USA > Connecticut > Litchfield County > Torrington > History of Torrington, Connecticut, from its first settlement in 1737, with biographies and genealogies > Part 40
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I This was a fur cap with a patent-leather visor, which had been bought for him in Chicago in December, 1856, as he came from Kansas to Massachusetts. He wore also a gray overcoat with a cape, a soldier's overcoat which had seen equal service. No shepherd- king or peasant-captain ever went forth to war more plainly clad.
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Kagi and Stevens were at this time at the head of the company, Tidd and Cook having tarried in Maryland to cut the wires. As they approached the Virginia side, the watchman who patrolled the bridge met them and was arrested by Kagi and Stevens, who took him with them to the armory gate, leaving Watson Brown and Stewart Taylor to guard the bridge. The rest of the company proceeded with Brown, in his wagon or on foot, to the armory gate, which was but a few rods from the Virginia end of the bridge. There they halted, at about half past ten o'clock, broke open the gate with the crowbar in the wagon, rushed inside the armory yard, and seized one of the two watchmen on duty. Brown himself, with two men, then mounted guard at the armory gate, and the other fourteen men were sent to different parts of the village. Oliver Brown and William Thomp- son occupied the bridge over the Shenandoah, and there arrested a few prisoners. Kagi, with John Copeland, went up the Shenandoah a half mile or more to that part of the armory called "the rifle works," where he captured the watchmen, sent them to Brown, and occupied the buildings. Edwin Coppoc and Albert Hazlett went across the street from the armory gate and occupied the arsenal, which was not in the armory inclosure.
HARPER'S FERRY.
All this was done quietly and without the snapping of a gun ; and before midnight the whole village was in the possession of Brown and his eighteen men. He then dispatched Stevens, Cook, and others, six in all, on the turnpike towards Charlestown to bring in
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Colonel Washington and some of his neighbors, with their slaves, as has been already said. This was done before four o'clock in the morning. In the mean time, at 1:30 A.M., the rail road train from the west had reached Harper's Ferry, and a negro porter, who was crossing the bridge to find the missing watchman, was stopped by Watson Brown's guard. Turning to run back and refusing to halt, he was shot and mortally wounded by one of the bridge guard, which was now increased to three. This was the first shot fired on either side, and was three hours after the entrance of Brown into the vil- lage. Shots were fired in return by some of the rail road men, and then no more firing took place until after sunrise. Before sunrise the train had been allowed to go forward, Brown and one of his men walking across the bridge with the conductor of the train to satisfy him that all was safe, and that the bridge was not broken down. The work of gathering up prisoners as hostages had also been pushed vigorously, and before noon Brown had more than twice the number of his own force imprisoned in the armory yard. None of his own men were killed or captured until ten or eleven o'clock on Monday morning, when Dangerfield Newby, the Virginia fugitive, was shot near the armory gate. Shortly afterward Stevens was wounded and captured, Watson Brown was wounded, and William Thompson was captured. For from nine o'clock (when the terrified citizens of Harper's Ferry found a few arms and mustered courage enough to use them) until night, the Virginians, armed and officered, had been surrounding Brown's position, and before noon had cut off his retreat into Maryland. During the four or five hours after daybreak, when he might have escaped from the town, he was urged to do so by Kagi, by Stevens, and by others ; but for one reason or another he delayed his movements until it was too late. For twelve hours he held the town at his mercy ; after that he was firmly caught in the trap he had entered, and the defeat of his foray was only a question of a few hours' time. He drew back his shattered forces into the engine-house near the armory gate, soon after noon, but neither his men at the rifle works, nor those ENGINE HOUSE. at the arsenal across the
51
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street, nor his son Owen, on the Maryland side of the Potomac, could join him. He fought bravely, and so did Kagi and his few men on the bank of the Shenandoah, but the latter were all killed or captured before the middle of the afternoon, and at evening, when Colonel Lee arrived from Washington with a company of United States marines, nothing was left of Brown's band except himself and six men, two of whom were wounded, in his weak fortress, and two unharmed and undiscovered men, Hazlett and Osborn Anderson, in the arsenal not far off. His enterprise had failed, and apparently through his own fault.
