John Brown’s Mistake
The Power of Memory and the Dangers of Violence
When white abolitionist John Brown first plotted to terrorize the South, he may have believed that the black community was ready to join him in carrying out his vision of a slave revolt throughout the South. Brown seized the United States Federal Arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on October 16, 1859, because for him, “slavery was a state of war, and the slave had a right to anything necessary to his freedom.”1 Most blacks, however, did not know what Brown’s plans actually were—they did not know all of what he really intended to do. Some blacks did give Brown their support for what they understood would be “Railroad business on a somewhat extended scale.”2 For many other blacks, however, despite Brown’s dissemblance, using forceful means to help the enslaved escape through the Underground Railroad was viewed as a mistake and was unlikely to succeed. Nevertheless, Brown attempted to seize Harpers Ferry in order to arm those slaves he hoped to encourage to run away from neighboring plantations. The fugitives would then be able to flee to the free states or Canada or remain as part of an armed force to help Brown and his men hold the Allegheny Mountains as a sanctuary of freedom. Brown wanted to replicate this model throughout the South. Brown failed.
A popular perception is that if Brown had had more support from blacks, his plan could have succeeded. But the lack of black participation in Brown’s insurgency in Harpers Ferry was deliberate: blacks and whites had not forgotten nor gotten rid of their anxiety about a potential war between the races. Indeed, the aftermath of Brown’s invasion into Harpers Ferry verifies that the concerns black people had about racial violence and their fear of black extermination were legitimate. Brown’s operation was founded upon certain assumptions girded by white nineteenth-century notions of masculinity that sanctified violence if a person’s rights were trampled upon. Therefore, Anglo-Americans could not respect people, in this case black men, if they were unwilling to fight for their own freedom.3 Yet black men had their own ideas about manhood, which did not sanction exposing the black community, particularly black women and children, to violent retribution. Brown’s invasion of Harpers Ferry did unsettle the institution of slavery in the South, but it was enslaved and free blacks who suffered the consequences of Brown’s actions.
It was not unreasonable for John Brown to initially assume that he had support from the black community to use force to liberate those enslaved. After decades of failed efforts to end slavery in the southern states and to acquire for themselves civil liberties in the North, blacks enslaved and free faced an uncertain future. A rhetoric of black militancy emerged in response to a waning belief that William Lloyd Garrison’s methods of moral suasion would end slavery. Federal laws favoring slaveholders in the southern states continued to circumscribe the lives of all blacks in America. There was a pervasive sense of doom that fostered a growing commitment to forceful resistance among the free black community that also extended to the slave. Although the black community was in a “militant mood” after 1852, for the most part, suggestions by black abolitionists to begin “the formation of military companies for the defense of the state or nation” were responses to the heightened animosity of American whites toward free blacks in the North and South.4 In many ways, black challenges to slavery trumpeted an endorsement of violent confrontation, and inculcating fear of the possibility of slave insurrections was a strategy that black abolitionists used frequently in the decade preceding the Civil War. Yet upon closer examination, for the majority of black leaders in America, the use of force by slaves against slaveholders in the South continued to be equated with catastrophic results.
