John Brown, Soldier of Fortune: A Critique

by Hill Peebles Wilson

Other documents disclose the facts that the "Captain" and his men not only intended to seize this United States property—the arms in the arsenal and in the rifle works—but that they intended to keep them and to use them. A general order issued from the headquarters of their war department provided for the organization of an army.

Jeremiah G. Anderson was one of Brown's veterans, who, with full confidence in the final success of their venture, approved of this movement. Late in September, writing from "near Harper's Ferry" he said:[411]

Everything seems to work to our hand and victory will surely perch upon our banner.... This is not a large place but a very precious one to Uncle Sam, he has a great many tools here.

A victor is one who conquers—who defeats an enemy. In its relation to war, victory means the defeat of the enemy in battle. Anderson had an army in his mind, and battles and conquest, and the establishment of the Provisional Government, when he referred to victory, and used the word advisedly. A "raid" upon a place may be successfully executed but it cannot be, properly, called a victory over anything. John E. Cook believed the arms would be used and approved of the use of them. "But ere that day arrives," he said, "I fear that we shall hear the crash of the battle shock and see the red gleaming of the cannon's lightning."[412]

Brown leased the Kennedy farm because the location was suitable for his purposes in the furtherance of his plans. From there he conducted his secret negotiations, with the slaves, for the insurrection, and distributed the pikes, probably 500, which his co-conspirators were to use in their secret assassinations; but when he launched the invasion, and debouched his command, he abandoned it. Therefore, it was not necessary for him to leave a force "adequate" or inadequate "on the river bank to insure his being able to fall back to that base," or to cover a retreat still more illogical: a retreat of his little band, with a lot of slaves, and prisoners as hostages, "to the hills" where barren rocks afforded no shelter and "where starvation would have met him at the threshold of his eyrie."[413]

Aside from what the record contains relating to the subject, it is illogical to assume that the veterans of Brown's band would imperil their lives in a scheme so dangerous—a scheme involving death upon the gallows for every one of them if they failed—unless they approved of it with the fullest possible degree of confidence; only absolute confidence in the feasibility of their plans, and the hope of reward without a parallel, could have induced these men "with soiled lives behind them."[414] to undertake this conquest. Their arrogance upon entering the town is evidence of their enthusiasm, and confidence in the success of what they were doing, and of their approval of it. Their conduct was of the swaggering, domineering kind. It was of the: Halt! or I'll kill you! kind; conduct bred by contamination in an environment supercharged with the scheming for murderous deeds, reeking with the planning for assassinations, and nourished by the belief that they were not accountable to any power upon earth for their actions. Men do not shoot down their fellows-men for trivial causes, unless they believe they are in control of the situation, and are immune from punishment. These men were expecting trouble. They had come to Harper's Ferry believing they were about to write the bloodiest chapter in history; that the most desperate struggle in all history was imminent, and they were impatient to have it begin. They cut the telegraph wires; made prisoners of whomever they met; stopped the railway train carrying passengers and mails: shot at Watchman Higgins; shot and killed the baggage-porter, Hayward, because he did not obey the command to halt; and killed Mr. Boerly without any apparent provocation. Men who have no confidence in their supremacy; who do not believe they will succeed in what they are doing, but intend to run away, and laboriously "take to the hills" and act upon the defensive without facilities for defense, do not thus demean themselves. The logic of Mr. Villard's theory of Brown's plans is: That this score of "hard-headed Americans" believed they could shoot down and kill their fellow-citizens upon the streets of Harper's Ferry with impunity; that they could rob the homes of that neighborhood and not be held accountable therefor; that they could carry off property: watches, money, horses, carriages, wagons, and slaves, into the hills adjoining the town, and not be pursued by the local authorities; that they could take citizens of the United States into custody as prisoners, and carry them to a "hill-top fastness," and maintain themselves there without supplies of either food, water, shelter, or munitions of war, other than what they carried upon their persons.

