There was no violation of military principles in Brown's occupation of Harper's Ferry, or in the dispositions which he made of his men, nor in his tenacious defense of his position. The military principles which he violated are not referred to in the charges and specifications preferred against him by this recent biographer. These violations were fatal to his enterprise, but they all antedate the night of October 16, 1859. If the hundreds of slaves whom Brown secretly armed with the Collinsville spears, with which to assassinate their masters and their masters' families, had done their bloody work as they had promised to do; then the fifteen hundred men that Brown believed would report to him for duty by 12 o'clock on the 17th,[415] and the 5,000 men whom Cook, at 4 o'clock, thought had already reported and were in action, would have arrived, and the story of Harper's Ferry would have been different. There would have been no violations of military principles then in Brown's tactics and strategy, to criticise by any authority whatever. "Another general, with the same purpose in view," and with the same forces at his disposal, would not have improved very much upon Brown's plans.
The hint at a hill-top fastness, where another general would have established his camp before he "swooped" down upon the town, is a modification of Mr. Redpath's invention of an "inaccessible fastness." It is a delusion none the less, a delusion that was shot to pieces within two years after Mr. Redpath framed it. Such a position has no existence, except it be in authors' imaginations. There is not now, and there never was a position upon either Maryland Heights or Loudoun Heights that cannot be "stormed at with shot and shell."
During the war between the States, the Union generals fortified Mr. Redpath's inaccessible fastness. Half way up the tangled steeps of Maryland Heights, on a small bit of plateau—less than an acre—they placed a battery of siege guns: two 9-inch Columbiads, a 50-pounder Parrott, and two or three field pieces. Also, they reënforced the natural defenses of the "hill-top fastness" by formidable breastworks, built of rocks and trunks of trees, and protected them by abatis. On the 12th of September, 1862, the Confederate infantry swarmed all over these inacessible fastnesses. During the 13th and 14th, the front of the "hill-top fastness," on the summit of Maryland Heights, was a sheet of flame and lead, enveloped in clouds of smoke. The rifle fire from the opposing lines stripped the bark from the trunks of all the trees, within a hundred and fifty yards of the front of these breastworks, as clean as though they had been girdled with an ax. Not only did Jackson's infantry penetrate these fastnesses, but during the morning of the 14th they took two pieces of artillery to the top of these "inaccessible" heights and "turned loose" with shot and shell upon the hill-top fastness. During the night of the 14th, the Union commander abandoned the inaccessible fastness, dismounted and spiked the guns on the mountain side, and joined the forces at Harper's Ferry, on Bolivar Heights.
On the 20th, a detachment from what had been Mansfield's Corps, of McClellan's Army—Crawford's Brigade[416]—then in command of Col. Joseph F. Knipe of the Forty-sixth Pennsylvania, with a section of artillery, also climbed these inaccessible heights to drive the Confederates from the position.[417]
There are many persons living who remember having marched or "tramped" or "climbed" or "trudged" or "stumbled" or "hoofed it" up and down and over these mountains, on campaign and on picket duty, during the years of the great war; but it is doubtful if any of them ever heard of a detachment that executed such maneuvers by "swooping." The real movement is different, especially so if it be executed at night.
In behalf of a patient public that has long been grievously imposed upon by partisan biographers, the writer asks unanimous consent that references to "fastnesses," with which Brown is said to have been "familiar for seventeen years" be barred, henceforth, from the literature of this subject; the inhibition to include all the patterns of fastnesses which have been exploited; from the inaccessible kind of 1859 down through the intervening years, ending with the hill-top variety of fifty years after.