CHAPTER X

THE GREAT BLACK WAY

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because of the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; He hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.”

Half-way between Maine and Florida, in the Heart of the Alleghanies, a mighty gateway lifts its head and discloses a scene which, a century and a a quarter ago, Thomas Jefferson said was “worth a voyage across the Atlantic.” He continues: “You stand on a very high point of land; on your right comes up the Shenandoah, having ranged along the foot of the mountain a hundred miles to find a vent; on your left approaches the Potomac, in quest of a passage also. In the moment of their junction they rush together against the mountain, rend it asunder, and pass off to the sea.”[198]

This is Harper’s Ferry and this was the point which John Brown chose for his attack on American slavery. He chose it for many reasons. He loved beauty: “When I met Brown at Peterboro in 1858,” writes Sanborn, “Morton played some fine music to us in the parlor,—among other things Schubert’s _Serenade_, then a favorite piece,—and the old Puritan, who loved music and sang a good part himself, sat weeping at the air.”[199] He chose Harper’s Ferry because a United States arsenal was there and the capture of this would give that dramatic climax to the inception of his plan which was so necessary to its success. But both these were minor reasons. The foremost and decisive reason was that Harper’s Ferry was the safest natural entrance to the Great Black Way. Look at the map (page 274). The shaded portion is “the black belt” of slavery where there were massed in 1859 at least three of the four million slaves. Two paths led southward toward it in the East:—the way by Washington, physically broad and easy, but legally and socially barred to bondsmen; the other way, known to Harriet Tubman and all fugitives, which led to the left toward the crests of the Alleghanies and the gateway of Harper’s Ferry. One has but to glance at the mountains and swamps of the South to see the Great Black Way. Here, amid the mighty protection of overwhelming numbers, lay a path from slavery to freedom, and along that path were fastnesses and hiding-places easily capable of becoming permanent fortified refuges for organized bands of determined armed men.

The exact details of Brown’s plan will never be fully known. As Realf said: “John Brown was a man who would never state more than it was absolutely necessary for him to do. No one of his most intimate associates and I was one of the most intimate was possessed of more than barely sufficient information to enable Brown to attach such companion to him.”[200]

[Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE GREAT BLACK WAY]

A glance at the map shows clearly that John Brown intended to operate in the Blue Ridge mountains rising east of the Shenandoah and known at Harper’s Ferry as Loudoun Heights. The Loudoun Heights rise boldly 500 to 700 feet above the village of Harper’s Ferry and 1,000 feet above the sea. They run due south and then southwest, dipping down a little the first three miles, then rising to 1,500 feet, which level is practically maintained until twenty-five miles below Harper’s Ferry where the mountains broaden to a dense and labyrinthical wilderness, and rise to a height of 2,000 or more feet. Right at this high point and insight of High Knob (a peak of 2,400 feet) began, in Fauquier County, the Great Black Way. In this county in 1850 were over 10,000 slaves, and 650 free Negroes, as compared with 9,875 whites. From this county to the southern boundary of Virginia was a series of black counties with a majority of slaves, containing in 1850 at least 260,000 Negroes. From here the Great Black Way went south as John Brown indicated in his diary and undoubtedly in the marked maps, which Virginia afterward hastily destroyed.

The easiest way to get to these heights was from Harper’s Ferry. An hour’s climb from the arsenal grounds would easily have hidden a hundred men in inaccessible fastnesses, provided they were not overburdened; and even with arms, ammunition and supplies, they could have repelled, without difficulty, attacks on the retreat. Forts and defenses could be prepared in these mountains, and before the raid they had been pretty thoroughly explored and paths marked. In Harper’s Ferry just at the crossing of the main road from Maryland lay the arsenal. The plan without a doubt was first, to collect men and arms on the Maryland side of the Potomac; second, to attack the arsenal suddenly and capture it; third, to bring up the arms and ammunition and, together with those captured, to cross the Shenandoah to Loudoun Heights and hide in the mountain wilderness; fourth, thence to descend at intervals to release slaves and get food, and retreat southward. Most writers have apparently supposed that Brown intended to retreat from the arsenal across the Potomac. A moment’s thought will show the utter absurdity of this plan. Brown knew guerrilla warfare, and the failure of Harper’s Ferry raid does not prove it a blunder from the start. The raid was not a foray _from_ the mountains, which failed because its retreat was cut off, but it was a foray _to_ the mountains with the village and arsenal on the way, which was defeated apparently because the arms and ammunition train failed to join the advance-guard.

This then was the great plan which John Brown had been slowly elaborating and formulating for twenty years—since the day when kneeling beside a Negro minister he had sworn his sons to blood-feud with slavery.