Indeed, most blacks believed that resistance on the part of those enslaved in the form of insurrection would only end in their destruction. According to Canadian immigrant and black abolitionist Henry Bibb, an enslaved man knows that “public opinion and the law is against him, and resistance in many cases is death to the slave, while the law declares, that he shall submit or die.”5 Solomon Northup, a formerly free traveling musician from Saratoga Springs, New York, was sold into slavery on a plantation in Louisiana. While there, Northup related, “such an idea as insurrection . . . is not new among the enslaved population of Bayou Boeuf. More than once I have joined in serious consultation, when the subject has been discussed, and there have been times when a word from me would have placed hundreds of my fellow-bondsmen in an attitude of defiance. Without arms or ammunition, or even with them, I saw such a step would result in certain defeat, disaster and death, and always raised my voice against it.”6 Another Canadian immigrant, pastor and editor Samuel Ringgold Ward, warned those free blacks who talked of using force in the 1850s that the “sword” or “physical force [is] right enough . . . when it can be successfully wielded, but unwise and suicidal in the case of so few against so many.”7 Despite the rhetoric, Frederick Douglass acknowledged, “We cannot but shudder as we call to mind the horrors that have marked servile insurrections—we would avert them if we could . . . because the overthrow of that tyrant would be productive of horrors.”8
After a purported insurrection attempt in December 1856, the accounts of brutal and deadly retribution by those enslaved living in Dover, Tennessee, confirm such apprehensions.9 According to a former slave living in Tennessee at the time, “Out at Hillsman’s iron work they have shot niggers and chopped their heads off, and stick their heads on poles and throw their bodies in the river. They did everything they could think of. (During a period of fear of slave insurrections).”10 One former slave stated, “I didn’t know I was a slave until once they cut darkies heads off in a riot. They put their faces up like a sign board. They said they was going to burn niggers up by the hundreds. I have heard a heap of people say they wouldn’t take the treatment what the slaves took, but they woulda took it or death. If they had been there they woulda took the very same treatment.”11 Another former slave confirmed that “in 1856 they whipped more colored people to death because they thought the colored people were fixing to rise.”12 According to the Clarksville Jeffersonian, the enslaved feared “a general and indiscriminate slaughter.” One resident noted that some slaves had taken five to six hundred lashes before confessing anything. The Jeffersonian editor asked that “fearful and terrible examples should be made in every neighborhood where the crime can be established, and if necessary, let every tree in the country bend with negro meat. . . . We must strike terror, and make a lasting impression.”13
Nor would free blacks be exempt from violence or the possibility of extermination. Ward, a fugitive slave from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, told his fellow “Beloved Brethren” who are free that he believed that despite white attempts to pass “compulsory laws for your removal . . . you will never be removed as a mass, by force or favor. . . . [T]he destiny of any peoples . . . is almost invariably wrought out . . . on their native soil. This is true,” Ward stated, “even where that destiny is extermination.”14
Benj S. Bebee, a free black from Massachusetts, prophesied that because extermination remained a real possibility in 1852, freedom in his opinion was unachievable in America. Bebee stated, “A mutual fear and prejudice exists between the two races engendering that spirit of antagonism which must ultimately turminate in the entire extirpation of the weaker race. If I could cause my voice to be heard from the Atlantic’s raging billows to the calm bosom of the pacific I would warn (them) my people of the disasterous fate that awaits them and their posterity.”15
This was not mere hyperbole, as northern whites in New York threatened to exterminate blacks in a race war in 1851. According to Frederick Douglass, some whites in Rochester threatened that black abolitionists would be responsible for a race war if they attempted to resist the recapture of fugitive slaves after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was enacted.