His own explanation of this failure is characteristic : it was fore- ordained to be so. " All our actions," he said to one who visited him in prison, "even all the follies that led to this disaster, were decreed to happen ages before the world was made." He declared at the same time that had he betaken himself to the mountains, he could never have been captured, " for he and his men had studied the country carefully, and knew it a hundred times better than any of the inhabitants." He ascribed his ruin to his weakness in listen- ing to the entreaties of his prisoners and delaying his departure from the captured town. "It was the first time," somebody reports him as saying, " that I ever lost command of myself, and now I am pun- ished for it." But he soon began to see that this mistake was lead- ing him to his most glorious success, a victory such as he might never have won in his own way. A month after his capture he wrote thus to his old school-master in Connecticut : "I have been a good deal disappointed, as it regards myself, in not keeping up to my own plans ; but I now feel entirely reconciled to that, even ; for God's plan was infinitely better, no doubt, or I should have kept to my own. Had Samson kept to his determination of not telling Delilah wherein his great strength lay, he would probably have never overturned the house. I did not tell Delilah, but I was induced to act very contrary to my better judgment ; and I have lost my two noble boys, and other friends, if not my two eyes. But God's will, not mine, be done." Thus his thoughts took recourse, as often before, to the story and the fate of Samson, whose last victory over the enemies of Israel was more than paralleled by the short and de- feated campaign of John Brown in Virginia.
The story of Brown's capture, of the slaughter of his men, of his own fearless bearing and heroic sayings during his captivity, and of his final martyrdom, " making the gallows glorious like the cross,"
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all this is too familiar to be told here. It has become a part of the world's history and literature, a new chapter added to the record of heroism and self-devotion, a new incident in the long romance which has been for three hundred years the history of Virginia. It was little to the honor of Virginia then ; but so heavy has been the penalty since visited on that state and her people, that we may omit all censure upon what was done. God has judged between them and John Brown, and His judgment, as always, will be found not only just but merciful, since it has removed from a brave and gene- rous people the curse of human slavery. It was for this result, and this alone, that Brown plotted and fought, prayed and died, and even before his death he saw that his prayers would be answered.
Through his grandfather, the revolutionary captain, John Brown was related to Dr. Humphrey, once president of Amherst college, and to the Rev. Luther Humphrey. They were his cousins, and to the latter, not long before his execution, Brown wrote one of those remarkable letters which did so much, during his six weeks' impri- sonment, to change the public opinion concerning him into that which now prevails. His conversation with Senator Mason at Har- per's Ferry and his speech to the court after his conviction are better known than this letter (which, indeed, has seldom been printed), but neither of them gives a nobler image of the " plain heroic magnitude of mind" with which he accepted his fate and explained his course of life. The letter also contains some touches of autobiography which add to its value. It is as follows :
CHARLESTOWN, JEFFERSON CO., VA., 19th November, 1859.
REV. LUTHER HUMPHREY :
MY DEAR FRIEND, Your kind letter of the 12th instant is now before me. So far as my knowledge goes as to our mutual kindred, I suppose I am the first, since the landing of Peter Brown from the Mayflower, that has either been sentenced to imprisonment or to the gallows. But, my dear old friend, let not that fact alone grieve you. You cannot have forgotten how and where our grandfather fell in 1776, and that he, too, might have perished on the scaffold, had circumstances been but a very little different. The fact that a man dies under the hand of an executioner (or otherwise) has but little to do with his true character, as I suppose. John Rogers perished at the stake, a great and good man, as I suppose ; but his doing so does not prove that any other man who has died in the same way was good or otherwise.
