Part 2
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
TO FREE THE SLAVES
The daylight hours of Sunday, October 16, 1859, were quiet ones at the Kennedy farm as the long period of inactivity and uncertainty neared its climax. Early in the morning John Brown held worship services, the impending attack invoking “deep solemnity” upon the gathering. After breakfast and roll call a final meeting was held and instructions were given. Then everything was in readiness.
About 8 p.m. Brown turned to his followers. “Men,” he said, “get on your arms; we will proceed to the Ferry.” The men, ready for hours, slung their Sharps rifles over their shoulders, concealing them under long, gray shawls that served as overcoats, and waited for the order to march. A horse and wagon were brought to the door of the farmhouse. In the wagon the men placed a few items that might be needed for the work ahead: a sledge hammer, a crowbar, and several pikes. Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Meriam were detailed to remain at the farm as a rearguard. In the morning they were to bring the rest of the weapons nearer the town where they could be passed out to the slave army Brown expected to raise.
Donning his battered old Kansas cap, symbol of the violence to which he had contributed in that strife-torn territory, Brown mounted the wagon and motioned his men to move out. From the farmhouse the group moved down the lane and onto the road leading to Harpers Ferry. Tidd and Cook, who were best acquainted with the route, preceded the main body as scouts. Upon reaching the town they were to cut the telegraph lines on both the Maryland and Virginia sides of the Potomac.
For more than 2 hours the men tramped along behind the wagon, strictly adhering to Brown’s order to maintain silence. About 10:30 p.m. they reached the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad bridge that would carry them into Harpers Ferry. It was a long wooden-covered structure that spanned the Potomac River a little upstream from where the Shenandoah comes spilling in from the south. Kagi and Stevens entered first and encountered watchman William Williams, who approached with a lantern. They quickly took Williams prisoner. The rest of the raiders, except for Watson Brown and Stewart Taylor who were told to stay on the Maryland side as a rearguard, fastened cartridges boxes to the outside of their clothing for ready access and followed the wagon onto the bridge.
Crossing quickly, the raiders stepped from the tunnel’s black throat into the slumbering town. Before them lay a large structure that doubled as the railroad depot and the Wager House. Just beyond, to the left, was the U.S. Arsenal buildings where thousands of guns were stored. To the right the armory shops stretched in a double row along the Potomac. Brown turned the horse and wagon toward the armory.