It has been observed that colored persons are pricing and buying fire arms . . . with the avowed intention of using them against the ministers of the law, in our city. . . . Whether what our correspondent apprehends be fully justified by the facts or not . . . let the negroes buy as many revolvers as they please—but they may rest assured that the first one that is used by them against our citizens, will be the signal for the extermination of the whole negro race from our midst. If they wish to provoke a war of the races by re-enacting the bloody scenes of Christiana . . . let it be known at once, that our people may be prepared for the enemy.16
According to Douglass, there were “at least” two northern presses in Rochester looking to encourage white violence with “utterly preposterous” charges like these against the black community.17
In 1856 the first female African American editor, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, who also immigrated to Canada from Wilmington, Delaware, noted that extermination remained a threat to blacks in America in her assessment of what would happen if a war ensued between Britain and the United States. In America, Shadd Cary argued, “the colored man is both hated and feared, despised, and respected, ridiculed and praised. . . . He must either take the side of his oppressor and oppose his benefactor, or declare in favor of the latter, and bring down upon his own head, the dreadful ordeal of an extermination massacre. The extermination of the whole colored race in the United States.”18
Shadd Cary also wrote about the deadly consequences of slave insurrections for free black communities in the South: “The papers contain daily accounts from the Sunny South, of Insurrections and rumors of Insurrections, of wholesale terror, hanging, flogging to death etc.” Although Shadd Cary did not dismiss “as unreasonable” the view that insurrections concentrated in one area might “afford relief to the fettered millions,” she believed that it would inevitably result in a massive immigration to Canada. As “signs multiply daily indicating the approach of troublesome times . . . the effect of this horrible state of affairs . . . flogging men to death without trial or the slightest pretext or proof of guilt upon the nominally free colored man of the South, will be very sad—almost too intolerable to be born[e]. . . . As soon as the Spring opens therefore large numbers are anticipated.”19
The threat of violent retribution in response to imagined or real insurrection attempts caused many of the enslaved to flee in terror as well. Shadd Cary stated that “the Underground Railroad Cause has suffered to some extent on account of the rumors of Insurrections and as the numbers escaping . . . are not as numerous as they were [in 1856] last year this time. . . . A resolute young woman . . . stated that about 40 had fled from her neighborhood recently and that the balance had fully resolved to leave in the Spring at all hazard. Whether they [the enslaved] will succeed or not of course remains to be seen.”20
The northern black community well understood the danger of forceful resistance. At a black abolitionist convention in Massachusetts in 1858, antislavery speaker Charles Remond, who was born free into an elite family in Salem, Massachusetts, called for an address to be written to the enslaved telling them to organize an insurrection in the South. Rev. Josiah Henson, the founder of the Dawn settlement for fugitive slaves in Ontario, Canada, immediately challenged him. Henson stated that because “he [Henson] didn’t want to see three or four thousand men hung before their time, he should oppose any such action. . . . If such a proposition were carried out, everything would be lost. Remond might talk, and then run away, but what would become of the poor fellows that must stand? . . . [T]hey had nothing to fight with at the South—no weapons, no education.” Mr. Troy from Windsor, Canada, stated that he “wanted to see the slaves free, for he had relatives who were the property of Senator [Robert] Hunter, of Virginia; but he knew no such step as was now proposed could help them at all. He hoped the Convention would vote the thing down.” Convention delegate Capt. Henry Johnson stated, “It was easy to talk, but another thing to act. He was opposed to insurrection. . . . If we were equal in numbers, then there might be some reason in the proposition. If an insurrection occurred, he wouldn’t fight.” Remond’s motion lost. It was noted that the debate calling for a slave insurrection was “by far the most spirited discussion of the Convention.”21
After decades of failed efforts to end slavery and civil inequalities, blacks, enslaved and free, continued to face an uncertain future that was fraught with their potential destruction and possible extermination. The question, then, is why Brown, a colleague and friend to many black abolitionists, would attempt to initiate a slave insurrection in the South? Perhaps Brown failed to realize that the rhetoric of violence used by the black abolitionist community was merely patterned after national trends that used fear as a strategy, as historian Benjamin Quarles has argued, and that the discourse was without substance.22 While Quarles’s analysis is true to some extent, Brown did know, as did the black community, that violence and black extermination were still real threats to those enslaved in the South and to those blacks living in the North. The evidence suggests that Brown was well informed by the end of the 1850s that the black community North and South would have been unwilling to instigate a violent uprising of the slaves. His insistence on going ahead anyway with his insurrection plans points toward his style of leadership, as well as his and other white radical abolitionists’ racial assumptions.
