Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price (28 page)

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Authors: Tony Horwitz

Tags: #John Brown, #Abolition, #Civil War Period (1850-1877)

BOOK: Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price
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Unbeknownst to Tidd and the others, Cook was already in custody just a few blocks away. His search for food the previous afternoon had led to a rural iron works, where he said he belonged to a hunting party and wanted to buy bacon. But one of the men he approached had seen wanted notices for Cook, and he communicated his suspicion to a colleague. Both were southern sympathizers and one of them was experienced at capturing fugitive slaves.
The two men offered to take Cook to a nearby store; en route, they overpowered him. On his person they found documents that erased any doubt about his identity. He carried a commission as a captain in Brown’s army, sketches of roads near Harpers Ferry, and a piece of parchment attesting to the lineage of the antique pistol he had taken from Lewis Washington during the raid on the Virginian’s plantation.
Bound and put in a wagon to Chambersburg, Cook tried to sweet-talk his captors, claiming he could pay them more than the official bounty. But the men took him before a judge, who committed Cook to the Chambersburg jail. A crowd of curious onlookers trailed the fugitive as he was escorted to prison, and among them were two abolitionist women who concocted a daring scheme. Carrying extra clothes, they planned to visit Cook in jail and dress him as a woman. Then one of the women would walk out of jail with Cook while the other remained in his cell.
But they were discouraged from this plan by the lawyer appointed to represent Cook. He told them that the prisoner wouldn’t be handed over to Virginia authorities quickly or without a legal contest. He was wrong. A request for Cook’s rendition arrived in the morning and at noon the manacled prisoner was put aboard a train for Charlestown, Virginia. His
captors collected their $1,000 reward and Wise offered a new one of $500 for each of the men still at large.
Authorities also issued wanted notices describing the remaining fugitives on the basis of information Cook provided. The muscular and heavy-bearded Charles Tidd, the notice said, “looks like a fighting man, and his looks in this respect are in no way deceptive.” Owen Brown was described as spare and freckled, with red whiskers. Barclay Coppoc had a light mustache and “a consumptive look.” The even sicklier Francis Meriam “sometimes wears a glass eye” and had a face “blotched from the effects of Syphilis.”
Cook may have provided this information knowing that the men would be long gone by the time the notice circulated. Meriam, so weak he couldn’t walk much beyond Chambersburg, managed to slip aboard a train to Philadelphia and make his way home to Boston. After seeing him off, Charles Tidd, Owen Brown, and Barclay Coppoc continued their cross-country trek from Chambersburg, enduring rain and snow and subsisting on stolen chickens and apples. They finally found refuge with Quakers in northwest Pennsylvania. Only then did they learn the fate of those they’d left behind in Harpers Ferry, including the news that Owen’s siblings Watson and Oliver were dead, and that Barclay’s brother, Edwin, was alive but imprisoned.
They also learned that two other insurgents had taken flight. Albert Hazlett and Osborne Anderson, who had been posted at the arsenal across the street from the armory, had managed to slip away under cover of darkness or the heavy fighting around the engine house. After finding a boat, they made their way to Maryland and undertook their own hard journey through the mountains to Pennsylvania. The two men were even more conspicuous than the others, since Hazlett was white and Anderson black.
Hazlett, the rugged Kansas veteran who had apologized to Annie Brown for his tobacco spitting at the Kennedy farm, was overcome by exhaustion and blistered feet near Chambersburg and persuaded Anderson to go on alone. Hazlett then hitched a ride in a wagon and reached the Ritner boardinghouse, where he was quickly spotted and pursued. Described as being of “very rough and shabby appearance,” he limped on for another thirty miles before being captured and relieved of a pair of
revolvers and a bowie knife. Like Cook, he was sent to the jail in Charlestown.
Osborne Anderson
Anderson, meanwhile, found shelter among free blacks and abolitionists in Pennsylvania and traveled north from there to his home in Canada. In his long flight from Harpers Ferry, the black fugitive had essentially followed the Underground Railroad from a slave state to a free country. He published a short account soon after his escape, “A Voice from Harper’s Ferry.” Despite the attack’s failure, he wrote, John Brown “dug the mine and laid the train which will eventually dissolve the union between Freedom and Slavery.”
 
