Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (23 page)

Brown had made up his mind, however, and by mid-October he had managed to recruit and train twenty-two fighters, some of them free blacks, such as Dangerfield Newby, who hoped to liberate their families still in slavery. More significant, Brown had traded in on his reputation as a hero of anti-slavery militancy to approach prominent Eastern abolitionists such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, George Luther Stearns, Franklin B. Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and Samuel Gridley Howe, and easily hypnotized them with his fire-and-brimstone eloquence into giving him the money he needed to finance the attack on Harpers Ferry. “God has honored comparatively but a very small part of mankind with any possible chance for such mighty & soul-satisfying rewards,” he assured Franklin Sanborn. “I expect to effect a mighty conquest even though it be like the last victory of Sampson.”
⁵¹

Early in the morning of October 17, 1859, Brown and his followers descended upon the Harpers Ferry arsenal, disposed of its two guards, captured the Baltimore & Ohio railroad bridge over the Potomac, and sent squads out to gather up slave recruits. Instead of an army of slave volunteers, two companies of Virginia militia arrived to pin Brown down in the arsenal and begin picking off his men. By midafternoon, Brown and his beleaguered band were barricaded into the arsenal’s brick firehouse. The next morning, a detachment of U.S. Marines under a lieutenant colonel of cavalry named Robert E. Lee assaulted the firehouse and captured or killed all of Brown’s remaining men.
⁵²

It might have been best for the emotional well-being of the entire country had Brown himself died in the assault, but he was only wounded and captured, and subsequently he was put on trial for treason, murder, and insurrection against the Commonwealth of Virginia. The trial gave Brown what he had always really wanted, a public pulpit, and what he revealed about the nature of his plot, the identities of the people who had backed it, and the cold fury with which he was prepared to execute it sent a shiver of horror down the back of the South. As Frederick Douglass wrote afterward, “With the Allegheny mountains for his pulpit, the country for his church, and the whole civilized world for his audience, John Brown was a thousand times more powerful as a preacher than as a warrior.”
⁵³

It could only have conjured up nightmares of Nat Turner, of slave rebellion, of wholesale race war, to listen to Brown’s description of his planned insurrection, especially since it was evident that he had absolutely no regrets about what he had done or what he had planned to do. “I see a book kissed which I suppose to be the Bible,” Brown said at his sentencing, “which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do to them. … I believe that to have interfered as I have done in behalf of His despised poor, is no wrong, but right.” If the court found that sufficient grounds for his execution, then he embraced the verdict with the fervor of a Christian martyr. “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done.” Brown’s trial lasted seven days, during which he behaved himself with amazing composure. He was declared guilty on November 2, 1859, and hanged on December 2 in Charlestown. His last words, written on a slip of paper and handed to a jail guard, Hiram O’Bannon, hung like dark thunderclouds over the American horizon: “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.”
⁵⁴

Brown’s raid caused an eruption in the South. Although Southern leaders publicly congratulated their slaves on their reluctance to rally to Brown’s banner, the behavior of Southern whites showed something entirely different from confidence. “Never has the country been so excited before,” wrote one Georgian in December 1859. “There was great feeling in 1820, but not like the present. The South is deeply stirred.” Governor Andrew Barry Moore of Alabama called for passage of a bill that organized volunteer military units in every Alabama county, authorized borrowing $200,000 to buy weapons, and established scholarships for young Alabama males to attend military schools. Slave codes were toughened, slave patrols were reinstated, and violence against blacks multiplied. White Northerners were particularly suspect, since travelers and strangers from the North could easily turn out to be emissaries of some future John Brown. Nonslaveholding white Southerners were also the target of suspicion. It had not escaped the notice of the planters and their friends in the Southern state capitals that Brown had chosen western Virginia for his raid, a region of comparatively few slaves but full of resentful white yeomen. It was even more disturbing to learn that the Harpers Ferry townspeople and even the militia had been less than enthusiastic in attacking Brown (the Virginia militia had, in fact, declined Lieutenant Colonel Lee’s invitation to make the final assault on Brown). “Watch Harpers Ferry people,” Virginia governor Henry Wise warned his agents in mid-November, and at Brown’s hanging, Wise ordered the local commander to “let no crowd be near enough to the prisoner to hear any speech he may attempt.”
⁵⁵

