Events flashed sharp and terrible and swift as lightning after this
sombre opening of the storm. The telegraph wires were cut, the watchman
at the bridge captured, guards were placed at the two bridges leading
out of the town, and many citizens were taken from the streets and held
as prisoners in the Arsenal.
Perhaps the most distinguished prisoner was Colonel Lewis W.
Washington, a great-grand-nephew of the first President, and like him,
a gentleman farmer and slave-owner. He lived five miles from the Ferry,
and with the instinct of a dramatist, John Brown seized him and freed
his slaves as a means of impressing on the American imagination that a
new revolution for human rights was being ushered in.
The little town was peaceful and unprepared for this sudden attack,
as unprepared as it would be today for a similar raid. By morning,
however, the alarm had been spread; the church bells rang, military
companies from Charlestown and other neighboring towns began pouring
in, the saloons were crowded with nervous and hard-drinking men, and
there was the clamor and furor of thousands of awe-struck Southerners.
No one knew how many men were in the Arsenal. No one knew whether the
whole South was not being attacked by abolitionists, or whether or not
all the slaves had armed and risen against their masters, as they had
attempted to years before in Nat Turner’s and other rebellions.
By noon the Southerners had begun the attack. They killed or drove out
all the guards John Brown had stationed at various strategic points in
the town; they murdered two of Brown’s men they had taken prisoners,
and tortured another. They managed to cut off all of Brown’s paths of
retreat, and by nightfall, he and the few survivors of his men were in
a trap.
His young son Oliver, only twenty years old, and recently married,
died in the night. He had been painfully wounded, and begged, in his
agony, that his father shoot him and relieve him from pain. But the
old Spartan held his boy’s hand, and told him to be calm, and to die
like a man. Another young son, Watson, had been killed earlier in the
fighting. John Brown had now given three sons to freedom, and was soon
himself to be a sacrifice.
There were left alive and unwounded but five of Brown’s men. The
Virginia militia, numbering, with the civilians in the town, up to the
thousands, seemed afraid to attack this little group of desperate men.
In the dawn of the next morning, however, United States marines, under
the famous commander, Robert E. Lee, then a Colonel in the Federal
forces, attacked the arsenal and captured it easily. John Brown refused
to surrender to the last; and he stood waiting proudly for the marines
when they broke down the door and came raging like tigers at him.
A fierce young Southern officer ran at him with a sword, that
bent double as it pierced to the old man’s breast-bone. The young
Southerner then took the bent weapon in his hands and beat Brown’s head
unmercifully with the hilt, bringing the blood, and knocking senseless
the old unselfish and tender champion of poor Negro men and women.
Those near him thought John Brown was dead; but he was still alive; he
had still his greatest work to do.