The money resources with which John Brown undertook his project are not exactly known. Sanborn says: “Brown’s first request in 1858 was for a fund of a thousand dollars only; with this in the hand he promised to take the field either in April or May. Mr. Stearns acted as treasurer of this fund, and before the 1st of May nearly the whole the amount had been paid in or subscribed,—Stearns contributing three hundred dollars, and the rest of our committee smaller sums. It soon appeared, however, that the amount named would be too small, and Brown’s movements were embarrassed from the lack of money before the disclosures of Forbes came to his knowledge.”[201] From first to last George L. Stearns gave in cash and arms about $7,500, and Gerrit Smith contributed more than $1,000. Merriam brought with him $600 in gold in October. Between March 10th and October 16th, Brown expended at least $2,500. In all Sanborn raised $4,000 for Brown. Hinton says: “As near as can be estimated, the money received by Brown could not have exceeded $12,000, while the supplies, arms, etc., furnished may have cost $10,000 more. Of course, there were smaller contributions and support coming in, but if the total estimate be placed at $25,000, for the period between the 15th of September, 1856, when he left Lawrence, Kan., and the 16th of October, 1859, when he moved on Harper’s Ferry, Va., with twenty-one men, it will certainly cover all of the outlay except that of time, labor, and lives.”[202]

This total, however, does not include a fund of $1,000 raised for his family.

The civic organization under which Brown intended to work has been spoken of. The military organization was based on his Kansas experience and his reading. In his diary is this entry:

“Circassia has about 550,000 Switzerland 2,037,030

Guerrilla warfare See Life of Lord Wellington

Page 71 to Page 75 (Mina)

See also Page 102 some valuable hints in the Same Book. See also Page 196 some most important instructions to officers.

See also same Book Page 235 these words deep, and

narrow defiles where 300 men would suffice to check an army.

See also Page 236 on top of Page ”

This life of Wellington, W. P. Garrison states,[203] was Stocqueler’s and the pages referred to tell of the Spanish guerrillas under Mina in 1810, and of methods of cooking and discipline. In one place the author says: “Here we have a chaos of mountains, where we meet at every step huge fallen masses of rock and earth, yawning fissures, deep and narrow defiles, where 300 men would suffice to check an army.” The Alleghanies in Virginia and Carolina was similar in topography and, for the operation here, Brown proposed a skeleton army which could work together or in small units of any size:

“A company will consist of fifty-six privates, twelve non-commissioned officers, eight corporals, four sergeants and three commissioned officers (two lieutenants, a captain), and a surgeon.

“The privates shall be divided into bands or messes of seven each, numbering from one to eight, with a corporal to each, numbered like his band.

“Two bands will comprise a section. Sections will be numbered from one to four.

“A sergeant will be attached to each section, and numbered like it.

“Two sections will comprise a platoon. Platoons will be numbered one and two, and each commanded by a lieutenant designed by like number.”[204]

Four companies composed a battalion, four battalions a regiment, and four regiments a brigade.

So much for his resources and plans. Now for the men whom he chose as co-workers. The number of those who took part in the Harper’s Ferry raid is not known. Perhaps, including active slave helpers, there were about fifty. Seventeen Negroes, reported as probably killed, are wholly unknown, and those slaves who helped and escaped are also unknown. This leaves the twenty-two men usually regarded as making the raid. They fall, of course, into two main groups, the Negroes and the whites. Six or seven of the twenty-two were Negroes.

First in importance came Osborne Perry Anderson, a free-born Pennsylvania mulatto, twenty-four years of age. He was a printer by trade, “well educated, a man of natural dignity, modest, simple in character and manners.” He met John Brown in Canada. He wrote the most interesting and reliable account of the raid, and afterward fought in the Civil War.

Next came Shields Green, a full-blooded Negro from South Carolina, whence he had escaped from slavery, after his wife had died, leaving a living boy still in bondage. He was about twenty-four years old, small and active, uneducated but with natural ability and absolutely fearless. He met Brown at the home of Frederick Douglass, who says: “While at my house, John Brown made the acquaintance of a colored man who called himself by different names—sometimes ‘Emperor,’ at other times, ‘Shields Green’.... He was a fugitive slave, who had made his escape from Charleston, S. C.; a state from which a slave found it no easy matter to run away. But Shields Green was not one to shrink from hardships or dangers. He was a man of few words and his speech was singularly broken; but his courage and self-respect made him quite a dignified character. John Brown saw at once what ‘stuff’ Green ‘was made of,’ and confided to him his plans and purposes. Green easily believed in Brown, and promised to go with him whenever he should be ready to move.”[205]

Dangerfield Newby was a free mulatto from the neighborhood of Harper’s Ferry. He was thirty years of age, tall and well built, with a pleasant face and manner; he had a wife and seven children in slavery about thirty miles south of Harper’s Ferry. The wife was about to be sold south at this time, and was sold immediately after the raid. Newby was the spy who gave general information to the party, and lived out in the community until the night of the attack.