The ultimate message of John Brown for Southerners was the lesson of distrust for the North, for Brown’s raid was seized upon as argument-clinching proof that the North was only awaiting its opportunity to destroy the South by force, and the discovery of Brown’s private correspondence in his temporary headquarters in Maryland underscored how much support Brown had enjoyed from prominent Northern abolitionists. Northern reactions to Brown’s execution only served to redouble Southern accusations about the real intentions of Northerners. “This mad attempt of a handful of vulgar cut-throats,” wrote Robert Lewis Dabney, “would have been a very trivial affair to the Southern people, but for the manner in which it was regarded by the people of the North.”
⁵⁶

Although Lincoln and other Republicans hastened to wash their hands of any association with Brown, across the North Brown’s steadfast and unrelenting courage at his trial dimmed the idiocy of his raid and allowed him to emerge as a hero, and abolitionism as heroic. In Chicago, church bells were tolled at the hour of Brown’s
execution, Albany fired a 100-gun salute, immense memorial meetings were organized in Philadelphia and New York, and in Boston William Lloyd Garrison praised Brown as a model fit for repeated imitation. “Was John Brown justified in his attempt?” Garrison asked enthusiastically. “Yes, if Washington was in his… If men are justified in striking a blow for freedom, when the question is one of a threepenny tax on tea, then, I say, they are a thousand times more justified, when it is to save fathers, mothers, wives and children from the slave-coffle and the auction-block, and to restore to them their God-given rights.” Garrison was a pacifist by conviction, “yet, as a peace man—an ‘ultra’ peace man—I am prepared to say ‘Success to every slave insurrection at the South, and in every slave country.’”
⁵⁷
No wonder the South saw Brown’s raid as sinister proof that the Union was turning into an embrace with destruction.

The primary casualty of Harpers Ferry was, ironically, the Democratic Party. Persuaded that no Northerners were to be trusted after Harpers Ferry, Southern Democrats now began to demand that their voice have the preponderant weight in determining Democratic policy. Addressing the Virginia legislature in January 1860, Christopher Memminger announced that the South must secure four guarantees in the next election for its continued safety—an equal share for the South of all the Western territories, the disbanding of all anti-slavery societies, the repeal of any laws that obstructed the capture of fugitive slaves, and a ban against any amendment of the Constitution respecting slavery—while others such as Jefferson Davis of Mississippi added to that demands for a national slave code that would prevent interference by a territorial legislature “whether by direct legislation or legislation of an indirect and unfriendly nature… the constitutional right of any citizen of the United States to take his slave property into the common Territories.”
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They fully expected the next Democratic national convention in Charleston, South Carolina, to make these demands part of its national platform.

Douglas and the Northern Democrats were unwilling to acquiesce in a legislative program for the destruction of popular sovereignty in the territories, and certainly not for the purpose of pandering to Southern anxieties about John Brown and slavery. The stakes were made all the higher since Buchanan, bowing to Democratic tradition and weary of the burdens of the presidency, had announced his intention not to seek reelection. This left Douglas as the single most obvious candidate for the Democrats to run for the presidency in 1860. Douglas’s defense of popular sovereignty and his defiance of Lecompton in the teeth of Buchanan’s rage had made Douglas the champion of the Northern Democracy, and the only acceptable presidential candidate to the Northern half of the party. Moreover, Northern Democrats were convinced that only Douglas, and not the Southern fire-eaters, had the national stature to carry both
Northern and Southern states in the presidential election of 1860. Consequently, they regarded Douglas as the only one capable of retaining Democratic control of the presidency and, with that, the entire apparatus of the federal bureaucracy.

