up to me at this point, with all their arms and ammunition, we will then take our prisoners and cross the Potomac bridge, a little beyond which we will set them at liberty.” This wasn’t all: “We require the delivery of our horse and harness at the hotel.”
Brown elaborated on this proposal in a separate parley with two officers from a Maryland unit that had just reached town and been posted at the armory. He told them that once he reached the far side of the river and released the prisoners, the troops opposing him would be free to “take him if we could.” Brown also said, “He had fought Uncle Sam before, and was willing to do it again.” But he then added one final condition: “that he & his men should not be shot down instantly by a body of men posted for the purpose, but on being allowed a brief period for preparing for fight, he was willing to take his chances for death or escape.”
Brown, in short, demanded that he be given a fighting chance—a duel, almost, on the opposite bank of the Potomac. He may have hoped to make a fighting retreat along the ravine leading up to the log schoolhouse, where he could expect to collect more arms and be reinforced by his men in Maryland. Brown believed he merited this chance not only because he held hostages, but also because he had fought honorably rather than massacring civilians or burning the town. As one of the Maryland officers reported: “He thought he was entitled to some terms.”
In the view of Brown’s foes, this was preposterous: he deserved no concessions and was in no position to demand them. The armory was surrounded and reinforcements were en route. “The terms you propose I cannot accept,” Colonel Baylor wrote in a curt reply. But he decided to postpone any further action until morning, rather than risk an attack in the dark. In his official report, Baylor gave an additional reason for suspending operations: “Our troops by this time required some refreshment, having been on active duty, and exposed to a heavy fall of rain all day.”
Baylor, however, had only loose command of the hundreds of armed
men in Harpers Ferry, many of whom had long since sought refreshment on their own. By the time Captain John Sinn of the Frederick, Maryland, militia arrived on Monday evening, he found the town in a state of drunken mayhem. “Every man had a gun, and four-fifths of them were under no command,” he reported. “The military had ceased firing, but men who were intoxicated were firing their guns in the air, and others at the engine-house.”
Still others were stumbling from the saloons to desecrate the corpse of Dangerfield Newby, or to taunt the wounded Aaron Stevens in his bed at the Wager House. Captain Sinn found young men threatening to shoot Stevens and shamed them by saying, “If the man could stand on his feet with a pistol in his hand they would all jump out of the window.”
Sinn also arranged for a surgeon in his unit to go to the engine house and tend to Brown’s wounded son Watson. By the time the surgeon arrived, late Monday night, the scene inside the engine house was ghastly. On one side of the cramped interior—a room just twenty foot square—stretched the bloodied corpses of Steward Taylor and Oliver Brown. Near them lay Watson, in such agony that he begged his comrades to shoot him. The surgeon could do little for his stomach wound, but promised to return in the morning.
 
 
BROWN’S UNINJURED MEN, COOPED up in the engine house with the dead and wounded, were in poor shape as well. They had marched and fought with little or no food or sleep since leaving the Kennedy farm more than twenty-four hours before. With a drunken mob howling and firing potshots outside the armory’s gate, there wasn’t much prospect of rest during the long night ahead.
The same was true for Brown’s hostages, some of whom had refused breakfast—the only meal that day—fearing it might be drugged. The engine house was cold and dark and the only place to lie down was the brick floor. Though the hostages occupied the safest part of the building, behind the fire engines, there was still the danger of bullets ricocheting through the doors or windows. Armistead Ball, the hostage who was a master machinist at the armory, sought shelter by wedging himself in a
corner of the brick structure, but found he was too large. “For the first time in my life,” he later said, “I wished I was a thin man.”
Even more uncomfortable was the situation of the black Virginians in the engine house. Though ostensibly liberated, they now had, in effect, three sets of masters. First, Brown and his men, who had thrust pikes into their hands and put them at great peril inside the engine house. Second, the white hostages sequestered with them, including their owners, who were alert to any sign of cooperation or complicity with the insurgents. And third, the mob outside, which was unlikely to show mercy toward armed slaves caught in the presence of abolitionists. To Armistead Ball, the black men in the engine house seemed, like himself, “badly scared.”
Brown, on the other hand, appeared as cool and composed as he had been throughout the battle. At day’s end, when the firing subsided, he had straightened the limbs of his dead son Oliver and removed his gear. Then, through the night, he tried to comfort Watson, who kept crying out in pain and begging to be put out of his misery. “No, my son, have patience: I think you will get well,” one hostage heard Brown say. “If you die, you die in a glorious cause.” Another hostage heard Brown tell Watson “to endure a little longer and he might die as befitted a man.”
Brown also tried to hold together what remained of his shattered army. Of the eighteen men who had crossed the Potomac with him Sunday night, half were dead, dying, or captured, including his lead lieutenants, Kagi and Stevens. Two other tested fighters, Tidd and Cook, were in Maryland, while two men posted to the arsenal were unaccounted for. That left Brown in direct command of only one Kansas veteran, Jeremiah Anderson, and three novices, all in their early twenties: the fugitive slave Shields Green, the Iowa Quaker Edwin Coppoc, and the smooth-cheeked Dauphin Thompson, whose older brother, William, had been brutally slain within sight of the engine house that afternoon.

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