By the 1840s the shift toward scientific racism, which argued that differences in people were biological, had fostered the development of racial assumptions about Europeans, Africans, and their diasporic counterparts.23 Nineteenth-century ethnologists such as Charles Caldwell, Josiah C. Nott, and Samuel G. Morton questioned whether there was an inherent hierarchy in the different races, and, if so, if the lower or inferior races could become equal or civilized like the higher races of man, namely, the Anglo-Saxon race.24 White southerners embraced the supposed modern scientific theories that claimed that peoples of African descent were racially inferior and could not become civilized, as these theories supported the institution of enslavement. These imagined ethnological differences were also couched and accepted by nineteenth-century northerners, however, and their acceptance of these ideas has been described as “romantic racialism,” which attaches, at some level, positive value to ideas its subjects would have deemed offensive (i.e., that blacks were childlike or docile). The ethnic chauvinism of northern humanitarians was a form of racism that, despite historical evidence to the contrary, sought to rationalize and glorify Anglo-Saxon aggression.25 John Brown and the six men who supported him financially and organizationally (Franklin Sanborn, Theodore Parker, Samuel Gridley Howe, Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns) held “common social assumptions” about enslavement and black people that united them to Brown’s cause.26 Their racist ideas about black men informed how they went about attempting to disrupt slavery in the South and why Brown, despite objections from the black community, went forward with his plans.
The six men who supported Brown, known historically as the Secret Six, believed that “slave violence would destroy” slavery.27 They shared the belief that a slave insurrection would demonstrate that black men were men and, therefore, illegitimately held in bondage. More importantly, all six members “felt that a willingness to fight for freedom was the core of Anglo-American political, social, and economic life” and that an “insurrection would be the slave’s first step toward assimilation of a value system that emphasized individualism” and thus, as François Furstenberg points out, make them “worthy of freedom.”28 An insurrection would change white attitudes about the black race. It would encourage a core set of values among blacks that were quintes-sentially Anglo-American.
The Secret Six, however, had concerns about Brown’s assertions that the black population in the South would join him in a massive insurrection, because they did not believe that the enslaved would fight their oppressors.29 Secret Six member Theodore Parker’s lack of faith was based on his romanticized belief that “the African is the most docile and pliant of all the races of men.” Parker attempted to rewrite the history of enslavement by stating that the African race, unlike the Caucasian, “has so little ferocity: vengeance . . . is exceptional in his history. In his barbarous savage, or even wild state, he is not much addicted to revenge; always prone to mercy . . . so little warlike. Hence is it that the white men have kidnapped the black, and made him their prey.”30 The notion of the African race being weak and helpless, almost effeminate, is directly opposite to what some southerners knew to be true: many Africans were and had always been great warriors. Parker goes on to state that it was because the “African is not very good with the sword and the AngloSaxon is something of a master” that antislavery societies had not advocated using force. If blacks had been able warriors like white men, Parker argued, “the stroke of an axe would have settled the matter long ago. But the black man would not strike.”31
The notion that black men needed white men to lead them into battle was pervasive among the Secret Six and their allies. James Redpath, a close friend and supporter of Brown, believed that the “Underground telegraph,” which linked the enslaved to each other on “hundreds of plantations,” would facilitate a “formidable insurrection directed by white men.”32 Although Thomas Higginson was the only one of the six who held that African slaves were warriors, he believed that because of slavery, the African had lost “what he had once been and what he may be again.”33 It is clear, however, that other white supporters of Brown did not entirely believe these prevailing ideas. John Henry Kagi, Brown’s advisor and second-in-command, wanted to participate so that he could be “directing and controlling the negroes to prevent some of the atrocities that would necessarily arise from the sudden upheaval of such a mass as the Southern slaves.”34 Kagi is talking about atrocities against whites, demonstrating that despite the prevailing ethos of what I call romantic racism, he nevertheless held assumptions that the ferocity of black men in battle would need to be controlled.