Whether I have any reason to " be of good cheer" (or not) in view of my end, I can assure you that I feel so ; and I am totally blinded if I do not really experience that strengthening and consolation you so faithfully implore in my behalf. The God of our fathers reward your fidelity. I neither feel
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mortified, degraded, nor in the least ashamed of my imprisonment, my chain, or near prospect of death by hanging. I feel assured " that not one hair shall fall from my head without the will of my heavenly Father." I also feel that I have long been endeavoring to hold exactly " such a fast as God has chosen." See the passage in Isaiah which you have quoted." No part of my life has been more happily spent than that I have spent here, and I humbly trust that no part has been spent to better purpose. I would not say this boastingly ; but " thanks be unto God, who giveth us the victory through infinite grace."
I should be sixty years old, were I to live to May 9, 1860. I have en- joyed much of life as it is, and have been remarkably prosperous ; having early learned to regard the welfare and prosperity of others as my own. I have never, since I can remember, required a great amout of sleep ; so that I con- clude that I have already enjoyed full an average number of working hours with those who reach their threescore years and ten. I have not yet been driven to the use of glasses, but can see to read and write quite comfortably. But more than that, I have generally enjoyed remarkably good health. I might go on to recount unnumbered and unmerited blessings, among which would be some very severe afflictions, and those the most needed blessings of all. And now, when I think how easily I might be left to spoil all I have done or suffered in the cause of freedom, I hardly dare wish another voyage, even if I had the opportunity.
It is a long time since we met ; but we shall come together in our Father's house, I trust. Let us hold fast that we already have, remembering we shall reap in due time, if we faint not. Thanks be unto God, who giveth us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord. And now, my old, warm-hearted friend, goodby ! Your affectionate cousin,
JOHN BROWN.
A few days before this letter to his cousin Humphrey he had written to another old friend, " I wish I could tell you about a few only of the interesting times I here experience with different classes of men, clergymen among others. Christ, the great captain of liberty as well as of salvation, and who began his mission, as foretold of him, by proclaiming it, saw fit to take from me a sword of steel after I had carried it for a time ; but he has put another in my hand (the sword of the Spirit) ; and I pray God to make me a faithful soldier
I The reference here is to the familiar text in the fifty-eighth chapter of the prophet, who may be said to have foretold Brown as clearly as he predicted any event in Hebrew history : " Is not this the fast that I have chosen ? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke ? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him ; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh ? . . . Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer ; thou shalt cry, and he shall say, Here I am. . . . Thou shalt raise up the foundations of many gene- rations ; and thou shalt be called, The Repairer of the breach, The Restorer of paths to dwell in."
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wherever he may send me." In explanation of this passage it is to be said that during Brown's imprisonment he was often visited by Virginian clergymen and itinerant preachers, desirous of praying with him and of converting him from his errors. One of these afterward said that when he offered to pray with Brown the old man asked if he was willing to fight, in case of need, for the freedom of the slaves. Receiving a negative reply, Brown then said, " I will thank you to leave me alone ; your prayers would be an abomination to my God." To another he said that he " would not insult God by bowing down in prayer with any one who had the blood of the slave on his skirts." A Methodist preacher named March having argued to Brown in his cell in favor of slavery as "a Christian institution," his hearer grew impatient and replied, " My dear sir, you know nothing about Christianity ; you will have to learn its A, B, C; I find you quite ignorant of what the word Christianity means." Seeing that his visitor was disconcerted by such plain speaking, Brown added, " I respect you as a gentleman, of course ; but it is as a heathen gentleman." To these interviews he has alluded in some of his letters of that period, and to a lady who visited him in prison he said, " I do not believe I shall deny my Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, as I should, if I denied my principles against slavery. Why, I preach against it all the time ; Captain Avis knows I do ; " whereat his jailer smiled and said, " Yes."
A citizen of Charlestown, named Blessing, had dressed Brown's wounds while in prison, and had shown him other kind attentions, for which Brown, who was very scrupulous about acknowledging and returning favors, desired to make him some acknowledgment. On one of the last days of November, therefore, in the last week of his life, Brown sent for Mr. Blessing, and asked him to accept his pocket Bible, as a token of gratitude. In this book, which was a cheap edition in small print, much worn by use, Brown had marked many hundred passages (bearing witness more or less directly against human slavery) by turning down the corner of a page and by heavy pencillings in the margin. On the fly leaves he had written this :
To Jno. F. Blessing, of Charlestown, Va., with the best wishes of the un- dersigned, and his sincere thanks for many acts of kindness received. There is no commentary in the world so good, in order to a right understanding of this blessed book, as an honest, childlike, and teachable spirit.
