THE EVE OF THE TRAGEDY

John Brown was now fifty-nine years old, and in the last year of his life. He had been disciplined in a terrible school in Kansas, but what he was about to attempt seemed so mad, so reckless, and so suicidally brave that many men of the South claimed, after the attempt, that he was but an insane man, and many of his conservative friends chose to take this view of the case, also.

Yet John Brown was not insane. Coolly, rationally, like a clear-headed strategist, he had figured out the situation. He was an Abolitionist, and was determined to do anything to end the brutal slave-system. Peaceful agitation had been going on for decades, but the North was still apathetic, and the South was only more inflamed and settled in its ideas.

What John Brown felt was needed now, was to make the men of the North and the South realize that there would be no peace in the land while slavery endured. What they must see was that men like himself would rise to break that loathsome peace. He would go to the South, capture the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, in Virginia, and run off all the slaves he could find. He would take the hills about the Ferry, and with a guerrilla band move through the countryside, making slavery a shaky institution.

If he failed, he could but lose his life. He would at least stir the nation on the issue of slavery, and force men to take sides. There was too much neutrality and silence in the land on this issue, this institution that to him was a bloody crime against God and humanity. He could not fail, he felt; success or failure would achieve the same results. Events proved that he was right.

John Brown spent that winter and spring in New England, giving occasional lectures, and meeting all the leading men of the Abolition movement, who collected money for him, though he did not fully reveal his plans to anyone.

George L. Stearns, Gerrit Smith, the philanthropist, Frank B. Sanborn, the Concord school-master and author; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a brave, noble commander in the Civil War, and a charming man of letters afterward; Theodore Parker, one of the greatest and most sincere Christian clergymen produced in America; Samuel G. Howe, and others were among John Brown’s supporters. Thoreau and Emerson he also met at various times, and both were passionate admirers of the stern, pure soldier of liberty.

While their Captain was gathering arms and money for the raid, some of Brown’s men were quartered in a farm-house near Harper’s Ferry, while others were studying the region, and mapping out routes for the attack and the retreat to the hills.

It was a cool fall night, the 16th of October, 1859, when Captain John Brown gave the command his men had been impatiently awaiting for months: “Men, get on your arms; we will proceed to the Ferry.” Says Mr. Villard, at times an eloquent chronicler:

“It took but a minute to bring the horse and wagon to the door, to place in it some pikes, fagots, a sledge hammer, and a crow-bar. The men had been in readiness for hours; they had but to buckle on their arms and throw over their shoulders, like army blankets, the long gray shawls which served some for a few brief hours in lieu of overcoats, and then became their winding sheets. In a moment more, the commander-in-chief donned his old battle-worn Kansas cap, mounted the wagon, and began the solemn march through the chill night to the bridge into Harper’s Ferry, nearly six miles away.

“Tremendous as the relief of action was, there was no thought of cheering or demonstration. As the eighteen men with John Brown swung down the little lane to the road from the farm-house that had been their prison for so many weary weeks, they bade farewell to Captain Owen Brown, and Privates Barclay Coppoc and F. J. Meriam, who remained as rear-guard in charge of the arms and supplies. The brothers Coppoc read the future correctly, for they embraced and parted as men do who know they are to meet no more on earth. The damp, lonely night, too, added to the solemnity of it all, as they passed through its gloom. As if to intensify the sombreness, they met not a living soul on the road to question their purpose, or to start with fright at the sight of eighteen soldierly men coming two by two through the darkness as though risen from the grave.

“There was not a sound but the tramping of the men and the creaking of the wagon, before which, in accordance with a general order, drawn up and carefully read to all, walked Captains Cook and Tidd, their Sharp’s rifles hung from their shoulders, their commission, duly signed by John Brown, and officially sealed, in their pockets. They were detailed to destroy the telegraph wire on the Maryland side, and then on the Virginian, while Captains John H. Kagi and Aaron D. Stevens, bravest of the brave, were to take the bridge watchman and so strike the first blow for liberty. But as they and their comrades marched rapidly over the rough road, Death himself moved by their side.”