Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price (13 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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IN EARLY JUNE, AFTER raising money in New York and New England, Brown turned up at the door of the Connecticut forge master he’d long ago hired to manufacture a thousand pikes. “I have been unable, sir, to fulfill my contract with you up to this time,” Brown told Charles Blair, “now I am able to do so.”
Blair was reluctant: his workmen were fully employed and he’d been disappointed by Brown two years earlier. He also couldn’t understand why the abolitionist wanted him to finish work on the pikes, which had been intended for free-state families. “Kansas matters are all settled,” he told Brown, “what earthly use can they be to you now?”
Brown replied that the pikes were worth nothing unfinished, but that he “could dispose of them in some way” once they were fully assembled. And so, a week later, upon receipt of the $450 still outstanding, Blair wrote Brown that he would finish the job. “Wishing you peace and prosperity,” he said in closing.
Brown by then was in North Elba, visiting his family; a daughter-in-law trimmed his extravagant beard. He stayed only a week before heading to Ohio, where most of his soldiers and guns were quartered. Then, accompanied by two sons and another man, he traveled to southern Pennsylvania. A fourth accomplice—John Kagi, a veteran of the partisan battles in Kansas—was to rendezvous with the advance party at its final destination.
“We leave here to day for Harpers Ferry,” Brown wrote Kagi on June 30, 1859, from a town just north of the Mason-Dixon Line. “We shall be looking for cheap lands near the Rail Road in all probability.”
He signed himself with a new alias: “Yours in truth I. Smith.”
Into Africa
He was a stone, this man who lies so still,
A stone flung from a sling against a wall,
A sacrificial instrument of kill.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
,
“John Brown’s Body”
My Invisibles
 
 
 
O
n July 4, 1859, John Unseld was riding to Harpers Ferry from his farm in Maryland when he encountered four strangers on the road. “Good morning, gentlemen,” Unseld called out, “how do you do?”
The eldest of the party introduced himself as Smith, without giving his first name. He said two of the young men with him were his sons, the other a Mr. Anderson. They’d arrived by rail in Harpers Ferry the evening before, inquired about cheap lodging, and been directed to the village of Sandy Hook, just across the Potomac River in Maryland.
“I suppose you are out hunting mineral, gold, and silver?” Unseld asked.
“No, we are not,” Smith replied, “we are out looking for land.” He said the weather in northern New York had recently been so severe that they’d decided to sell their farmland and try their luck farther south.
Unseld rode on to Harpers Ferry and met the men again on his return trip. Smith told him he was impressed by the countryside he’d seen so far and asked about property for sale or rent. Unseld knew of a vacant farmhouse and guided Smith as far as his own home, where he invited the newcomer in for dinner. Smith declined, not even taking a drink.
“If you follow up this road along the foot of the mountain,” Unseld told him, “it is shady and pleasant and you will come out at a church up here about three miles, and then you can see the house.”
Smith saw the place and liked it, whereupon Unseld directed him to its owner, a widow named Kennedy who lived in Sharpsburg, Maryland, a short way north along Antietam Creek. When Unseld next saw Smith, the New Yorker said he’d rented the Kennedy farm until the following March and showed him the receipt. Unseld thought it odd that the man wanted him to see the piece of paper. “It is nothing to me,” he said.
Over the next few months, the genial Marylander often stopped by the Kennedy farm, an isolated place with a log house set well back from the road and a separate cabin hidden by summer growth. Unseld never saw the interior. Since Smith always declined Unseld’s invitations to enter his own home, the Marylander did likewise. In any event, Smith told him they had no chairs to sit on, only boxes.
So during his visits, Unseld remained on his horse in the yard, chatting with Smith or with two young women of the family who appeared that July. The newcomers cut some hay and acquired a few farm animals. Unseld also learned that Smith planned to buy fat cattle and drive them north to New York for sale.
“There was nothing which induced me to suppose that his purpose was anything different from what he stated,” Unseld said, months later, in sworn testimony before the U.S. Senate. Nor did the slave-owning Marylander suspect that “Smith” was an assumed name, and that the reticent New York farmer he’d helped to find lodging on Independence Day was America’s most notorious abolitionist—“Old Ossawattomie Brown, from Kansas,” as Unseld called him.
 
