IN pursuance of instructions from the Governor of Virginia, notice is
hereby given to all whom it may concern,
That, as heretofore, particularly from now until after Friday next the
2nd of December, STRANGERS found within the County of Jefferson, and
Counties adjacent, having no known and proper business here, and who
cannot give a satisfactory account of themselves, will be at once
arrested.
That on, and for a proper period before that day, stangers[sic] and
especially parties, approaching under the pretext of being present at
the execution of John Brown, whether by Railroad or otherwise, will be
met by the Military and turned back or arrested without regard to the
amount of force, that may be required to effect this, and during the
said period and especially on the 2nd of December, the citizens of
Jefferson and the surrounding country are _EMPHATICALLY_ warned to
remain at their homes armed and guard their own property.
On the afternoon before the execution, Brown’s grief-stricken wife was
allowed to visit him in his cell. They spent several hours talking.
Toward evening they parted, and Mary Brown went to Harpers Ferry to
await the delivery of her husband’s body. It would be her agonizing duty
to return Brown’s remains to their North Elba home for burial.
A few minutes after 11 a.m. on December 2, 1859, John Brown walked down
the steps of the Charles Town jail, climbed into the back of a
horse-drawn wagon, and sat down on his own coffin. Flanked by files of
soldiers, the wagon moved off toward a field a short distance from the
town where a scaffold had been erected. No civilians were permitted near
the execution site. The field was ringed by 1,500 soldiers, among them a
company of Virginia Military Institute cadets commanded by a
stern-looking professor who would soon gain fame and immortality as the
Confederate Gen. “Stonewall” Jackson. In the ranks of a Richmond company
stood another man who, in a few short years, would also achieve
immortality by committing one of the most infamous deeds in American
history—John Wilkes Booth.
[Illustration: With soldiers lining the streets, John Brown comes
down the steps of the Charles Town jail on the way to his execution,
December 2, 1859. The wagon containing his coffin stands nearby.]
As the hushed military watched, Brown climbed the scaffold steps.
Sheriff John W. Campbell pulled a white linen hood over the prisoner’s
head and set the noose. John Avis, the jailer, asked Brown to step
forward onto the trap. “You must lead me,” Brown replied, “for I cannot
see.” The abolitionist’s last words were directed to Avis as one final
adjustment of the noose was made. “Be quick,” he said.
At 11:30 a hatchet stroke sprung the trap and John Brown died. The voice
of a militia colonel broke the stillness: “So perish all such enemies of
Virginia! All such enemies of the Union! All such enemies of the human
race!”
But the end was not yet. True, Brown was dead; but he had helped to
arouse popular passions both North and South to the point where
compromise would be impossible. The raid created a national furor and
generated a wave of emotionalism that widened the sectional breach that
had divided the country for so many years. Although conservative
Northern opinion quickly condemned the raid as the work of a madman, the
more radical hailed it as “the best news America ever had” and glorified
Brown as “the new saint” whose martyrdom in the cause of human freedom
would make the gallows “glorious like the cross.”
[Illustration: The hanging of John Brown took place at 11:30 a.m.,
December 2, 1859, in a field just outside Charles Town. The field no
longer exists, but the site is identified by a simple stone marker.]
Southerners shuddered. For decades they had been defending their
“peculiar institution” of slavery against the ever-increasing attacks of
Northern abolitionists, but anti-slavery agitation had always followed a
course of non-violence. Then Brown had come with his pikes and guns to
change all that. In the false atmosphere of crisis that gripped the
South in the wake of the raid, the small voices of moderates were lost
in the din of extremists who saw Brown’s act as part of a vast Northern
conspiracy to instigate servile insurrections throughout the slave
States.
To meet this threat, real or imagined, vigilance committees were formed,
volunteer military companies were organized, and more and more
Southerners began to echo the sentiments of the Richmond Enquirer: “if
under the form of a Confederacy our peace is disturbed, our State
invaded, its peaceful citizens cruelly murdered ... by those who should
be our warmest friends ... and the people of the North sustain the
outrage, then let disunion come.”
Disunion sentiment increased during the presidential campaign of 1860,
stimulated by a split in the Democratic Party that practically
guaranteed a Republican victory in the November elections. When Abraham
Lincoln was elected President, the secessionist movement could no longer
be contained. On December 20, unable to tolerate a President “whose
opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery,” South Carolina severed
her ties with the Union. By February 1, 1861, Mississippi, Florida,
Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had followed her lead. One week
later the Confederate States of America was formed at Montgomery, Ala.,
and the country drifted slowly toward civil war. Before many months had
passed, soldiers in blue would be marching south to the tune of “John
Brown’s Body” as if to fulfill the prophecy Brown had left in a note to
one of his Charles Town guards shortly before the execution:
[Illustration: Charlestown, Va, 2^d, december, 1859 I John Brown am
now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never
be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly
flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be
done.]