HARPER'S FERRY AND JOHN BROWN
Mad Old Brown,
Osawatomie Brown,
With his eighteen other crazy men, went in and took the town.
--EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN.
Three States meet at Harper's Ferry, and the line dividing two of them
is indicated where it crosses the station platform. If you alight at the
rear end of the train, you are in Maryland; at the front, you are in
West Virginia. This I like. I have always liked important but invisible
boundaries--boundaries of states or, better yet, of countries. When I
cross them I am disposed to step high, as though not to trip upon them,
and then to pause with one foot in one land and one in another, trying
to imagine that I feel the division running through my body.
Harper's Ferry is an entrancing old town; a drowsy place, piled up
beautifully, yet carelessly, upon terraced roads clinging to steep
hills, which slope on one side to the Potomac, on the other to the
Shenandoah, and come to a point, like the prow of a great ship, at the
confluence of the two.
There is something foreign in the appearance of the place. Many times,
as I looked at old stone houses, a story or two high on one side, three
or four stories on the other, seeming to set their claws into the cliffs
and cling there for dear life, I thought of houses in Capri and Amalfi,
and in some towns in France; and again there were low cottages built of
blocks of shale covered with a thin veneer of white plaster showing the
outlines of the stones beneath, which, squatting down amid their trees
and flowers, resembled peasant cottages in Normandy or Brittany, or in
Ireland.
It is a town in which to ramble for an hour, uphill, down and around;
stopping now to delight in a crumbling stone wall, tied together with
Kenilworth ivy; now to watch a woman making apple butter in a great iron
pot; now to see an old negro clamber slowly into his rickety wagon, take
up the rope reins, and start his skinny horse with the surprising words:
"Come hither!"; now to look at an old tangled garden, terraced rudely up
a hillside; now to read the sign, on a telegraph pole in the village,
bearing the frank threat: "If you Hitch your Horses Here they will be
Turned Loose." Now you will come upon a terraced road, at one side of
which stands an old house draped over the rocks in such a way as to
provide entrance from the ground level, on any one of three stories; or
an unexpected view down a steep roadway, or over ancient moss-grown
housetops to where, as an old book I found there puts it, "between two
ramparts, in a gorge of savage grandeur, the lordly Potomac takes to his
embrace the beautiful Shenandoah."
The liaison between the rivers, described in this Rabelaisian manner by
the author of "The Annals of Harper's Ferry," has been going on for a
long time with all the brazen publicity of a love scene on a park bench.
I recommend the matter to the attention of the Society for the
Suppression of Vice, which once took action to prohibit a novel by Mr.
Theodore Dreiser. A great many people wish to read Mr. Dreiser's books
yet no one has to read them if he does not want to. But it is a
different matter with these rivers. Sensitive citizens of Harper's Ferry
and pure-minded passengers on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad are obliged
daily to witness what is going on.
Before the days of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and of the
late Anthony Comstock, when we had no one to make it clear to us exactly
what was shocking, little was thought of the public scandal between the
Potomac and the Shenandoah. Thomas Jefferson seems to have rather liked
it; there is a point above the town, known as Jefferson's Rock, at
which, it is said, the author of the Declaration of Independence stood
and uttered a sentiment about the spectacle. Everybody in Harper's Ferry
agrees that Jefferson stood at Jefferson's Rock and said something
appropriate, and any one of them will try to tell you what he said, but
each version will be different.
A young lady told me that he said: "This view is worth a trip across the
Atlantic Ocean."
A young man in a blue felt hat of the fried-egg variety said that
Jefferson declared, with his well-known simplicity: "This is the
grandest view I ever seen."
An old man who had to go through the tobacco chewer's pre-conversational
rite before replying to my question gave it as: "Pfst!--They ain't
nothin' in Europe ner Switzerland ner nowheres else, I reckon', to beat
this-here scenery."
The man at the drug store quoted differently alleging the saying to have
been: "Europe has nothing on this": whereas the livery stable man's
version was: "This has that famous German river--the Rhine River don't
they call it?--skinned to death."
Whatever Jefferson's remark was, there has been added to the spectacle
at Harper's Ferry, since his day, a new feature, which, could he have
but seen it, must have struck him forcibly, and might perhaps have
caused him to say more.
