By the summer of 1859 Harpers Ferry was a quietly thriving little
industrial and transportation community sitting on a narrow shelf of
land at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers in the Blue
Ridge Mountains of northern Virginia. Until its selection as the site
for a Federal armory at the end of the 18th century, the town’s growth
had been slow. What growth it did experience was due to its location on
the wilderness route to the Shenandoah Valley. The land on which the
town sat was first settled in 1733 by a Pennsylvania Dutchman named
Peter Stephens, who operated a small ferryboat service across the
rivers. At that time the place was called “Peter’s Hole” because it was
dominated by three towering bluffs—Maryland Heights to the north,
Loudoun Heights to the south, and Bolivar Heights to the west. When
Robert Harper, a skilled Philadelphia architect and millwright, bought
the land in 1747, he improved the ferry service and built a gristmill.
Around these facilities at the base of Bolivar Heights the village of
Harpers Ferry gradually developed.
In 1794, when relations between the United States and England were
strained, Congress grew uneasy over the country’s military posture.
Uncertain of the ordnance-producing capabilities of private
manufacturers in time of need, it directed President George Washington
to establish a number of armories where guns could be made and stored.
One of the sites he chose was Harpers Ferry.
Washington was well acquainted with Harpers Ferry. As a young man during
the middle part of the century, he had accompanied surveying parties
that inspected the vast holdings of the Virginia aristocracy in this
area. He considered Harpers Ferry “the most eligible spot on the
[Potomac] river” for an armory. Abundant water power was available, iron
ore was plentiful nearby, hardwood forests insured a steady supply of
charcoal to fuel the forges, and the place was far enough inland to be
secure from foreign invasion.
In June 1796 the Government purchased from the Harper heirs a 125-acre
tract of land and began constructing workshops on the benchland between
the Potomac River and what would later become Potomac Street. Waterpower
was harnessed by building a dam upstream from the armory and channeling
the water through a canal into the workshops. Although a critical
shortage of gunsmiths and ordnance-making machinery restricted
operations for several years, limited arms production began late in 1798
under the direction of an English Moravian named Joseph Perkin, the
armory’s first superintendent.
The first muskets, based on the old French infantry type of 1763, were
completed in 1801. In 1803 production was expanded to include rifles,
and 2 years later the manufacture of pistols. (The Model 1805 pistol,
made at Harpers Ferry, was the first hand weapon to be produced at a
United States armory.) At first the rate of musket production was
meager, but by 1810 the armory was turning out 10,000 annually, storing
them in two arsenal buildings nearby on Shenandoah Street.
In 1819 John Hall, a Maine gunsmith, received a contract from the
Federal Government to manufacture 1,000 breech-loading flintlock rifles
of his own design. Sent to Harpers Ferry, he set up the Hall Rifle Works
in two buildings on Lower Hall Island, which adjoined Virginius Island
in the Shenandoah River about ½ mile from its junction with the Potomac.
Hall’s rifles were made on so exact a scale that all the parts were
interchangeable—a factor that helped to pave the way for modern mass
production methods. The War Department was elated with Hall’s success
and his contract was repeatedly renewed. When the Hall rifle was
discontinued in 1844, the Government tore down the old buildings and
erected a new rifle factory on the same site. Standard U.S. Model rifles
were produced there until the industry was destroyed, along with the
armory complex, at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861.
The abundance of water power that had attracted the arms industry soon
brought others. Besides the rifle factories on Hall Island, Virginius
Island boasted an iron foundry, flour mill, cotton mill, and machine
shop, all powered by water diverted through the island by a dam in the
Shenandoah River and a series of sluiceways and underground water
tunnels. More than 200 persons made their home around the prospering
island industries.
The formation, development, and expansion of the United States Armory
and Arsenal at Harpers Ferry (its complete, official designation) was
the chief stimulus for the growth of the town. From a simple beginning
the armory by 1859 had spread to include 20 workshops and offices, lined
in a neat double row over an area 600 yards long. At its peak, the
armory provided employment for more than 400 men, mostly transplanted
Northerners whom local residents classified as “foreigners.” In the
65-year history of this major industry, the U.S. Government invested
nearly $2 million in land, water power improvements, walls and
embankments, hydraulic machinery, and buildings.