The Northern Democracy’s unwillingness to follow the demands of the Southern ultras, and their determination to see Douglas nominated by the Charleston convention, together with Southern demands for renewal of the slave trade and slave protection in the territories, made the destruction of the Democratic Party inevitable. Douglas “held out to us here, when we advocated and supported the Kansas-Nebraska bill… that the Democratic party should be a unit on the question,” complained Louisiana senator Judah P. Benjamin, “but when he goes home, and is pressed in a local contest”—namely, the debates with Lincoln—“and he sees the glittering prize of a seat in this Chamber slipping from his grasp, he tells his people, as he says he has told them a hundred times before,” that “he has, in the Kansas-Nebraska act, obtained … a perfect right to make a free Territory of every Territory in the Union, notwithstanding the decision of the court.”
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When the Charleston convention assembled in April 1860, Southern radicals led by William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama stood for seven days agitating for a pro-slavery platform, and when it became clear that they would not get it from the Douglas men, all of the Deep South delegations except that of Georgia walked out of the convention. The Southern withdrawal made it statistically impossible for Douglas to obtain the necessary two-thirds vote for the nomination, and the shattered convention adjourned, to reconvene in Baltimore on June 18. But when the Democrats met again, the convention split once again, with still more Southern withdrawals, and Douglas, still short of the two-thirds majority of delegates, had to be nominated by the convention as part of a resolution. The same day, the Southern ultras nominated their own candidate, John Breckinridge of Kentucky, for president, thus making the party split a political reality.

Then, as if things were not already bad enough for the Democrats, a compromise movement, composed largely of old-time Southern Whigs and calling down a pox on both Douglas and Breckinridge, met in Baltimore and nominated yet another presidential candidate, the colorless Tennessean John Bell. The end result was that Douglas captured the Democratic nomination for the presidency, but both Southern support and the Democratic Party collapsed under him. “It is an utterly futile and hopeless task to re-organize, re-unite and harmonize the disintegrated Democratic party, unless this is to be done by a total abandonment of principle,” editorialized the
Augusta Daily Chronicle and Sentinel
. “No, sensible people might as well make up their minds to the fact that the Democratic party is dissolved forever, that new organizations must take its place.”
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The Republicans viewed the splintering of the Democrats with glee, for the collapse of Democratic unity between Douglas and Breckinridge, and the unwillingness of Bell’s supporters to vote for either as an acceptable Southern candidate, opened the way to a Republican victory in November. But precisely because victory was now within their grasp, the Republicans instantly began to hesitate about nominating their most ultra-anti-slavery standard-bearers, such as William H. Seward of New York. Seward was a longtime Whig who had once stiffened Zachary Taylor’s back against slave expansion, and who was regarded by Northern Democrats as a reckless radical. Nominating Seward might be perceived as too violent an anti-slavery gesture by the Republicans, costing them the votes of the moderates within the party; even more serious, his championship of the Whig economic agenda in the Senate and as governor of New York might drive Northern and Southern Democrats back into each other’s arms, depriving the Republicans of as much as a quarter of the votes they had won from Democrats in the 1856 presidential campaign.

The Republicans who assembled in Chicago in May 1860 for their national nominating convention would be looking for an anti-slavery man and a Whig economist who had managed to avoid making himself nationally notorious on either of those points, the kind of man Horace Greeley described in a letter to a friend: “I know the country is not Anti-Slavery. It will only swallow a little Anti-Slavery in a great deal of sweetening. An Anti-Slavery man per se cannot be elected; but a Tariff, River-and-Harbor, Pacific Railroad, Free Homestead man
may
succeed
although
he is Anti-Slavery.”
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Greeley thought this might mean the Missouri Whig Edward Bates, but the man who best fit Greeley’s description was already at hand in Illinois in the person of Abraham Lincoln.