JOHN BROWN.
CHARLESTOWN, 29th November, 1859.
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He had written his own name as owner of the book on the op- posite page, and immediately following it was this inscription :
" The leaves were turned down by him while in prison at Charlestown. But a small part of those passages which in the most positive language condemn oppression and violence are marked."
Except a codicil to his will, and a note to his wife inclosing it, the very last paper written by John Brown was this sentence, which he handed to one of his guards in the jail on the morning of his execution :
CHARLESTOWN, VA., December 2, 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.
A week before this, Brown's friend and supporter in his Virginia campaign, Theodore Parker, had written from Rome, to Francis Jackson in Boston, the same declaration, to the truth of which history has fully borne witness. " A few years ago," wrote Parker, on the 24th of November, 1859, " it did not seem difficult first to check slavery, and then to end it, without any bloodshed. I think this cannot be done now, nor ever in the future. All the great charters of humanity have been writ in blood. I once hoped that of Ame- rican democracy would be engrossed in less costly ink ; but it is plain now that our pilgrimage must lead through a Red sea, wherein many a Pharaoh will go under and perish." So it happened, and not only the Pharaohs, but the leaders of the people perished. Standing on the battle-field at Gettysburg, just four years after the date of Brown's letter to Humphrey (November 19, 1863), Abraham Lin- coln pronounced that immortal eulogy on those who "gave their lives that the nation might live," in which he called upon his hearers to resolve " that these dead shall not have died in vain ; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that gov- ernment of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth,"- echoing in this last period the very words of Parker, so often heard in prayer and sermon from his Boston pul- pit. Not long afterward Lincoln himself fell, the last great victim in the struggle, as John Brown had been its first great martyr. Hence- forth their names will be joined and their words will be remembered together, the speeches of the condemned convict at Charlestown and of the successful statesman at Gettysburg going down to posterity as
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the highest range of eloquence in our time. But those brave men whom Lincoln commemorated in his funeral oration went forth to battle at the call of a great people ; they were sustained by the re- sources and by the ardor of millions. When I remember my old friend, lonely, poor, persecuted, making a stand with his handful of followers on the outpost of freedom, our own batteries trained upon him as the furious enemy swept him away in the storm of their ven- geance, I see that history will justly exalt his fame above that of all the soldiers in the civil war.
It was the mission of John Brown to show our nation the full height and depth of her crime and punishment. It was not till the tragedy of Harper's Ferry and Charlestown, that the inevitable was clearly seen to be inevitable. Lying in his blood, and the blood of his sons, in that fatal town where the blood of his murderers, north- ern as well as southern, has since been so freely shed to atone for his, the brave old soldier of the Lord uttered the oracles which this nation must hear, though she had not sought them. "You had better, all you people of the South, prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. It must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it, and the sooner you are prepared for it, the better for you. You may dispose of me very easily ; I am nearly disposed of now. But this question is still to be settled - this negro question, I mean. The end of that is not yet." Simple words, yet full of the pith and marrow of truth. Long before, he had writ- ten, " I expect nothing but to endure hardness, but I expect to win a great victory, even though it be like the last victory of Sampson." And this American Sampson, " a Nazarite unto God from the womb to the day of his death," died in that "last victory," which he hoped for, and pulled down in utter ruin our whole house of idols.
" O dearly bought revenge, yet glorious ! Living or dying thou hast fulfilled The work for which thou wast foretold To Israel, and now liest victorious Among thy slain, self-killed, Not willingly, but tangled in the fold Of dire necessity; whose law in death conjoined Thee with thy slaughtered foes, in number more Than all thy life had slain before."