At a lofty point upon the steep wall of Maryland Heights, across the
Potomac from the town, far, far up upon the side of the cliff,
commanding a view not only of both rivers, but of their meeting place
and their joint course below, and of the lovely contours of the Blue
Ridge Mountains, fading to smoky coloring in the remote distance, there
has, of late years, appeared the outline of a gigantic face, which looks
out from its emplacement like some Teutonic god in vast effigy, its huge
luxuriant mustaches pointing East and West as though in symbolism of the
conquest of a continent. A blue and yellow background, tempered somewhat
by the elements, serves to attract attention to the face and to the
legend which accompanies it, but the thing one sees above all else, the
thing one recognizes, is the face itself, with its look half tragic,
half resigned, yet always so inscrutable: for it is none other than the
beautiful brooding countenance of Gerhard Mennen, the talcum-powder
gentleman.
* * * * *
The great story of Harper's Ferry is of course the John Brown story.
Joseph I.C. Clarke, writing in the New York "Sun" of Sir Roger
Casement's execution for treason in connection with the Irish rebellion,
compared him with John Brown and also with Don Quixote. The spiritual
likeness between these three bearded figures is striking enough. All
were idealists; all were fanatics. Brown's ideal was a noble one--that
of freedom--but his manner of attempting to translate it into actuality
was that of a madman. He believed not only that the slaves should be
freed, but that the blood of slaveholders should be shed in atonement.
In "bleeding Kansas" he led the Ossawatomie massacre, and committed
cold-blooded murders under the delusion that the sword of the Lord was
in his hand.
In October, 1859, Brown, who had for some time been living under an
assumed name in the neighborhood of Harper's Ferry, led a score of his
followers, some of them negroes, in a surprise attack upon the
Government arsenal at this place, capturing the watchmen and taking
possession of the buildings. It was his idea to get the weapons the
arsenal contained and give them to the slaves that they might rise and
free themselves. Before this plan could be executed, however, Brown and
his men were besieged in the armory, and here, after a day or two of
bloody fighting, with a number of deaths on both sides, he was captured
with his few surviving men, by Colonel (later General) Robert E. Lee,
whose aide, upon this occasion, was J.E.B. Stuart, later the Confederate
cavalry leader. Stuart had been in Kansas, and it was he who recognized
the leader of the raid as Brown of Ossawatomie.
It is said that Brown's violent anti-slavery feeling was engendered by
his having seen, in his youth, a colored boy of about his own age
cruelly misused. He brooded over the wrongs of the blacks until, as some
students of his life believe, he became insane on this subject. His
utterances show that he was willing to give up his life and those of his
sons and other followers, if by such action he could merely draw
attention to the cause which had taken possession of his soul. In the
course of the fighting he saw his two sons mortally wounded, and was
himself stabbed and cut. Throughout the fight and his subsequent trial
at Charles Town he remained imperturbable; when taken to the gallows he
sat upon his coffin, in a wagon, and he not only mounted the scaffold
without a tremor, but actually stood there, apparently unmoved, for ten
or fifteen minutes, with the noose around his neck, while the troops
which had formed his escort were marched to their positions.
A large number of troops were present at the execution, for it was then
believed in the South that the Brown raid was not the mere suicidal
stroke of an individual fanatic, but an organized movement on the part
of the Republican party; an effort to rescue Brown was therefore
apprehended. This idea was later shown to be a fallacy, Brown having
made his own plans, and been financed by a few northern friends, headed
by Gerrit Smith of New York.
There has been a tendency in the North to make a saint of John Brown,
and in the South to make a devil of him. As a matter of fact he was a
poor, misguided zealot, with a wild light in his eye, who had set out to
do a frightful thing; for, bad though slavery was, its evils were not
comparable with the horrors which would have resulted from a slave
rebellion.
It must be conceded, however, that those who would canonize John Brown
have upon their side a strange and impressive piece of evidence. The
jail where he was lodged in Charles Town and the courthouse where he was
tried, still stand, and it is the actual fact that, when the snow falls,
it always miraculously melts in a path which leads diagonally across the
street from the one to the other. That this is true I have unimpeachable
testimony. _Snow will not stand on the path by which John Brown crossed
back and forth from the jail to the court-house._ There will be snow
over all the rest of the street, but not on that path; there you can see
it melting.
But, as with certain other "miracles," this one is not so difficult to
understand if you know how it is brought about. The courthouse is heated
from the jail, and the hot pipes run under the pavement.