[Illustration: HARPERS FERRY AND VICINITY 1859]
After 1830 Harpers Ferry, already recognized as an important industrial
center, attained prominence as a vital link in the transportation and
communications line between the Ohio and Shenandoah Valleys and the
East. By 1830 a semi-weekly stagecoach service connected the town with
Washington, D.C. The one-way trip usually required a full day’s travel.
That same year a turnpike company was founded to construct a 16-mile
macadamized toll road from Harpers Ferry to Middleway, 5 miles west of
Charles Town. A turnpike being built from Frederick, Md., about 20 miles
to the east, reached the town in 1832. Still another turnpike company,
organized in 1851, ran a road from Harpers Ferry southeastward to
Hillsborough, about 10 miles away.
But the signal impetus to the establishment of the town’s commercial
position was the arrival of canal and railroad. Waging a bitter battle
to reach the rich Ohio Valley and carry its trade to the East, impeding
each other’s progress at every opportunity, the Chesapeake and Ohio
Canal (originating in Washington, D.C.) and the Baltimore and Ohio
Railroad (originating in Baltimore, Md.) reached Harpers Ferry in the
early 1830’s. Following the winding Potomac River northward and westward
from Georgetown, the C & O Canal arrived at Harpers Ferry in November
1833, more than a year ahead of its rival. But the railroad pushed on to
the Ohio Valley while the canal stopped at Cumberland, Md. The
establishment of these two arteries provided shippers with a cheaper
carrier for their products and assured travelers of a more efficient and
economical means of reaching their destinations.
With the expansion of industry and the development of superior
transportation facilities, the population of the community swelled to
nearly 3,000 by 1859. Of these about 150 were “free coloreds” and 150
were slaves. The total number of slaves in the entire six-county area
around Harpers Ferry was just slightly more than 18,000, of which less
than 5,000 were men. There were no large plantations because the land
and the climate could not sustain a plantation economy. The few
slaveholders maintained farms, and their blacks were mainly “well-kept
house-servants.”
Most of the white residents of Harpers Ferry worked at the armory or at
the manufacturing plants on Virginius Island. Because land was at a
premium, the houses, saloons, hotels, and shops were tightly aligned
along Shenandoah, Potomac, and High Streets, and sprawled up the slopes
of Bolivar Heights. In some places the rocky cliffs were blasted away to
make room for another building. Most of the homes were of simple design,
but the Government-built residences of the armory officials were more
elaborate.
The inhabitants of the town were chiefly of Irish, English, and German
descent. Besides building six churches of varying faiths (one of which,
St. Peter’s Catholic Church, is still standing and in use today), they
established five private girls’ schools. A man could get a drink at the
Gault House or take a meal at the Potomac Restaurant or the Wager House.
If he so desired, he could join the Masons, the Odd Fellows, or the Sons
of Temperance. Nearly everyone was prosperous. It was a good time for
the town and its people.
[Illustration: This photograph of Harpers Ferry from the Maryland
side of the Potomac shows the town as it appeared about the time of
the raid. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad bridge, by which John
Brown and his raiders entered the village, is at the left.]
John Brown arrived amidst this prosperity on July 3, 1859. Not yet 60
years old, the rigors of frontier living had nevertheless left their
imprint upon him and there were those who said he looked and walked more
than ever “like an old man.” In March a Cleveland, Ohio, newspaper had
described him as “a medium-sized, compactly-built and wiry man, and as
quick as a cat in his movements. His hair is of a salt and pepper hue
and as stiff as bristles, he has a long, waving, milk-white goatee,
which gives him a somewhat patriarchal appearance, his eyes are gray and
sharp.” He had grown the beard before his last trip to Kansas in 1858,
and it covered his square chin and straight, firm mouth, changing his
appearance markedly. When he arrived in Harpers Ferry the beard had been
shortened to within an inch and a half of his face, because, his
daughter Annie later recalled, he thought it “more likely to disguise
him than a clean face or than the long beard.”