John A. Copeland was born of free Negro parents in North Carolina, reared in Oberlin and educated at Oberlin College. He was a straight-haired mulatto, twenty-two years old, of medium size, and a carpenter by trade. Hunter, the prosecuting attorney of Virginia, says: “From my intercourse with him I regarded him as one of the most respectable prisoners that we had.... He was a copper-colored Negro, behaved himself with as much firmness as any of them, and with far more dignity. If it had been possible to recommend a pardon for any of them, it would have been for this man Copeland, as I regretted as much, if not more, at seeing him executed than any other one of the party!”[206]

Lewis Sherrard Leary was born in slavery in North Carolina and also reared in Oberlin, where he worked as a harness-maker. An Oberlin friend testified: “He called again afterward, and told me he would like to keep to the amount I had given him, and would like a certain amount more for a certain purpose, and was very chary in his communications to me as to how he was to use it, except that he did inform me that he wished to use it in aiding slaves to escape. Circumstances just then transpired which had interested me contrary to any thought I ever had in my mind before. I had had exhibited to me a daguerreotype of a young lady, a beautiful appearing girl, who I was informed was about eighteen years of age....”[207] But here Senator Mason of the Inquisition scented danger, and we can only guess the reasons that sent Leary to his death. He was said to be Brown’s first recruit outside the Kansas band.

John Anderson, a free Negro from Boston, was sent by Lewis Hayden and started for the front. Whether he arrived and was killed, or was too late has never been settled.

The seventh man of possible Negro blood was Jeremiah Anderson. He is listed with the Negroes in all the original reports of the Chatham Convention and was, as a white Virginian who saw him says, “of middle stature, very black hair and swarthy complexion. He was supposed by some to be a Canadian mulatto.”[208] He was descended from Virginia slaveholders who had moved north and was born in Indiana. He was twenty-six years old.

Of the white men there were, first of all, John Brown and his family, consisting of three sons, and two brothers of his eldest daughter’s husband, William and Dauphin Thompson.

Oliver Brown was a boy not yet twenty-one, though tall and muscular, and had just been married. Watson was a man of twenty-five, tall and athletic; while Owen was a large, red-haired prematurely aged man of thirty-five, partially crippled, good-tempered and cynical. The Thompsons were neighbors of John Brown and part of a brood of twenty children. The Brown family and their intermarried Anne Brown says that William, who was twenty-six years of age, was “kind, generous-hearted, and helpful to others.” Dauphin, a boy of twenty-two, was, she writes, “very quiet, with a fair, thoughtful face, curly blonde hair, and baby-blue eyes. He always seemed like a very good girl.”[209]

The three notable characters of the band were Kagi, Stevens and Cook, the reformer, the soldier, and the poet. Kagi’s family came from the Shenandoah Valley. He was twenty-four, had a good English education and was a newspaper reporter in Kansas, where he earnestly helped the free state cause. He had strong convictions on the subject of slavery and was willing to risk all for them. “You will all be killed,” cried a friend who heard his plan. “Yes, I know it, Hinton, but the result will be worth the sacrifice.” Hinton adds: “I recall my friend as a man of personal beauty, with a fine, well-shaped head, a voice of quiet, sweet tones, that could be penetrating and cutting, too, almost to sharpness.”[210] Anderson writes that Kagi “left home when a youth, an enemy to slavery, and brought as his gift offering to freedom three slaves, whom he piloted to the North. His innate hatred of the institution made him a willing exile from the state of his birth, and his great abilities, natural and acquired, entitled him to the position he held in Captain Brown’s confidence. Kagi was indifferent to personal appearance; he often went about with slouched hat, one leg of his pantaloons properly adjusted, and the other partly tucked into his high boot-top; unbrushed, unshaven, and in utter disregard of ‘the latest style.’”[211]

Stevens was a handsome six-foot Connecticut soldier of twenty-eight years of age, who had thrashed his major for mistreating a fellow soldier and deserted from the United States army. He was active in Kansas and soon came under John Brown’s discipline.

“Why did you come to Harper’s Ferry?” asked a Virginian.