Brown and other white radical abolitionists discounted the atrocities that the black community would face if they were to initiate an insurrection in the South. Brown stated that “it would be better that a whole generation should pass off the face of the earth—men, women, and children,—by violent death” than live without full freedom. Brown also believed that black men lacked the manly ideal or black manhood, which aligned with prevailing notions of white romantic racism. Brown stated: “When they stand like men, the nation will respect them. . . . [I]t is necessary to teach them this.” In his serial essay, Sambo’s Mistake, Brown lectured to black men that they were wrong to expect “to secure the favor of whites by tamely submitting to every species of indignity, contempt, and wrong, instead of nobly resisting their [whites’] brutal aggressions from principle, and taking [their] place as men, and assuming the responsibilities of a man, a citizen, a husband, a father, a brother, a neighbor, a friend,—as God requires of every one.”35
James Redpath expressed similar sentiments that rebuffed the consequences of black extermination: “I dismiss the argument that we have no right to encourage insurrections. . . . [I]f all the slaves in the United States—men, women and helpless babes—were to fall on the field . . . if one man only survived to relate how his race heroically fell, and to enjoy the freedom they had won, the liberty of that solitary negro, in my opinion, would be cheaply purchased by the universal slaughter of his people and their oppressors.”36
Northern white men were not the only ones to condone the death of children and genocidal violence for the sake of liberty and freedom—white women did also. Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, claimed that she was certain that there was not “a mother among us all . . . who could ever be made to feel it right that that child should ever be a slave, not a mother among us all who would not rather lay that child in its grave.”37 When white abolitionist Lucy Stone visited fugitive slave Margaret Garner a few years later, Stone “told her that a thousand hearts were aching for her, and they were glad that one child of hers was safe with the angels.” Garner’s “only reply,” as an enslaved woman who murdered her infant child after being recaptured by her owner in Ohio, “was a look of deep despair—of anguish such as no word can speak.” From Stone’s point of view, Garner’s actions were quintessentially American:
I thought the spirit she manifested was the same with that of our ancestors . . . the spirit that would rather let us all go back to God than back to slavery. . . . Rather than give her little daughter to that life, she killed it. . . . That desire had its roots in the deepest and holiest feelings of our nature—implanted alike in black and white by our common Father. With my own teeth would I tear open my veins, and let the earth drink my blood, rather than wear the chains of slavery.38
White radical abolitionist calls for using violence as a way of asserting black manhood drew upon a long history. It was a history defined by violence, central to how Europeans colonized America and how, from their ethnological point of view, Anglo-Americans became the superior race. If, as Parker believed, blacks had been better fighters, then enslavement would have ended long ago. It was a matter of who was stronger, who was willing to fight to the death for the sake of liberty and freedom, to end what Parker called “this Crime against Humanity.”39 The black community was well aware of the racism that questioned their courage and ability to fight without white leaders. They had, however, their own understanding of manhood and freedom.
By the end of the 1850s, African Americans were at the forefront of creating their own solutions to ending slavery and achieving full freedom in America. In doing so, they asserted their own ideas, which were also prevailing European notions, about the protection of their women and children in violent conflict. Some black leaders in response to challenges by white men trumpeted superficial endorsements of insurrections. Most blacks, however, continued to believe that an insurrection would be catastrophic because they knew that the rules of standard warfare did not apply to them. They were cognizant of what happened to Native Americans and thus worked to forge a different path, hoping for a different outcome than that which they perceived had happened to aboriginal people in America. Yet blacks in the 1850s constantly had to defend their decision not to encourage those enslaved to use force as a strategy for liberation.
Black abolitionists, well aware of the negative discourse condemning black manhood, contested what they viewed as northern liberal-republican propaganda, which argued that slaves did not rebel because they were happy, they were too oppressed, or they lacked courage. In an editorial, Douglass noted how the value of nonviolence as a strategy had changed and how it was currently used against the black community to support white prejudice:
That submission on the part of the slave, has ceased to be a virtue, is very evident. . . . [I]nstead of being set to the credit of the poor sable ones, [it] only creates contempt for them in the public mind, and becomes an argument in the mouths of the community, that negroes are, by nature, only fit for slavery; that slavery is their normal condition. . . . This approach must be wiped out, and nothing short of resistance on the part of colored men, can wipe it out. Every slave-hunter who meets a bloody death in his infernal business, is an argument in favor of the manhood of our race.40
Although Douglass urged fugitive slaves to resist recapture, he did not call for an insurrection of those enslaved.
