Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price (22 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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Brown’s other men dodged to safety but were unable to retrieve their fallen compatriot, who was left exposed on the street for townspeople to gawk at. Locals didn’t know his name, but recognized him as a tall mulatto who had been seen earlier at the arsenal gate, firing his Sharps rifle. No one dared to collect his body, which lay in a gutter near the center of the fighting that now raged around the armory.
Later that day, hogs came to root in the slain man’s gaping neck wound. Angry and inebriated townspeople poked sticks in the wound and used pocket knives to cut off pieces of the dead man’s ears as gruesome souvenirs. By the time the mutilated body was finally taken away and dumped in an unmarked pit, little remained to identify the deceased as Dangerfield Newby, the former slave who had hoped to free his family still in bondage in Virginia.
Remarkably, the desperate letters Newby had received from his wife survived, having been taken from his pockets or from among his possessions found later. “if I thought I shoul never see you this earth would have no charms for me,” Harriett had written Dangerfield in her last message, begging him to rescue her before she was sold south. “Do all you Can for me, witch I have no doubt you will.”
Her determined husband fell just inside Virginia, fifty miles from Harriett, and his death extinguished her dream of freedom. A few months later, she was sold to a new master, in Louisiana. Her husband’s estate—including the $741 he’d saved to free her—was distributed among his relatives in Ohio.
 
 
NEWBY’S DEATH ALSO MARKED a turn in the broader campaign of liberation he’d joined. He was shot just as Brown’s men lost control of the Potomac bridge, a setback that isolated the small invasion force and exposed the deep flaws in its commander’s plan.
Among Brown’s idiosyncrasies as a military thinker were some curious notions regarding topography. On a carriage ride with Franklin Sanborn in 1857, he surveyed the New England landscape and told the Concord teacher that the strongest positions weren’t hilltops, as usually supposed. Rather, a ravine “well guarded on the flanks, was often a better military post,” he said.
This “strange doctrine,” as Sanborn called it, also turned up in the notes Brown took on his military reading. “Some
valuable hints
,” he wrote in his diary, listing book passages on guerrilla warfare, including one that mentioned “deep and narrow defiles where 300 men would suffise to check an
army
.”
Harpers Ferry fit Brown’s belief that ravines could serve as ideal redoubts. Occupying a point of land at the bottom of a gorge, the town was enclosed by rivers and steep mountains. Brown believed he could choke off the few approach points and defend what he considered an impregnable fortress against a much larger force. But if this doubtful strategy had any merit, it vanished the moment Virginians flanked Brown at midday on October 17.
The loss of the Potomac bridge cut Brown off from his men and material in Maryland. Having retreated from the Shenandoah bridge at about the same time, the band in Harpers Ferry now had no clear avenue of escape. Brown and his men also became vulnerable to attack from above. Since buildable land was scarce in the hilly, flood-prone town, most of the structures stood close together and were generally tall, three stories or more. Those on the steep hill behind the armory and arsenal loomed much higher. Once gunmen occupied buildings overlooking the “Lower Town,” as the riverside area was known, Harpers Ferry became a virtual shooting gallery.
Badly exposed, Brown’s men in the town were also isolated from one another. Instead of one mobile unit, they now constituted three separated squads: at the armory, arsenal, and rifle works. Anyone who tried
to move between these outposts risked the fate that had befallen Dangerfield Newby.
Late the previous night, Brown had sent a party under John Kagi to secure and hold Hall’s Rifle Works, half a mile from the armory. Kagi and his men stayed there through the night and morning, patrolling the factory grounds and awaiting further orders. None came, nor did Brown respond to Kagi’s message urging a withdrawal. Kagi and his men were left stranded and in the dark as gunmen mobilized on the ridge overlooking their position.
Also waiting anxiously for Brown’s orders was Charles Tidd, who had spent most of the day in Maryland, transporting weapons from the Kennedy farm to the log schoolhouse. That summer, when Tidd had angrily left the farm upon learning of his commander’s plan to seize Harpers Ferry, he had been mollified by Brown’s agreement to send men “in each direction to burn RR bridges & return with slaves,” as Tidd later described the revised plan. These measures would presumably give the band much-needed reinforcement and make it harder for counterattacking troops to reach the scene. But if Brown did in fact make such a promise to Tidd, he didn’t follow through on it. Instead, he stayed put in Harpers Ferry all morning, until the “steel trap” Frederick Douglass had warned of began to close, leaving his men to wonder: What was the old man up to?
Front gate of the U.S. armory; the engine house is the first building on the left
 