Mr. Alcott, the Connecticut Pythagorean, who met John Brown in Concord in 1859, gave this description of him at one of his Bos- ton conversations in 1865 :
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" The only time I saw the Captain, - for so he was then named,- was at a lecture of his, given at our Town Hall. He spoke with the directness that so became him on the Kansas troubles, modestly alluding to the part he had taken in those encounters. Our people heard him with favor He impressed me as a person of surpassing sense, courage and religious earnestness. A man of reserves, yet he inspired a confidence in his integrity and good judgment. He seemed superior to any legal traditions, able to do his own thinking, was an idealist, at least in matters of state, if not on all points of his religious faith. He did not conceal his hatred of slavery, much less his readiness to strike a blow for freedom at the fitting moment. I thought him equal to anything he should dare, the man to dothe deed necessary to be done with the patriot's zeal, the martyr's temper and purpose. And as I looked, it was plain that Nature was interested in his purpose, and had intimated hers in his person. Though but little above medium height, he seemed tall as he rose to speak, and there was something thunderous about his brow that Brackett has caught in his bust. His eyes were remarkable for their depth of grey bravery, as if the lion lay couchant there, and ready to spring at the least rustling, yet they were kindly in repose, though dauntless and determined. I am accustomed to divine men's tempers by their voices ; his was vaulting and metallic, suggesting reserved force and indomitable will. In short, his countenance and frame throughout were surcharged with unmistakable power. At a later date, he cultivated the flowing beard which gave him the soldierly air and port of an apostle. Not far from sixty then, he seemed alert and agile, resolute and ready for any crisis. I thought him the manliest of men, and the type synonym of the Just. Per- haps I felt more disposed to magnify his claims upon my admiration on learn- ing that he came from my native state.
The public murder of John Brown upon a Virginia gallows, fol- lowing closely after his capture of Harper's Ferry, was the first act in the long tragedy, of which the public murder of Lincoln was the final catastrophe :
" Bloodily closed what bloodily began, With slaughter of that far-foreseeing man ; Whose spirit, from the scaffold where he died, Armies and senates could inspire and guide."
Nor is it without the deepest reason, in the fitness of things, that the great heart of the people, in all nations, responding to the voice of Nature, joins the names of Brown and Lincoln in the same throb of gratitude. An American lady, who had known intimately both these martyrs of liberty, was spending a few weeks, soon after the eman- cipation of the Russian serfs, in Moscow, that citadel of ancient op- pression. Entering a poor man's shop one day to purchase the icon or picture of some Russian saint, and giving the shopkeeper to un- derstand that she was an American, he drew her with enthusiasm into a recess of his dingy rooms, where a lamp was continually burn- ing before rude pictures of his American saints, John Brown and
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Abraham Lincoln, placed side by side for his daily worship. He had been a serf, one of the millions whom the noble edict of Alexander set free. Along with the czar and his patron saint, he paid religious honors to the two American emancipators, the echoes of whose good fame had reached him, blended sweetly in one lofty note, as they came borne across seas and lands, from the Potomac to the Moskwa.
It was their deeds, not their words, that reached the ears of the Russian serf, yet how imperishable are the very words of Brown! " What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, com- pared with wisdom and manhood ?" said Henry Thoreau, speaking of John Brown, at the commemoration in North Elba, July 4, 1860. " To omit his other behavior, see what a work this comparatively unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks. He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which, I think, will live longer than that. What a variety of themes he touched on in that short space ! There are words in that letter to his wife, respecting the education of his daughters which deserve to be framed and hung over every mantelpiece in the land." It seems fitting to include in this biography not the short passage thus mentioned, but his whole last letter, which deals with graver matters :
JOHN BROWN'S LAST LETTER TO HIS FAMILY.
CHARLESTOWN PRISON, JEFFERSON CO. VA., Nov. 30, 1859.
My dearly beloved Wife, Sons and Daughters, Every One : As I now begin probably what is the last letter I shall ever write to any of you, I conclude to write to all at the same time. I will mention some little matters particularly applicable to little property concerns in another place.
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