 
MR. ANDERSON, THE NONFAMILY member of the “Smith” party, was a midwestern farmer, first name Jeremiah, and he recorded his impression of Independence Day in the South in a letter he wrote on July 5 to his brother in Iowa.
“Nothing going on here except drinking and dancing, and fighting,” he wrote. However, he praised the mountain scenery and the wild berries he’d collected by the road. “I am going to be on a farm about 5 miles from the Ferry up the Potomac engaged in agricultural pursuits,” he told his brother. “I am going to work on the farm for Mr.
Smith
who expects to rent until he finds land to buy.”
His employer’s words were likewise anodyne. In a letter to “John Henrie Esquire,” an associate in Smith & Sons, a diversified firm that required workmen and the shipment of heavy boxes, Brown wrote: “Dear Sir, Please forward enclosed at once + write us on first arrival of freight or of hands to work on the job.” When the freight arrived, his associate formally replied: “I await your directions in the matter. Respectfully, John Henrie.”
By the summer of 1859, “Mr. Smith” and “Mr. Henrie”—real name, John Henry Kagi—were old hands at this sort of subterfuge. Since Brown’s recruitment of Kagi two years before, the two had worked closely together on covert missions and cycled through a number of aliases. Brown didn’t always choose his aides wisely—Hugh Forbes being a glaring example—but in John Kagi, his secretary of war, he’d found a loyal and versatile lieutenant.
Born in Ohio to a blacksmith from Virginia, Kagi was a precocious youth who began teaching school at seventeen in the Shenandoah Valley, sixty miles from Harpers Ferry. A freethinker, vegetarian, and abolitionist, he was forced to leave his job because of his antislavery views. Kagi headed west, earning a law degree and becoming a newspaper correspondent and free-state partisan in Kansas. Before joining Brown’s band in Tabor, Iowa, he was twice imprisoned, and was badly wounded in a shootout with a proslavery judge.
As Brown’s second-in-command, Kagi possessed attributes his leader did not. He was young, like most of the recruits, extremely personable, and deft at logistics and communication, traits that suited him well for the delicate task he undertook in the summer of 1859.
Having chosen as a forward post the isolated Kennedy farm, five miles from Harpers Ferry, Brown needed a staging area where he could safely receive men and weapons from the North. He found it in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, a railroad hub just north of the Mason-Dixon Line. The town had a large population of free blacks who were active in the Underground Railroad, and it lay forty miles by country road from Brown’s Maryland hideout, allowing for the discreet forwarding of supplies and personnel.
“John Henrie” found lodging by the railroad tracks in Chambersburg at the boardinghouse of an abolitionist sympathizer, Mary Ritner. He enlisted the help of local blacks “to receive company,” and coordinated
the shipment of “freight” from agents in other states. Anyone who opened this correspondence would find opaque discussions of “prospecting,” “mining tools,” and “hands.” Kagi’s clerklike demeanor also gave nothing away. One man who shared his small Chambersburg boardinghouse that summer later remarked that the agreeable young fellow, who spent most of his time in his room writing, “had far more of the appearance of a Divinity student than of a Warrior.”
John Henry Kagi
 
