John Brown was now fifty-nine years old, and in the last year of his
life. He had been disciplined in a terrible school in Kansas, but what
he was about to attempt seemed so mad, so reckless, and so suicidally
brave that many men of the South claimed, after the attempt, that he
was but an insane man, and many of his conservative friends chose to
take this view of the case, also.
Yet John Brown was not insane. Coolly, rationally, like a clear-headed
strategist, he had figured out the situation. He was an Abolitionist,
and was determined to do anything to end the brutal slave-system.
Peaceful agitation had been going on for decades, but the North was
still apathetic, and the South was only more inflamed and settled in
its ideas.
What John Brown felt was needed now, was to make the men of the North
and the South realize that there would be no peace in the land while
slavery endured. What they must see was that men like himself would
rise to break that loathsome peace. He would go to the South, capture
the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, in Virginia, and run off all the slaves
he could find. He would take the hills about the Ferry, and with a
guerrilla band move through the countryside, making slavery a shaky
institution.
If he failed, he could but lose his life. He would at least stir the
nation on the issue of slavery, and force men to take sides. There
was too much neutrality and silence in the land on this issue, this
institution that to him was a bloody crime against God and humanity.
He could not fail, he felt; success or failure would achieve the same
results. Events proved that he was right.
John Brown spent that winter and spring in New England, giving
occasional lectures, and meeting all the leading men of the Abolition
movement, who collected money for him, though he did not fully reveal
his plans to anyone.
George L. Stearns, Gerrit Smith, the philanthropist, Frank B. Sanborn,
the Concord school-master and author; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a
brave, noble commander in the Civil War, and a charming man of letters
afterward; Theodore Parker, one of the greatest and most sincere
Christian clergymen produced in America; Samuel G. Howe, and others
were among John Brown’s supporters. Thoreau and Emerson he also met at
various times, and both were passionate admirers of the stern, pure
soldier of liberty.
While their Captain was gathering arms and money for the raid, some of
Brown’s men were quartered in a farm-house near Harper’s Ferry, while
others were studying the region, and mapping out routes for the attack
and the retreat to the hills.
It was a cool fall night, the 16th of October, 1859, when Captain
John Brown gave the command his men had been impatiently awaiting for
months: “Men, get on your arms; we will proceed to the Ferry.” Says Mr.
Villard, at times an eloquent chronicler:
“It took but a minute to bring the horse and wagon to the door, to
place in it some pikes, fagots, a sledge hammer, and a crow-bar.
The men had been in readiness for hours; they had but to buckle on
their arms and throw over their shoulders, like army blankets, the
long gray shawls which served some for a few brief hours in lieu of
overcoats, and then became their winding sheets. In a moment more, the
commander-in-chief donned his old battle-worn Kansas cap, mounted the
wagon, and began the solemn march through the chill night to the bridge
into Harper’s Ferry, nearly six miles away.
“Tremendous as the relief of action was, there was no thought of
cheering or demonstration. As the eighteen men with John Brown swung
down the little lane to the road from the farm-house that had been
their prison for so many weary weeks, they bade farewell to Captain
Owen Brown, and Privates Barclay Coppoc and F. J. Meriam, who remained
as rear-guard in charge of the arms and supplies. The brothers Coppoc
read the future correctly, for they embraced and parted as men do who
know they are to meet no more on earth. The damp, lonely night, too,
added to the solemnity of it all, as they passed through its gloom.
As if to intensify the sombreness, they met not a living soul on the
road to question their purpose, or to start with fright at the sight of
eighteen soldierly men coming two by two through the darkness as though
risen from the grave.
“There was not a sound but the tramping of the men and the creaking of
the wagon, before which, in accordance with a general order, drawn up
and carefully read to all, walked Captains Cook and Tidd, their Sharp’s
rifles hung from their shoulders, their commission, duly signed by John
Brown, and officially sealed, in their pockets. They were detailed
to destroy the telegraph wire on the Maryland side, and then on the
Virginian, while Captains John H. Kagi and Aaron D. Stevens, bravest
of the brave, were to take the bridge watchman and so strike the first
blow for liberty. But as they and their comrades marched rapidly over
the rough road, Death himself moved by their side.”