With Brown were two of his sons—34-year-old Owen and 20-year-old
Oliver—and Kansas veteran Jeremiah G. Anderson. The 26-year-old,
Indiana-born Anderson was the grandson of Southern slaveholders and had
joined the abolitionist cause in 1857 after working several unproductive
years as a peddler, farmer, and sawyer. Determined to eliminate slavery,
Anderson once vowed to “make this land of liberty and equality shake to
the centre.”
After consulting briefly with Cook, who had been serving as a
schoolteacher, book salesman, and canal-lock tender, and had even
married a local girl since being sent to Harpers Ferry the year before,
Brown and his three companions took up residence in a private home in
Sandy Hook, a small village about a mile down the Potomac on the
Maryland shore. The names they gave their landlord were “Isaac Smith &
Sons.” To anyone asking their business in the area, Brown told them they
were simple farmers looking for good farmland to develop.
Brown arose early on July 4 and began exploring the Maryland side of the
Potomac to find a suitable hideout for his raiders. Local inquiry led
him to a farm owned by the heirs of a Dr. R. F. Kennedy about 5 miles
north of Harpers Ferry. A cursory inspection convinced him that the
place, though small, was conveniently located and admirably suited for
concealment. The farm was remote from other settlements, and it was
surrounded by woods and hidden by undergrowth—an ideal situation for
hiding men and supplies from the gaze of inquisitive neighbors.
[Illustration: John Brown in May 1859.]
For $35 in gold Brown rented the farm, which consisted of two log
structures, some outbuildings, and a pasture. The main house sat about
100 yards off the public road connecting Harpers Ferry with
Boonesborough and Sharpsburg, Md., and contained a basement kitchen and
storerooms, a second-floor living room and bedrooms, and an attic. The
second floor was used as kitchen, parlor, and dining room, and the attic
served as a storeroom, drilling room, and “prison” to keep the men out
of sight. Near the farmhouse stood a small cabin that later became a
storage place and sleeping quarters for some of the raiders.
[Illustration: The isolated character of the Kennedy farm did not
prevent curious neighbors from “dropping in” for a visit.]
[Illustration: To help avert suspicion, Brown’s daughter Annie and
Oliver’s wife Martha (shown here with her husband in 1859) lived at
the farm while the arms and men were being assembled. Martha did the
cooking and helped Annie with household chores.]
Brown’s chief fear was that neighbors would become suspicious of “Isaac
Smith & Sons” and possibly uncover his revolutionary plans. Reasoning
that nearby families would be less distrustful with women among the
group, he appealed to his wife and daughter Annie at their home in North
Elba, N.Y., to come live with him, saying that “It will be likely to
prove the most valuable service you can ever render to the world.” Mrs.
Brown was unable to make the long journey, but Annie and Oliver’s wife
Martha did join him in mid-July. Their presence proved of inestimable
value not only in alleviating suspicion but in contributing to the
morale of the men. Martha served as cook and housekeeper, preparing
meals on a wood stove in the upstairs living room; Annie kept constant
watch for prying neighbors. “When I washed dishes,” noted Annie many
years later,
I stood at the end of the table where I could see out of the window
and open door if any one approached the house. I was constantly on the
lookout while carrying the victuals across the porch, and while I was
tidying or sweeping the rooms, and always at my post on the porch when
the men were eating. My evenings were spent on the porch or sitting on
the stairs, watching or listening.
[Illustration: The Kennedy farmhouse served as the base of
operations for John Brown’s raiders.]
[Illustration: Annie Brown]
His base established, Brown laid plans to assemble his arms and supplies
and to gather in his followers. On July 10 he wrote to John Kagi at
Chambersburg, Pa., where an arms depot had been set up, giving him
directions for forwarding the waiting men and the “freight”—200 Sharps
rifles, an equal number of pistols, and a thousand pikes. The weapons,
crated in large wooden boxes marked “Hardware and Castings,” were
shipped from Ohio to Chambersburg where Kagi sent them by wagon to Brown
at the Kennedy farm. Supplies were acquired at various places between
Chambersburg and Harpers Ferry.