They know little of Brown's plans and of his intentions, who criticize his strategy, in occupying Harper's Ferry, and his tenacious defense of the position. And they know nothing of the agreements at which he had arrived, and the engagements which he had entered into with the slaves of that section, whom he had taken into his confidence, during the preceding three months, and who were to launch the insurrection he had planned, and who were to constitute the rank and file of his army of invasion. The author of Fifty Years After seems to have no clearer conception of the subject herein, than the author of fifty years before assumed to have. Accepting, almost at par, Mr. Redpath's deceptive vagaries, he formulates a plan of campaign to conform with the conditions of his absurd conclusions; and then criticizes Brown because he did not execute his conceptions. The plans for their operations, whatever they may have been, were satisfactory to Brown and to the veteran adventurers who followed his flag. "The man of blood and iron" and the "hard-headed Americans" had the plans under consideration during the two years preceding, and had placed the seal of their approval upon them. If they were satisfactory to those who made them, and understood them, and staked their lives upon the successful execution of them, they should not be denounced too confidently, not to say flippantly, by those who do not know, or who assume not to know, what the plans were.

The details which Brown made from his command were not to "garrison various parts of the town" and "hold the bridges"; the assignments were made in pursuance of his well defined plan to organize and equip there the army which was to garrison the town and which was thereafter to burn the bridges and hold the approaches to it; the army that was to invade the Southern States; the army that was to "start from here" (Harper's Ferry) "and go through the State of Virginia and on South," conquering and to conquer.

The dispositions that he made of his forces were in harmony with the theory of the insurrection, which was the key-note of the invasion. The slaves from the east side of the Potomac—the neighborhoods of Sharpsburg, Boonsboro, and Hagerstown—after declaring their right to freedom, by assassinating their owners, were to report to Owen Brown at the "school-house," there to be organized into a battalion under his command, and, be armed with the rifles and supplied with the ammunition that were to be deposited there for that purpose. In the same way the slaves who were to arrive from the Middletown Valley, and from the Frederick country, through Pleasant Valley and Sandy Hook, were to report to Watson Brown at the Potomac bridge and by him, or by Taylor who was stationed there with him, taken to the arsenal, where Hazlett was in charge as quartermaster and ordnance officer, and there be armed and equipped from the "precious tools stored there," belonging to the United States, which were to be seized for this purpose. In a similar manner, the slaves from Loudoun Valley and the west side of the Shenandoah were to report to Oliver Brown and William Thompson and Newby at the Shenandoah bridge; while the slaves coming from the country lying between the Shenandoah and the Potomac were to report to Kagi, at the rifle-works, and by him and his assistants—Copeland and Leary—taken to the arsenal for their equipment. Brown had said to his friend Douglass: "When I strike the bees will swarm and I shall want you to help me hive them." In this manner they were to be hived, and furnished with stings.

This being true, Brown defied no canons when he crossed the Potomac nor did he thereby place a river between himself and his base of supplies. He had, in general orders, designated Harper's Ferry as his headquarters. Harper's Ferry, with its millions of dollars' worth of military stores, was thenceforth to be his base of supplies, and the State of Virginia and the South the field of his operations. Having paralyzed the South with the insurrection, the Potomac was to be his front, and behind its banks he intended to entrench his army. He appointed no place for his men to retreat to, nor made any provisions for retreating, for the word had no place in his vocabulary. He fixed no hour for his withdrawal from the town, because he did not intend to withdraw from it. He was not executing a raid. Why should his captains proudly march to Harper's Ferry; "their Sharp's rifles hung from their shoulders, their commissions duly signed and officially sealed in their pockets," if they were to trudge back again to the Kennedy farm in demoralizing retreat, with no booty, and without having seen an enemy, and before a hostile shot had been fired; and then "take to the hills," there to be hunted by dogs and men, as wild beasts are hunted, and be shot down as wild beasts are shot, by slave-catchers, patrols, and marshals. Their campaign was serious, heroic, and desperate beyond the comprehension of Brown's biographers. Rarely in history have men voluntarily stood to win or die as these men stood at Harper's Ferry. There was no place on the earth where they could retreat to and live. When Brown and his captains crossed the Potomac, the die was cast; the invasion was on. Thenceforth they might advance but not retreat; they might fight but not run. If they came back, it would have to be "with their shields or upon them."