[CHAPTER XIV]
A PERVERSION OF HISTORY
But many a man has committed his greatest blunder when
attempting to write a book.
—John Brown, Jr.
Concerning the things which Brown intended to do, and the plans which he made in pursuance thereof Mr. Redpath says:[396]
It was the original intention of Captain Brown to seize the Arsenal at Harpers Ferry on the night of the 24th of October, and to take the arms there deposited to the neighboring mountains, with a number of the wealthier citizens of the vicinity, as hostages, until they should redeem themselves by liberating an equal number of their slaves. When at Baltimore, for satisfactory reasons, he determined to strike the blow that was to shake the Slave System to its foundations, on the night of the 17th.
... Harper's Ferry, by the admission of military men, was admirably chosen as the spot at which to begin a war of liberation. The neighboring mountains, with their inaccessible fastnesses, with every one of which, and every turning of their valleys, John Brown had been familiar for seventeen years, would afford to guerrilla forces a protection the most favorable, and a thousand opportunities for a desperate defense or rapid retreats before overwhelming numbers of an enemy.
This is the conception of the Harper's Ferry episode that Brown's family, and his partisans, decided should be put forth concerning an incident which was to have been written in streams of blood, such as never flowed upon the continent. That anything so irrational should have been published, or should have been seriously considered by any one, is beyond the comprehension of thoughtful persons; and yet, the foolish fictions therein suggested were accepted as the truth in the Northern States, and, with some modifications of the more grotesque absurdities therein contained, have been approved by subsequent writers and biographers and have been incorporated with the history of our country.
Why Brown should have intended to abandon Harper's Ferry without a struggle to retain it after having taken formal possession of the place and of the war material stored there, if the position was admirably chosen as the spot at which to begin a war of liberation; or how a voluntary retreat into the mountains by a band of twenty-two men could be regarded as a "blow" of any kind; or where the inaccessible fastness which he intended to retreat to was located: or how he intended to shelter and subsist his men and prisoners in an inaccessible fastness that had not been supplied with subsistence stores or with camp and garrison equipage of any description; or how he would be able to find his way, if the night happened to be a dark night, up and through the tangled obstructions upon which the fastness relied for its inaccessibility; or how he intended to transport the military equipment stored at Harper's Perry, to the fastness, without means of transportation, or roads to travel on; or how he intended to prevent his fastness from being surrounded and his communications with the world cut off while the altruistic negotiations for the "exchange of the wealthier citizen prisoners for an equal number of slaves," were progressing, appear to have been matters of no concern to this biographer. It was sufficient for his purpose to assume that these things, however inconsistent they might be, were the things which Brown intended to do, and that they constituted the blow which he had promised to strike. Mr. Redpath, personally, knew what Brown intended to do. He knew that Brown, pursuant to his pledges, planned to strike a blow that would shake the center of the slave system; that he planned to precipitate a war of surpassing atrocity; a war that was to begin with a carnival of assassinations; that he intended "to assail slavery with the only weapon that it fears":[397] a servile insurrection.
Mr. Sanborn had been a valuable instrument in Brown's hands for the practice of his Eastern impositions. Taking his cue from Mr. Redpath, after describing what occurred on the night of the 16th of October, he rises to the full height of his conception of the occasion to inquire:
Why then did Brown attack Harper's Ferry, or having captured it, why did he not leave it at once and push into the mountains of Virginia, according to his original plan?[398]