Alone and in twos and threes, Brown’s followers began to assemble at the
farm. Watson Brown arrived on August 6. “Tall and rather fair, with
finely knit frame, athletic and active,” the 24-year-old Watson brought
with him two of his brothers-in-law and North Elba neighbors, William
and Dauphin Thompson. The Thompsons had not previously taken active
roles in the anti-slavery movement but they were dedicated
abolitionists. William, 26 years old, was fun-loving and good natured.
He had started for Kansas in 1856 but turned back before reaching there.
His 20-year-old brother Dauphin had never been away from home before.
Handsome, inexperienced, with curly, golden hair and a soft complexion,
he seemed “more like a girl than a warrior” and was “diffident and
quiet.” Both had come to the Kennedy farm because they were firmly
convinced of the justness of John Brown’s cause.
Next came Aaron Stevens and Charles Plummet Tidd, a 25-year-old former
Maine woodsman. Tidd was a Kansas veteran. He had been one of the first
to join Brown at Tabor, Iowa, in 1857 and had remained one of his
closest associates ever since. He was quick-tempered, but according to
Annie Brown, “His rages soon passed and then he tried all he could to
repair damages. He was a fine singer and of strong family affections.”
[Illustration: Edwin Coppoc]
[Illustration: Dauphin Thompson]
[Illustration: Charles Plummer Tidd]
Tidd and Stevens were followed by 22-year-old Albert Hazlett, another
veteran of the Kansas fighting, Canadian-born Stewart Taylor, and two
brothers from Iowa, Edwin and Barclay Coppoc. Hazlett had worked on his
brother’s farm in western Pennsylvania before joining Brown at the
Kennedy farm. He was totally committed to the overthrow of slavery. “I
am willing to die in the cause of liberty,” he said; “if I had ten
thousand lives I would willingly lay them all down for the same cause.”
Taylor, 23 years old, was once a wagonmaker. He had met Brown in Iowa in
1858 and was “heart and soul in the anti-slavery cause.” Scholarly, a
good debater, and “very fond of studying history,” Taylor, like Stevens,
was a spiritualist and had a premonition that he would die at Harpers
Ferry. The Coppocs were Quakers by birth and training. They were in
Kansas during the troubles there but took no part in the fighting.
Edwin, at 24, was 4 years older than his brother Barclay. Both had
joined Brown initially in 1858 at Springdale, Iowa, where they were
living with their mother, shortly before the Chatham Convention.
Twenty-year-old William H. Leeman arrived near the end of August. Born
and educated in Maine, he had worked in a Haverhill, Mass., shoe factory
before going to Kansas in 1856 where he served in Brown’s “Liberty
Guards” militia company. Impulsive, hard to control, the 6-foot-tall
Leeman “smoked a good deal and drank sometimes,” but he had “a good
intellect with great ingenuity.” Shortly before the raid he wrote his
mother that he was “warring with slavery, the greatest curse that ever
infected America. We are determined to strike for freedom, incite the
slaves to rebellion, and establish a free government. With the help of
God we will carry it through.”
After Leeman came Dangerfield Newby, a mulatto born a slave but freed by
his Scotch father, and Osborn P. Anderson, a 33-year-old free Negro who
had worked as a printer before joining Brown in Canada in 1858. Newby,
at 44 the oldest of the group save for Brown himself, had a wife and
several children in bondage in the South. He came to the Kennedy
farmhouse convinced that the only way to free them was with rifle and
bullet. Week after week he would read and reread a worn letter from his
wife in which she begged him to “Buy me and the baby, that has just
commenced to crawl, as soon as possible, for if you do not get me
somebody else will.”
“Emperor” Shields Green, a 23-year-old illiterate escaped slave from
Charleston, S.C., joined up at Chambersburg where Brown had gone in
mid-August to enlist the aid of the famed Negro abolitionist, orator,
and journalist, Frederick Douglass. Brown and Douglass had first met at
Springfield, Mass., in 1847. Since then they had become good friends.
When the Negro leader learned the details of the planned assault on
Harpers Ferry, he refused to participate, arguing that an attack on the
Government would “array the whole country” against him and antagonize
the very people to whom the abolitionists looked for support. Moreover,
Douglass believed that the plan could not succeed, that Brown “was going
into a perfect steel-trap, and that once in he would never get out
alive.” Before leaving, Douglass asked Shields Green, who had
accompanied him to the meeting, what he intended to do. Green replied
simply, “I b’lieve I’ll go wid de ole man.”