He replied: “It was to help my fellow men out of bondage. You know nothing of slavery—I know, a great deal. It is the crime of crimes. I hate it more and more the longer I live. Even since I have been lying in this cell, I have heard the crying of 3 slave-children torn from their parents.”[212]

Cook was also a Connecticut man of twenty-nine years, tall, blue-eyed, golden-haired and handsome, but a far different type from Stevens. He was talkative, impulsive and restless, eager for adventure but hardly steadfast. He followed John Brown as he would have followed anyone else whom he liked, dreaming his dreams, rushing ahead in the face of danger and shrinking back appalled and pitiful before the grim face of death. He was the most thoroughly human figure in the band.

One other deserves mention because it was probably his slowness or obstinacy that ruined the success of John Brown’s raid. This was Charles P. Tidd. He was from Maine, twenty-seven years old, trained in Kansas warfare—a nervous, overbearing and quarrelsome man. He bitterly opposed the plan of capturing Harper’s Ferry when it was finally revealed, and as Anne Brown said, “got so warm that he left the farm and went down to Cook’s dwelling near Harper’s Ferry to let his wrath cool off.” A week passed before he sullenly gave in.

Besides these, there were six other men of more or less indistinct personalities. Five were young Kansas settlers from Maine, the Middle West and Canada, trained in guerrilla warfare under Brown and Montgomery and thoroughly disliking the slave system which they had seen. They were personal admirers of Brown and lovers of adventure. The last recruit, Merriam, was a New England aristocrat turned crusader, fighting the world’s ills blindly but devotedly. The Negro Lewis Hayden met him in Boston, “and, after a few words, said, ‘I want five hundred dollars and must have it.’ Merriam, startled at the manner of the request, replied, ‘If you have a good cause, you shall have it.’ Hayden then told Merriam briefly what he had learned from John Brown, Jr.: that Captain Brown was at Chambersburg, or could be heard of there; that he was preparing to lead a party of liberators into Virginia, and that he needed money; to which Merriam replied: ‘If you tell me John Brown is there, you can have my money and me along with it.’”[213]

These were the men—idealists, dreamers, soldiers and avengers, varying from the silent and thoughtful to the quick and impulsive; from the cold and bitter to the ignorant and faithful. They believed in God, in spirits, in fate, in liberty. To them, the world was a wild, young unregulated thing, and they were born to set it right. It was a veritable band of crusaders, and while it had much of weakness and extravagance, it had nothing nasty or unclean. On the whole, they were an unusual set of men. Anne Brown who lived with them said: “Taking them all together, I think they would compare well [she is speaking of manners, etc.] with the same number of men in any station of life I have ever met.”[214]

They were not men of culture or great education, although Kagi had had a fair schooling. They were intellectually bold and inquiring—several had been attracted by the then rampant Spiritualism; nearly all were skeptical of the world’s social conventions. They had been trained mostly in the rough school of frontier life, had faced death many times, and were eager, curious, and restless. Some of them were musical, others dabbled in verse. Their broadest common ground of sympathy lay in the personality of John Brown—him they revered and loved. Through him, they had come to hate slavery, and for him and for what he believed, they were willing to risk their lives. They themselves, had convictions on slavery and other matters, but John Brown narrowed down their dreaming to one intense deed.

Finally, there was John Brown himself. His appearance has been often described—several times in these pages. In 1859 he was the same striking figure with whitening hair, burning eyes, and the great white beard which hardly hid the pendulous side lips of Olympian Jove. One thing, however, must not be forgotten. John Brown was at this time a sick man. From 1856 to 1859, scarce a mouth passed without telling of illness. His health was “some improved” in May 1857, but soon he lost a week “with ague and fever and left home feeble.” In August he wrote of “ill health” and “repeated returns of fever and ague.” In September and October, his health was “poor.” The spring and summer of 1858 found him “not very stout,” and in July and August, he was “down with ague” and “too sick” to write. In September he was “still weak,” and, although “some improved” in December, the following spring found him “not very strong.” In April, amid the feverish activity of his fatal year, he was “quite prostrated,” with “the difficulty in my head and ear and with the ague in consequence.” Late in July, he was “delayed with sickness” and there can be little doubt that it was an illness and pain-racked body which his indomitable will forced into the raid of Harper’s Ferry.

Having collected a part of the funds and organized the band, John Brown was about to strike his blow in the early summer of 1858, as we have seen, when the Forbes disclosures compelled him to hide in Kansas, where the last massacre on the Swamp of the Swan invited him. He left Canada for Kansas in June, 1858. Cook, somewhat against the wishes of Brown who feared his garrulity, went to Harper’s Ferry, worked as a booking agent and canal keeper, made love to a maid and married her and then acted as advance agent awaiting the main band. Ten months after leaving Canada, and in mid-March, 1859, John Brown appeared again in Canada (as has been told in