Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price (9 page)

Read Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price Online

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
6.86Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Among the Connecticut admirers to whom Brown had showed off his fearsome bowie knife in March 1857 was a skilled forge master, Charles Blair. Brown wondered whether the long two-edged blade could be affixed to a six-foot shaft. This Cromwellian pike, he announced, would be the perfect defensive weapon “for the settlers of Kansas to keep in their log cabins.”
Never one for half measures, Brown promptly contracted with Blair to make a thousand of the spears. He also arranged for his teenaged son Oliver to work in Blair’s shop. But after paying an initial $550 and receiving samples, Brown failed to come up with the balance due. Blair kept the money he’d been paid and stopped work on the “Kansas butter knifes,” as Oliver coyly called them. Brown, who rarely gave up on his own ideas, was to revive the pike project at a later date, for use in a different theater.
He undertook a much costlier folly soon after his Connecticut visit. In New York City, he met Hugh Forbes, a British fencing teacher and soldier of fortune who had served with the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. The flamboyant “colonel,” as Forbes styled himself, struck Brown as the perfect drillmaster for the volunteer force he planned to train. He hired Forbes and advanced him six months’ pay, part of it as compensation for a manual on guerrilla tactics the colonel promised to deliver.
Months later, Brown was still waiting for the manual, and for Forbes to come train his Minute Men. “I furnished that money in the full expectation
of having your
personal assistance
this present time,” Brown wrote, in a vain effort to recover his payment. Very belatedly, Forbes finished the manual and made an appearance in Iowa—but by then, Brown was too broke to pay him any more. The disgruntled and erratic mercenary would soon decamp, taking with him a great deal of damaging information about Brown’s secret plans.
In any event, there was no one for Forbes to train, apart from Brown and Owen; other volunteers had yet to materialize. This was, in large part, because Kansas had changed during the year Brown was away. A new territorial governor had succeeded in calming the violence, and the continuing influx of northern settlers was shifting the balance of power toward the free-state camp. As a result, there was no longer a clear need for the defense force Brown had proposed. This, in turn, eroded his persistent efforts to drum up financial support back East. “It is not easy to raise money for your operations,” Franklin Sanborn wrote, “so long as there is peace.”
By the late summer of 1857, Brown could no longer afford his board in Iowa. He had ample guns, but still lacked knapsacks, saddlebags, and other equipment needed to outfit his phantom army. The inaction and delay had also sapped Brown’s customary drive and sense of direction. “
How to act now,
” he wrote his brother-in-law in Kansas. “I do not know.”
This paralysis didn’t last long. Throughout his life, Brown searched for clues to his destiny, the path he must follow “to answer the end of my being.” Everything had meaning, a hidden divine purpose—even his Iowa funk in the summer of 1857. He had believed that his God-given mission led back to Kansas. But if that was not so, then it must be time to put in motion his much more ambitious plan.
“In
immediate
want of from Five Hundred to One Thousand Dollars for
secret service & no questions asked,
” he wrote one of his eastern patrons late that summer. Brown had always been inclined to the clandestine, but secrecy now became his watchword. He had recently adopted the first of several aliases, “Nelson Hawkins,” the name of a family friend in Ohio. Writing to Sanborn, Brown reported that Hugh Forbes had arrived and opened a “small school.” Baffled, Sanborn replied: “Do you mean a children’s school, or a school for drilling?”
Brown also became ever more evasive about his movements and
intentions. In November 1857, he finally returned to Kansas, but only briefly and mysteriously. He quietly convened a small group of veteran fighters around a campfire on the prairie, seeking to enlist them for a strike against slavery. “If you want hard fighting you’ll get plenty of it,” he said, offering few other details.
Nine men agreed to follow him back to his training base in Iowa. Only then did he reveal the mission that would cost most of them their lives. As one of the recruits later stated in a jailhouse confession,
“Here we found that Capt. Brown’s ultimate destination was the State of Virginia.”
 