Solomon Northup argued that slaves were just as invested in becoming free as white men were, but they intentionally kept these ideas to themselves. The enslaved had “secret thoughts” that they “dare not utter in the hearing of the white man.” Moreover, whites like Brown were not correct in thinking that the enslaved would not fight. Northup argued: “They are deceived who flatter themselves that the ignorant and debased slave has no conception of the magnitude of his wrongs. They are deceived who imagine that he arises from his knees . . . cherishing only a spirit of meekness and forgiveness. A day may come—it will come . . . when the master in his turn will cry in vain for mercy.”41
The abolitionist and fugitive slave Rev. John Sella Martin argued that the idea that black men were not good warriors capable of fighting for their freedom espoused by whites like Parker was absurd. Martin asserted that the history of warfare in America demonstrated that these assumptions were false: “I know very well that in this country, white people have said that the negroes will not fight; but I know also, that when the country’s honor has been at stake, the dire prejudice that excludes the colored man from all positions of honor, and all opportunities for advancement, has not interfered to exclude him from the military.”42 Whites like Brown and the Secret Six might claim that blacks made poor soldiers, Martin argued, but the participation of blacks in the military throughout American history proved that this theory was without foundation.
As New York abolitionist James McCune Smith saw it, the problem was that “our white brethren cannot understand us unless we speak to them in their own language; they recognize only the philosophy of force. They will never recognize our manhood until we knock them down a time or two; they will then hug us as men and brethren. That holy love of human brotherhood which fills our hearts and fires our imagination, cannot get through the—in this respect—thick skulls of the Caucasians, unless beaten into them.”43 In McCune Smith’s view, many white Americans had lost faith in the strategy of nonviolence. They had no other vision of how the end of slavery would occur but for blacks to fight against whites as their oppressors.
For most black Americans, however, facilitating a slave insurrection across the South would have been antithetical to their understanding of manhood. Protecting their families was of singular importance to free and enslaved black men. According to John S. Jacobs, Harriet Jacobs’s brother, “To be a man, and not to be a man—a father without authority—a husband and no protector—is the darkest of fates. Such was the condition of my father. . . . The knowledge that he was a slave himself, and that his children were also slaves, embittered his life, but made him love us the more.”44 The former slave Andrew Jackson of Kentucky recalled that this concern extended to black women as well: “Although my master seemed to regard a female slave little better than a beast, nature taught me to consider the impropriety of her treatment, and I could not endure it. Whatever men may think of us, we are not destitute of the feelings of men.”45 Black abolitionist and author Rev. James C. Pennington revealed that “they [black men] are also conscious of the deep and corrupting disgrace of having our wives and children owned by other men . . . who have given us no flattering encouragement to entrust that of our wives and daughters to them.”46 Pennington, who was enslaved in the western part of Maryland before running away to Brooklyn, New York, goes on to say that another “evil of slavery that I felt severely about” was that he witnessed overseers who “seem to take pleasure in torturing the children of slaves, long before they are large enough to be put at the hoe, and consequently under the whip.”47 Fugitive slave Henry Bibb said that the abuse of his infant child led him to escape to find “a better home” for his family.48 And as much as Lucy Stone may have sided with Margaret Garner’s actions, one must not overlook Margaret’s “deep despair” at having killed her child.49 According to her husband, Robert, he would have stopped her. Robert “saw that his wife had cut the throat of her girl Mary, three years old, from ear to ear . . . and was making a dash at his boy Samuel. He sprang to his rescue, calling on her to desist and received part of the blow himself.”50
