Lieutenant Stuart walked slowly across the street, carrying a piece of a white bedsheet tied to a short pole. It was just past mid-morning and the sun’s heat was penetrating into the deep valleys along the rivers, warming the stones without much affecting the pools of colder air in the shrinking shade. The rivers chuckled expectantly, as bullies do when anticipating a cruel joke; aside from that, the town was silent. Thin wisps of smoke still curled from ash-piles that had been houses two short days ago, and a smell of burning clung to everything.
The town was silent; not even birds sang in the trees. Elegant cavalry boots crunched in the dust gravel of Washington Street – or was it Potomac? Stuart had been told but could not remember; his concentration was entirely focused on the taking of slow, short steps, on keeping his crude parley flag clearly visible, and on the door ahead. From the raised curb by the burned-out hulks of buildings to the dirty-gray arsenal walls was at least thirty feet of hard-packed soil and gravel, but to Stuart it seemed wider than the river beyond. He heard the shouts of the sentries, then the running feet of men answering the alarm. The windows in the side of the buildings were tightly shuttered but he had no doubt they could be thrown open at a moment’s notice, freeing the men behind to pour out a fusillade. It was useless to wonder if those brigands were armed, situated as they were in one of the largest stores of muskets in North America.
Just ahead now was his goal, a pair of doors in a rounded archway. His slow, careful steps ceased and he stood for a moment, feeling somewhat foolish. If the brigands did not understand that he had come to negotiate… But there, someone was calling out. Stuart brought his free hand to his ear. “What? I cannot hear you. I have come to offer terms, if you care to hear them.” To the shouted reply Stuart merely cupped his ear again and shrugged. Whether he could actually make out what they were saying was immaterial; the doors must open.
Instead a small window banged open. “Careful, there,” Stuart shouted. “We shall want our factory back unharmed, you know.” That sally brought a brief murmur of nervous laughter from the men inside.
“What do you offer?” A man’s voice, deep and rough. Not a trained speaker.
“I’m not disposed to stand here in the street and be shouted at,” Stuart said equably, pitching his voice a bit softer than usual. “I give you my word of honor as an officer and a gentleman that I am here to offer honorable terms.”
The window slammed shut. Voices argued heatedly. Stuart wished he had brought a canteen of water. Brandy would be better, but that was for later… should there be a later. These fools didn’t seem disposed to do anything but argue amongst themselves. He filled his lungs. “Halloo! You there! If you won’t talk, I’m not standing here in the street!” He turned to go.
As if on cue there was a clang as the crossbar hit the ground and a groan as the doors swung open. The open space of the arsenal was a black mouth beyond, unrelieved save where the sunlight cut wedges of light into the dusty floor. “Come on in, then,” the voice bellowed. A tiny smile concealed by the curls of his beard. Stuart turned and strode forward to the doorframe before halting.
“Now we can hear each other,” he said with casual cheer. “May I ask to whom I should address my comments?”
“First you want to come in, then you don’t,” the voice rasped. A man moved forward a step, not far enough into the doorway to be a target. “If you’ve come to speak, you may do so.”
“He should be taken to B… to the old man,” another argued. Stuart sensed this was the root of the earlier argument.
“I will gladly speak to John Brown,” he said, and noted the ripple of consternation when he said the name. “It is no secret to us who is here, or why. It is no revelation to you that you cannot escape. No slave rebellion has occurred, and no-one is coming to rescue you.”
“Enter, then, and speak us,” the other growled.
“Gladly. But the doors must remain open while I am inside. If they close it will signal that I am your prisoner, and all negotiations will cease. You will be starved out, if no other means will serve.”
“Bah. We fear nothing from you. Enter, and upon my word you shall be safe herein so long as you do not seek to harm us.”
Taking a deep, and as he hoped an unobtrusive, breath, Stuart strode determinedly forward. He was instantly flanked by two men with pistols, but he ignored them, staring straight ahead and allowing his eyes to adjust to the gloom. His escorts hurried him down long halls lined with incomprehensible machinery, bulky things that vanished into the gloom of the ceiling and merged into piles of materials at the verges. Baulks of timber, barrels of chemicals, rosins and tar, piles of cordage and heaps of hemp bagging were seemingly everywhere. At last they approached another double door, this one at the end of the mill house rather than at the side. The short distance to the next building had been secured by crates and stacks of timber; there was no chance a man passing through could be hit by a sniper on the hills above.
The next building was no better lit, for the few windows were tiny and set very high overhead, but even in the dimness Stuart could tell it was a warehouse for the finished product and not a continuation of the rifle works. Rough pine crates were piled head-high or higher, in even blocks separated by cross-passages. Here in the main hall were the personal belongings that had been missing in the rifle works; Brown and his men had forted up first in the warehouse, which lacked the vulnerable ground-level windows of the larger manufactory. Here, crates had been arranged into a crude throne, the splintery pine covered in blankets. Seated on it was a man of slight stature but impressive mien, with burning eyes staring from hollowed sockets above a mouth clenched in determination. Stuart did not doubt for an instant that this was indeed John Brown.