 
TO THOSE AT HIS side early that afternoon, Brown betrayed no sign of panic or indecision over his deteriorating military position. In Kansas, he’d earned a reputation for coolness under fire; here too he seemed in control, even as militiamen and armed citizens seized the bridge, killed one of his men, and began directing steady fire at his small force holed up in the armory.
As the shooting commenced, Brown put his hand on Terence Byrne, one of the forty or so prisoners held in the armory guard room. “I want you, sir,” he said, also selecting nine other men, including prominent armory officials and Byrne’s fellow farmers and slaveholders, Lewis Washington and John Allstadt. The ten prisoners were taken to a larger space adjoining the guardroom. This stablelike chamber had thick brick walls, heavy wooden doors, and very high windows. Designed to house the armory’s two fire engines, it would now become Brown’s command post and the holding cell for his most valuable hostages.
The prisoners were positioned at the rear of the engine house, behind the fire carts. Their captors manned the doors, which opened inward and could be pulled back a few inches to peer or shoot out of. Brown also put one of Allstadt’s freed slaves, Phil Luckum, to work drilling at the building’s brick walls to create openings for rifles. “You are a pretty stout looking fellow,” he said to Luckum, “can’t you knock a hole through there for me?” Using mason’s tools, Luckum worked until a bullet sent brick and mortar flying back in his face. “It’s getting too hot,” he declared, leaving Brown to finish the job.
With bullets thudding against the engine house and crashing through the high windows, Brown’s hostages agreed to help broker a cease-fire. A leading citizen was sent out with a flag of truce, escorted by William
Thompson, who had buoyantly told John Cook a short while ago that “everything was all right” at the Ferry.
Earlier in the day, Brown had sent out emissaries without incident. But the gunmen now surrounding the armory were in no mood to negotiate. They promptly seized Thompson and dragged him into the Wager House, tying his hands and feet to an armchair in the parlor. As the first of Brown’s men to be captured, Thompson was set upon by interrogators who asked about his motivation and the meaning of the attack.
“His answers were invariably the same,” said Christine Fouke, the sister of the hotel’s proprietor. Thompson told his captors he had been “taught to believe the Negroes were cruelly treated and would gladly avail themselves of the first opportunity to obtain their freedom.” He’d also been led to believe that once Brown and his men took possession of the armory, “the colored people would come in a mass, backed by the non-slaveholders of the Valley of Virginia.”
 
 
THOMPSON’S SEIZURE, UNDER A flag of truce, angered Brown and enraged his second-in-command at the armory, Aaron Stevens. Tender in his lovelorn letters to the Ohio music teacher Jennie Dunbar, Stevens was a ferocious fighter and dangerously hotheaded when crossed. His court-martial, five years before, was due to Stevens having felt insulted by a superior officer, which prompted him to draw his gun, declare “I am as good a man as you,” and threaten to blow out the officer’s “damned brains.” Since arriving in Harpers Ferry, he’d spoken sharply to Lewis Washington, the patrician plantation master, and told another hostage who expressed support of slavery, “You would be the first fellow I would hang.” Now, he wanted violent retribution against Thompson’s captors.
Stevens was dissuaded from this course of action by the most prominent of the local hostages, Archibald Kitzmiller, the acting superintendent of the armory. (His superior was away on business.) Kitzmiller had been the first man awakened by John Starry, who had alerted him that the armory “was in possession of an armed band.” Going to investigate, Kitzmiller had been seized and held ever since.
As Brown and Stevens mulled how to respond to Thompson’s capture,
Kitzmiller said, “I can possibly accommodate matters.” He then offered to go out as a peace broker himself, with Stevens as escort. Despite what had happened to Thompson, Brown agreed, sending not only Stevens but also his son Watson as a second bodyguard.
Stevens and Watson walked out of the gate behind Kitzmiller, who waved his handkerchief at armory workers he saw posted by the Potomac bridge. The three men then proceeded down a narrow street that formed a sort of canyon between tall commercial buildings on either side. This lane dead-ended at a raised railroad trestle, above which loomed the Gault House saloon. As Kitzmiller and his two escorts neared it, the saloonkeeper, George Chambers, smashed an upper-story window so he could shoot unobstructed. Then he and a fellow gunman opened fire.
Their first volley hit Watson Brown. A moment later, Stevens was also struck. He swore and fired back; hit again and again, he finally collapsed. Lying bloodied on the pavement, Stevens called out to Kitzmiller, who had urged him to attempt a peaceful negotiation. “I have been cruelly deceived,” Stevens said.
Kitzmiller, who had been dragged from his bed before dawn and then taken hostage, replied: “I wish I had remained at home.”
Watson Brown, meanwhile, had staggered back to the armory, vomiting blood from a stomach wound. He hoisted his rifle and for a time resumed his post at the engine house, until he became too weak and lay down on the floor. His father could do little except give him water and fume over the barbarity of his assailants. He began to “show temper,” one of the hostages later testified, and “said he had it in his power to destroy that place in half an hour.”
Brown regarded himself as a soldier, subject to traditional rules of battlefield conduct. His hostages, for the most part, abided by this canon, and not only because they were terrified. A number of them later testified to Brown’s sincere and respectful treatment of them. Virginians prided themselves on their code of honor, and Brown seemed a man whose word was his bond. Hostages who left the armory as emissaries pledged to return—and did so. Archibald Kitzmiller was a rare exception. Caught in the firefight that felled Aaron Stevens, he “did not consider” his pledge to return “binding under the circumstances,” as he later put it. Instead, he took cover in the Wager House.
The bullet-riddled Stevens was left crumpled on the pavement outside, exposed to a hard rain and the horrified gaze of onlookers. “I seen big beefs killed and they did not lose more blood,” Patrick Higgins, the bridge watchman, later stated.
But the strapping warrior wasn’t yet dead. After lying still for a few minutes, Stevens began to move and groan. Brown, having now lost three men under flags of truce, couldn’t risk sending out another to assist his wounded lieutenant. But a hostage volunteered to go to Stevens’s aid. Joseph Brua had served earlier as a peace envoy. Now he went into the bullet-raked street, helped Stevens into the Wager House, and returned once again to captivity. In an extraordinary day that mixed cruelty and kindness, dishonor and courage, Brua’s act was among the most remarkable.
Also astonishing was the fortitude of the man Brua rescued. Stevens had already commanded notice from townspeople for his fearsome and unflinching defense of an exposed position at the armory gate. Now, lying half naked on a bed in the Wager House, where a doctor dressed the wounds to his face, chest, and limbs, Stevens became a figure of awe for his majestic physique. “A large, exceedingly athletic man, a perfect Samson in appearance,” one person wrote. Another described his “brawny shoulders and large sinewy limbs, all the muscles finely developed and hard.”

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