 
BROWN HAD LONG PLANNED to carry his crusade against slavery into “Africa,” and his efforts to raise a Kansas defense force were one means to that end—a way to acquire arms, train a crack unit, and make trial incursions into neighboring Missouri. But in the summer of 1857, marooned without money or men, he had refined his scheme and resolved to accelerate its execution.
Brown also homed in on a specific target. Over the years, he canvassed a number of possible sites for a first strike, considering locales as distant as New Orleans. But with characteristic “fixedness,” he kept returning to a terrain that had long enchanted him: the rugged mountain corridor linking Pennsylvania to the South.
Brown’s preoccupation with the Alleghenies may have dated to 1840, when he surveyed Oberlin’s landholdings in western Virginia and briefly considered settling there. He returned to the region as a wool merchant, and he had mentioned the Alleghenies to Frederick Douglass in the winter of 1847–48, when he disclosed his nascent plan for launching raids to free slaves and funnel them north along the mountains.
Brown’s thinking had since grown far bolder. A student of military history and slave revolts, he took time during his wool-selling trip to Europe to tour battlefields and fortifications on the Continent. By the summer of 1857, he was poring over maps of the South, listing strategic locations and making notes on historical examples of small, mountain-based units successfully battling conventional armies. “Guerrilla warfare See Life of Lord Wellington Page 71 to Page 75,” he wrote in his pocket
diary, referring to a passage about Spanish partisans in the Napoleonic Wars.
Brown’s years in Springfield also exposed him to an industry for which that city was renowned: gun manufacturing. Most of the weapons were produced for the government at a massive federal factory in the city. There was only one other such facility in the nation, to which Springfield had close ties: the U.S. Armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
In the 1790s, as the United States sought to free itself from dependence on foreign and privately made arms, President George Washington had determined that his young country needed to establish at least two armories. Springfield, an early milling center with a preexisting arsenal, seemed an obvious choice. But Harpers Ferry was quite the opposite, a frontier hamlet in the Blue Ridge Mountains, located at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers. This water gap, known to early pioneers as the Hole, was so dramatic and untamed that Thomas Jefferson judged it “one of the most stupendous scenes in nature,” a vista “worth a voyage across the Atlantic.”
Washington took a more utilitarian view. A man of many parts, he was among other things a land speculator and transportation booster with grand visions for the river that ran past his plantation at Mount Vernon. He had long dreamed of making the Potomac a busy corridor between the Atlantic Seaboard and the Ohio Valley; upon becoming president, he touted Harpers Ferry as an ideal site for a national armory.
“This spot affords every advantage that could be wished for,” Washington wrote his secretary of war in 1795. The Shenandoah and Potomac provided endless water power; the surrounding hills abounded with timber and iron ore for gunstocks and barrels. And Harpers Ferry was just sixty miles from the new nation’s capital, roughly in the middle of the country as it then existed.
As a military strategist, Washington was also mindful of defense. Harpers Ferry—well inland, walled by mountains, and moated by rivers—was the most secure place imaginable to manufacture and store the nation’s guns.
“There is not a spot in the United States, which combines more or greater requisites,” Washington wrote, “considered either as a place of immense strength,” or as “inaccessible by an enemy.”
U.S. armory at Harpers Ferry, 1803
The nation’s first president had in mind a European threat: soldiers arriving by sea, as they’d done in the Revolutionary War and would do again during the War of 1812. In Washington’s day, it was impossible to imagine that the attack on the armory, when it came, would be launched by an enemy within.
 
 
 
WHEN, PRECISELY, BROWN FIXED on Harpers Ferry as a target isn’t clear, but he first mentioned it in 1857, during his sojourn in Tabor, Iowa. Though he had no one for Hugh Forbes to drill, Brown used the former Garibaldi partisan as a sounding board for his military plotting when Forbes arrived in Iowa. The plan of attack he disclosed was similar in its opening to his original scheme: a party of twenty-five to fifty guerrillas would strike a slave district in Virginia, inducing hundreds of slaves to join his mountain band. But what Brown expected would come after this was novel.
Brown planned to give mounts to eighty or a hundred of the freed
slaves and “make a dash” at the Harpers Ferry armory, destroying whatever guns he couldn’t carry off. Other parties would conduct additional raids on slave districts, which in turn would swell the guerrillas’ ranks. Brown thought he “could easily maintain himself in the Alleghanies” against the U.S. troops that would likely arrive within a few days. Finally, and most grandiosely, Brown believed his New England allies “
would in the meantime call a Northern Convention to restore tranquility and overthrow the pro-Slavery Administration
.”
This was a very different scheme from the Subterranean Pass Way to freedom Brown had described to Frederick Douglass a decade earlier. In some respects, his new strategy resembled that of the proslavery “filibusters” who invaded Latin America in the 1850s. Like them, he envisioned leading a small private army with the ultimate goal of toppling the government. The obvious difference was that he sought to destroy slavery in his own country, while filibusters aimed to expand it beyond the nation’s borders.
Hugh Forbes—whose letters are the only documentation of the Tabor strategy session—raised a number of objections to Brown’s plan. Unless slaves were forewarned of the plot, he told Brown, the “invitation to rise” would “meet with no response or a feeble one.” If an uprising did occur, it would be “either a flash in the pan, or would leap beyond his control or any control.” Forbes had even less faith in a Northern Convention. “Brown’s New-England friends would not have the courage to show themselves, so long as the issue was doubtful,” he wrote.
Forbes also proposed an alternative plan, close to Brown’s earlier scheme: hit-and-run raids along slavery’s frontier, to “stampede” slaves to Canada and make the institution untenable in border regions. This battle line could then be pushed slowly southward, further destabilizing the peculiar institution.
After days of debate, the two men forged a “mixed plan” and agreed that its execution would be overseen by a “Committee of Management.” Or so Forbes claimed to believe. He was first and foremost an opportunist, intent on using the intelligence he gathered at Tabor to enrich himself. And he was shrewd enough to know that compromise and shared leadership were anathema to Brown, a man whose plans were never “mixed” or managed by committee.
Forbes also grasped that Brown’s zeal was impervious to military doubts. “He was very pious, and had been deeply impressed for years with the Bible story of Gideon,” Forbes wrote, “believing that he with a handful of men could strike down slavery.”
 
 
THE NINE RECRUITS WHO followed Brown back to Tabor in the autumn of 1857, just after Forbes’s departure, were cut from very different cloth than their leader. One was an English poet, who styled himself a “protégé” of Lord Byron’s widow. Another was an Army bugler who had been sentenced to death for “drunken riot and mutiny.” Several were Spiritualists who rejected traditional Christianity. None was married, and most had migrated west seeking work or adventure before getting caught up in the Kansas struggle.
This experience had imbued them with a militant commitment to fighting slavery—the quality Brown most sought. “The persons I have with me are mostly well tried men,” he wrote Mary, “& all of them are pledged to
stand by the work.
”

Other books

Killer Colt by Harold Schechter
Cloud Nine by James M. Cain
Critical Strike (The Critical Series Book 3) by Wearmouth, Barnes, Darren Wearmouth, Colin F. Barnes
The Boy Who Plaited Manes by Nancy Springer
When Empires Fall by Katie Jennings
Wolf Moon by Desiree Holt
The Invasion Year by Dewey Lambdin