The negotiations were swift; Stuart proposed that the raiders should immediately quit the facility in exchange for their lives and Brown immediately rejected the idea of surrender. Left to themselves, or approached in less public circumstances, Stuart thought the old man’s followers would have been glad to quit the game. But none of them would break ranks with him, and while Stuart despised their cause he admired their stubborn devotion.
The return to the entrance took more time than the discussion. At the door, Stuart removed his hat and wiped his brow with a bright red kerchief. Replacing the hat, he turned to his escort and said, “I suppose this parley to be over. Is that how you see it?” And when the other man nodded, Stuart slugged him as hard as he could, a vicious right jab to the jaw, and threw himself at the doorman. Their surprise lasted just long enough for the Marines to burst from cover and come pounding across the street; just long enough for Stuart to go down in a heap under three other men, hat flying. Scattered shots rang out and Marines went down, but it was not enough to stop their charge into the building. Laying about them with truncheons and cutlasses they quickly overpowered the defenders. The few who escaped were hotly pursued down the lanes between machines.
Once Brown’s men had been removed from the pile atop Stuart, two Marines helped him to his feet. Despite his wounds, including a bullet hole in the muscle of one arm, Stuart was in gleeful good spirits. “We have them!” he boasted. “As neat a trick as I ever did…”
From outside the arsenal came shouts; from inside it the drumming of urgent feet as Marines came back in full retreat, screaming, ‘Fire!” Stuart blocked one side of the doorway while fresh-faced Captain Ruediger stopped the other. “Rally on me,” the Marine cried. “All Marines must rally!” Then Sherman came through the door at a run, flanked by Grant. “Ruediger – take your men outside, find the fire pumps, but leave me a dozen! You men – follow me!” And away they went, back into the gloom of the machinery house, from the end of which could be seen a flickering glow.
Grant paused long enough to grab Stuart by the arm. “Are you injured?”
“No more than a scratch, sir.”
“You’ve done well! Go and get that tended to.”
“I can still run faster than you, sir,” Stuart laughed, and then they were off, the short-legged Grant giving a surprisingly good account of himself. At the end of the building the doors were open into the warehouse beyond, which was now filled with a roaring fire, fueled by the raw pine of the musket crates. Sherman and the Marines were dragging flammables away from the doors while outside another group was dragging hoses to connect to hand-powered pumps. Grant pulled up when he saw the inferno beyond, but Stuart dove in, emerging soon after with the smouldering body of John Brown slung across his shoulders.
In the end, the warehouse was lost but the rifle works and the powder magazine were both saved. Virginia Governor John Letcher arrived by train once the telegraph was restored, and angrily demanded that Brown and his men be turned over to him for trial in a Virginia court. Sherman and Grant resisted his hectoring, insisting instead that the offenses had occurred on federal property and that therefore the federal government should have jurisdiction. A peremptory telegram from Attorney General Douglas decided the issue: Brown, no matter how badly burned, must be removed to Washington, DC for trial. Should he somehow be acquitted, Virginia could then take issue with him over the destruction of private property in Harpers Ferry.
The trial was swiftly arranged and conducted, with Chief Justice Roger Taney presiding and all of the pertinent parties on hand to bear witness. It was soon apparent that Brown had no intention of trying to prove his innocence, instead sitting quietly through the short proceedings. After the sentencing – death – he made a short statement, and was then led back to his cell to await his execution. Other survivors of the raid, barely a dozen, would also be sentenced to die. The sentences were carried out scarcely five days later, the men being hung by the neck until dead from a gibbet erected at the Navy Yard.
In Virginia, Governor Letcher pronounced himself, ‘well satisfied, both with the firmness and promptness of the federal government.’ The reaction to Brown’s raid, trial and death in New England, however, was one of incredulity, revulsion and horror. Said Henry David Thoreau:
A man does a brave and humane deed, and at once, on all sides, we hear people and parties declaring, "I didn't do it, nor countenance him to do it, in any conceivable way. It can't be fairly inferred from my past career." I, for one, am not interested to hear you define your position. I don't know that I ever was or ever shall be. I think it is mere egotism, or impertinent at this time. Ye needn't take so much pains to wash your skirts of him. No intelligent man will ever be convinced that he was any creature of yours. He went and came, as he himself informs us, "under the auspices of John Brown and nobody else."
I wish I could say that Brown was the representative of the North. He was a superior man. He did not value his bodily life in comparison with ideal things. He did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bid. For once we are lifted out of the trivialness and dust of politics into the region of truth and manhood. No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. In that sense he was the most American of us all. He needed no babbling lawyer, making false issues, to defend him. He was more than a match for all the judges that American voters, or office-holders of whatever grade, can create. He could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist.
Scarcely one week later a furtive, cloaked figure was led from a carriage through a side entrance to the White House, bringing with him news of desperate urgency.