Life at the Kennedy farm was wearing and tedious. Brown’s most trying
task was to keep his slowly increasing force occupied and out of sight.
Forced to remain in the two small buildings during the day, the men had
little to do. The long summer days were mostly spent reading magazines,
telling stories, arguing politics and religion, and playing checkers and
cards. They drilled frequently and studied the art of guerrilla warfare
from a specially prepared military manual.
Meals were served downstairs in the farmhouse, with Annie and Martha
standing guard while the men ate. After breakfast each morning, John
Brown would read from the Bible and utter a short prayer. Occasionally
he would travel into Harpers Ferry to pick up a Baltimore newspaper to
which he subscribed or to purchase flour from the mill on Virginius
Island. If a neighbor arrived unexpectedly during mealtime, the men
would gather up the food, dishes, and table cloth and carry them to the
attic.
[Illustration: Famed Negro abolitionist Frederick Douglass supported
Brown’s Kansas activities but warned him against attacking Harpers
Ferry. Douglass refused to participate in the raid, but his friend
Shields Green decided to go with Brown.]
[Illustration: Shields Green.]
At night the men could go outdoors for fresh air and exercise.
Thunderstorms were especially welcomed, for then they could move about
with little fear of making noise. These brief interludes served to
release tensions built up during long periods of confinement and
inactivity, but the secret living in such close quarters proved almost
too much to bear. Restiveness and irritations were bound to occur. Twice
there was a near revolt against the planned raid. On one occasion Tidd
became so infuriated that he left the farm and stayed with Cook in
Harpers Ferry for 3 days. So serious was the opposition that Brown
tendered his resignation as commander in chief. He withdrew it only
after the men gave him a renewed vote of confidence.
As September ended and the time for the attack approached, Annie and
Martha were sent back to North Elba. Brown and his men busied themselves
overhauling the rifles and pistols and attaching pike-heads to shafts.
The pikes were Brown’s own idea. Preparing for a return to Kansas in
1857, he had negotiated with a Connecticut blacksmith to manufacture
1,000 of these weapons—a two-edged dirk with an iron blade 8 inches long
fastened to a 6-foot ash handle. Originally they were intended for the
defense of free-soil settlers in Kansas, but Brown was unable to pay for
them until the spring of 1859, when he made final arrangements to use
them at Harpers Ferry. Knowing that most of the slaves he expected to
join him were unskilled in the use of firearms, he decided they could
handle a pike. A thousand men armed with pikes and backed by Brown’s
more experienced “soldiers” could constitute a formidable army.
Because so many people knew about Brown’s intentions, it was inevitable
that the secrecy would be broken. In late August Secretary of War John
B. Floyd received an unsigned letter reporting “the existence of a
secret association, having for its object the liberation of the slaves
at the South by a general insurrection.” Brown was named as its leader
and “an armory in Maryland” its immediate objective. Because the
informant mistakenly placed the armory in Maryland instead of Virginia
and because Floyd could not bring himself to believe such a scheme could
be entertained by citizens of the United States, the Secretary put the
letter away and forgot about it until subsequent events reminded him of
the warning.
October arrived. Still Brown delayed, hoping that more men would come.
Many upon whom he had counted failed to join him for a variety of
reasons. Even two of his sons, Jason and Salmon, refused to participate.
Though disappointed, Brown realized that the longer he delayed, the
greater were the chances that his plan would be discovered and thwarted.
Finally, on October 15, with the arrival of 22-year-old Francis J.
Meriam and two Ohio Negroes, John Copeland and Lewis S. Leary, both 25,
the ranks of the “Provisional Army of the United States” were completed.
In all there were 21 men besides the commander in chief. Of these, 19
were under 30, three not yet 21. Brown could wait no longer. Calling his
men together, he announced that the attack would take place the next
night, October 16, and cautioned them about the needless taking of human
life:
You all know how dear life is to you ... consider that the lives of
others are as dear to them as yours are to you; do not, therefore,
take the life of anyone if you can possibly avoid it, but if it is
necessary to take life in order to save your own, then make short work
of it.