 
WHILE KAGI QUIETLY SETTLED in southern Pennsylvania, and Brown planted himself at the Kennedy farm in Maryland, another agent operated inside Virginia—albeit in very different style. Since going ahead to Harpers Ferry the year before, John Cook had kept his own name and utilized rather than cloaked his expansive personality. He worked as a teacher, as a book peddler, and as a canal lock keeper; he published
poetry in a local paper; and he gained entrée to homes, workplaces, and outlying plantations.
He also charmed his landlady’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Virginia, whom he married on April 18, 1859, atop Jefferson’s Rock, a scenic perch overlooking Harpers Ferry. There is no evidence that Cook wed Virginia to deepen his local cover; the bride was five months pregnant. But he did use the occasion to gather intelligence, asking the clerk who issued their marriage license how many slaves lived in the county. Cook said he had a bet with a friend about the total and the clerk gave him the official figure.
By the time Brown arrived in Harpers Ferry on July 3, his high-spirited spy was bursting to make use of the information he’d collected over the past twelve months. “Tomorrow is the Fourth! The glorious day which gave
our
Freedom birth—but left sad hearts beneath the Slave Lash,” Cook wrote an Iowa family he’d befriended the year before. “Oh! How I wish I could be with you once again. But that’s a joy I may never know, till I have filled the humble post allotted to me, in the great mission now before us.”
Cook wasn’t alone in believing action to be imminent. Brown had intimated to the Secret Six that he might open his “wool business” on July 4, a date Harriet Tubman had suggested “as a good time to ‘raise the mill.’” In the event, he reached Harpers Ferry too late to make this happen. Even so, he hoped to launch his campaign quickly and wanted to “have the freight sent” as soon as possible.
There was, however, a hitch in the supply chain—“John Smith,” head of Smith & Sons’ Ohio branch and the eldest son of its founder, “Isaac.” At thirty-eight, John Brown, Jr., was an erudite and erratic man who had abandoned careers as a teacher and lecturer. He had never fully recovered from his breakdown in Kansas; in 1858, he described himself as so melancholic that he was “almost disqualified for anything which is engrossing in its nature.”
But he remained dedicated to his father’s cause and eager for his approval. “Please say to Mr. S———I am still ready to serve,” he wrote Kagi in the early summer of 1859. Brown didn’t call on his fragile son to come south, but he did entrust him with a critical behind-the-lines role. Brown’s rifles, pistols, and other supplies were now stored in a hay barn
near John junior’s home in a rural district east of Cleveland. This staunchly abolitionist area also served as a hideout and muster station for many of Brown’s scattered men. On July 5, the day after finding quarters at the Kennedy farm, Brown sent word for all “hands” and “
freight
” to be collected and forwarded south, “as near
together
as possible,” so he wouldn’t have to conceal them for long.
Instead, Brown’s men and arms dribbled in piecemeal over the course of months rather than weeks. John junior took his time shipping heavy boxes labeled “Hardware + Castings,” which traveled a circuitous route via wagon, canal, and rail to Kagi in Chambersburg. He also fumbled the forwarding of men, having somehow misunderstood his father’s “mining” schedule. “I had supposed you would not think it best to commence opening the coal banks before spring,” John junior wrote Kagi in late summer, in response to yet another urgent call for manpower. “Shall strain every nerve to accomplish this.”
Brown’s supply problems weren’t entirely his son’s fault. He could be too cryptic in his communiqués, and the many false starts in his mission had made some recruits lose heart—and money. “I expected to have joined in the dance long before this,” Luke Parsons wrote Kagi upon receiving the call to come south. “Were I to see Uncle John now & he to ask me to go, I should tell him that I owed $230, & must pay that first.” Parsons, who had joined Brown in Iowa and gone with him to Canada, was on his way to dig gold at Pike’s Peak. Though he considered rejoining the band, his mother helped dissuade him. “Don’t you do it,” she wrote her son. “They are bad men; you have got away from them keep away from them.”
 
 
BROWN, WHILE TRYING TO mobilize his troops, also realized that he needed recruits of another sort at the Kennedy farm—not guerrilla fighters, but innocent-seeming civilians. Otherwise, his Maryland neighbors might grow suspicious of the young men and wagon loads of freight arriving at the all-male compound. “I find it will be indispensable to have some women of our own family with us,” Brown wrote his wife, urging her to come for a “short visit” with their teenaged daughter, Annie. “It will be
likely to prove
the most valuable service you can ever render in the world.”
At the time, Mary Brown still had four children living at home, the youngest of whom was four. Two of her three sons, Oliver and Watson, and a stepson, Owen, were already pledged to her husband’s dangerous cause. She was evidently unhappy at his request for still more family sacrifice. “Mother
would not go
,” Annie later wrote. But she herself was eager to do so, and her sister-in-law, Martha Brown, was willing to join her in Mary’s stead.
In mid-July, Oliver Brown—Martha’s husband and Annie’s older brother—escorted the young women by boat down the Hudson River to New York and then by rail to Harpers Ferry. Annie was just fifteen, Martha only a year older. A dignified teenager with pale brown hair and blue-gray eyes, Martha had married Oliver despite her family’s strong dislike of abolitionists. Her twenty-year-old husband was a sensitive, bookish man who had hoped to study natural philosophy in New York City. But he felt obligated to help provide for the North Elba clan—and, now, to serve beside his father as he’d done in Kansas.
Oliver doted on his young bride; he carried a lock of her hair and a piece of her wedding dress, and he sent her soulful letters when he was away. The couple was so enraptured “in the enjoyment of each other,” Annie Brown wrote, “that they did not feel the need of much of this world’s goods.”

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