 
IN LATE OCTOBER, WITH all of Brown’s men dead, captured, or hiding in the North, the action shifted to the Jefferson County seat of Charlestown—a town extremely hostile to the insurgents now housed in its jail. Illustrative of the mood was the headline in the local
Independent Democrat
on the day of Brown’s capture. THE INFERNAL DESPERADOES CAUGHT, AND THE VENGEANCE OF AN OUTRAGED COMMUNITY ABOUT TO BE APPEASED. The
newspaper’s editor, like many other men in Charlestown, had taken part in the fighting.
Courthouse and street scene, Charlestown, 1859
On the day Brown was brought to jail, advertisements appeared in the local paper offering “Cash for Negroes” and seeking “MEN, WOMEN, BOYS, GIRLS, and FAMILIES, for the Southern markets.” One of the slave dealers named in these ads was John Avis, who also served as the county jail keeper. This was the man now responsible for Brown and his fellow insurgents.
Avis, a Mexican War veteran, had also taken a prominent role in the fighting at Harpers Ferry. He was nonetheless considerate to his new inmates, treating them as he did all others. They were given fresh clothes, allowed to send and receive mail, and quartered close to Avis and his family, who occupied one part of the jailhouse, a two-story brick building with barred windows and a high-walled yard that otherwise resembled a private home. Brown and Aaron Stevens shared a ground-floor room that visitors described as large and well-lit; it was heated by a stove and furnished with chairs and a writing desk.
Diagonally across from the jail stood the county courthouse, a Greek Revival edifice fronted by Doric columns and topped by a bell tower. At the time of Brown’s capture the circuit court for western Virginia was in autumn session; the session would end in another few weeks, not to resume until spring. If the insurgents weren’t tried quickly, they would have to be kept under guard for months, a prospect few Virginians relished. “There is danger on the one hand of a rescue by their friends, and on the other of Lynch-law from the indignant populace,” Governor Wise wrote on October 22.
While he fretted about security, his lead prosecutor, Andrew Hunter, worried that Aaron Stevens might “die of his wounds if we don’t hang him promptly.” The court should observe “all the judicial decencies,” Hunter wrote Wise, “but at double quick time.”
On October 25, exactly one week after their capture, Brown and his men were led between ranks of militiamen from the jail to the cannon-ringed courthouse. The town was swollen with soldiers and journalists. To accommodate the press, the telegraph line had been extended from Harpers Ferry to Charlestown. Fresh developments were quickly transmitted by wire to a national audience; as well, leading artists for publications such as
Leslie’s
and
Harper’s Weekly
provided a pictorial record, at a time when photographs weren’t yet reproduced in newspapers and magazines.
This publicity worked to Brown’s advantage. Even anti-abolitionist papers noted the swiftness of the proceedings and the defendants’ questionable fitness for trial. “There is an evident intention manifested here to hurry the trial through, and to execute the prisoners as soon as possible,” the
Baltimore American
noted upon the men’s first appearance in court. Brown, manacled to Edwin Coppoc, looked “weak and haggard, with his eyes swollen from the effects of the wounds on his head,” while Stevens was so feeble that he fainted during the initial testimony and had to lie on a mattress.
The first day’s session concerned itself with a formality: whether there was enough evidence to call a grand jury. Brown nonetheless seized the moment to speak beyond the courtroom, answering a straightforward legal question with a short speech. “Virginians, I did not ask for any quarter at the time I was taken. I did not ask to have myself spared,” he said. But, having been promised a fair trial by Governor Wise, he
wanted no part in a legal charade that rushed him to judgment without time to prepare or recover from his wounds. “If you seek my blood, you can have it at any moment, without this mockery of a trial,” he said. “I am ready for my fate.”
His words had no practical effect. The court kept up the pace, assigning lawyers, selecting jurors, and summoning witnesses within twenty-four hours of the proceedings’ commencement. But Brown’s defiant, unflinching demeanor, in spite of his wounds and manacles, reinforced the impression he’d made while lying bloodied at the armory. He was “game,” to use Governor Wise’s cockfighting term, a courageous foe who commanded respect. “I have now little to ask,” Brown stated that first day in court, “other than that I be not publicly insulted as cowardly barbarians insult those who fall into their hands.” Brown may have misjudged many aspects of southern society, but he intuitively grasped—and identified with—its chivalric code of honor.
Virginians believed they were holding to their own high standards by conducting a trial in a civilian court, before the eyes of the nation, rather than administering “drum-head justice” in a closed military tribunal. All the legal “decencies” would be duly observed in the Charlestown court. But given the realities of antebellum society in Jefferson County and its surrounds, an impartial hearing for Brown and his men was impossible.
Richard Parker, the presiding judge, was a respected, by-the-book jurist. He was also a slave owner and a former paymaster at the Harpers Ferry armory, who stated in his opening instructions to the jury: “I will not permit myself to give expression to those feelings which at once spring up in every breast when reflecting on the enormity of the guilt” of the defendants, who had invaded “our common country” and shot down Virginians “without mercy.” Then, having given expression to precisely those feelings, he reminded the jurors, most of whom were slaveholding farmers, that the defendants should be given “a fair and impartial trial.”
Like Parker, the two lawyers appointed to defend Brown were competent and highly regarded—and, like him, they were slaveholders. They had also taken part in the military action at Harpers Ferry. The lead prosecutor, Andrew Hunter (another slaveholder), was related by marriage to Fontaine Beckham, the slain mayor of Harpers Ferry. And Hunter’s son, Henry, was one of the gunmen who had burst into the
Wager House to avenge Beckham’s shooting by dragging William Thompson to his death on the Potomac bridge.
As well, Andrew Hunter was a close associate of the governor and shared Wise’s desire to implicate—and, if possible, indict—prominent Northerners. “What we aim at,” Hunter stated, “is not only the destruction of these men whom we have in confinement,” but “higher and wickeder game.”
Virginians’ ferocious hostility to abolitionism was reflected in the far-reaching indictment that Hunter drafted. It charged Brown and his men with first-degree murder, with conspiracy to induce slaves “to make insurrection against their masters,” and with having “traitorously” levied war and rebellion against Virginia. Treason was generally understood as a crime against the nation, and none of the defendants were citizens of the state they’d allegedly betrayed. But Hunter cited Brown’s Provisional Constitution as evidence that he and his men sought to usurp Virginia’s laws and establish a new government. They did so, he added, “not having the fear of God before their eyes, but being moved and seduced by the false and malignant counsel of other evil and traitorous persons and the instigations of the devil.”

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