Moreover, the nexus of unfettered retribution and resistance to enslavement linked the black community to Native Americans who fought back fiercely against white encroachment. The near annihilation of Native Americans provided an important example to the black community of what they might experience as racialized others in their own struggle for freedom. Austin Steward recollected that he met up with an old Indian in making his escape to freedom. When “the kind-hearted old Indian repeated to me the story of his wrongs, it reminded me of the injustice practiced on myself, and the colored race generally. . . . I have often wondered, when looking at the remnant of that once powerful race, whether the black man would become extinct and his race die out, as have the red men of the forest; whether they would wither in the presence of the enterprising Anglo-Saxon as have the natives of this country.”51 William J. Wilson, black abolitionist and editor of the Anglo-African Magazine who used the pseudonym “Ethiop,” wrote an essay entitled “What Shall We Do with the White People?” in which he also seemed concerned that what happened to Native Americans would happen to black Americans:
They [white people] came to this country in small numbers and began upon a course of wrong-doing. The Aborigines were the first victims. They robbed them of their lands, plundered their wigwams, burned their villages and murdered their wives and children. Thus, they advanced, until now they have almost the entire possession of the continent. . . . We find room enough for us [blacks] in this country . . . yet they would elbow us off what we possess, to give them room for what they cannot occupy. We want this country, say they, for ourselves alone.52
Frederick Douglass argued: “The negro is sometimes compared with the Indian, and it is predicted that, like the Indian, he will die out before the onward progress of the Anglo-Saxon Race. I have not the least apprehension at this point . . . with the negro. There is a vitality about him that seems alike invincible to hardship and cruelty. Work him, whip him, sell him, torment him, and he still lives, and clings to American civilization.”53
Black people, Dr. John Rock claimed, were “often insulted with the assertion, that if we had the courage of the Indians or the white man, we would never have submitted to be slaves.”54 Rock, an African American physician and lawyer in Boston, pointed out that those who believe that slaves should rebel against their masters were not looking at the reality of the situation, because “for a man to resist where he knows it will destroy him, shows more foolhardiness than courage.” For Rock, it was clear that “nothing but a superior force keeps us down,” the same force that had decimated Native American people. Those “white Americans [who] have taken great pains to prove that we are cowards,” white men who say that they would fight if they were in the slaves’ place, Rock argued, are not being honest, especially knowing the “true character of the Anglo-Saxon race.”55
Observations about the plight of Native Americans by black Americans shed light on the black community’s objectives and fears, in that they hoped to abolish slavery and to remain alive in America. Black men loved their wives and their children. The thought of engaging in an unwinnable war with whites in the South was just not an option that most black men viewed seriously. If nothing else, enslaved and free men could protect their wives and children from suffering any violence emanating from their own actions. And many in the black community did forewarn John Brown that arming slaves to enable them to escape or arming them to insurrect against their enslavement would not create the outcome of transforming the slave South that he envisioned.
Thus, despite the opinion of whites, blacks overwhelmingly rejected John Brown’s plan to arm those enslaved in the South and thereby “rous[e] the nation.”56 As black entrepreneur Edward V. Clark argued in a meeting at the Zion Church in New York City about the use of force, “the principle of dying before your time is much better in theory than in practice. . . . [Y]ou see it would be a loosing [sic] game, you see clearly we lose.”57 Although Brown might have believed at the onset that he had the support of a few members of the black community, he could not have believed that most supported his efforts. Nor could he know that the enslaved supported his ideas at all, as he intentionally did not adequately inform them. Indeed, Brown’s penchant for secrecy and perhaps even deceptive practices of telling different stories about what his mission was to be would become highly problematic for him. Whether Brown changed his plans at the last moment or kept secret his real intentions will never be known. For the black community, arming the enslaved to run away or to insurrect was fraught with risk. Whichever version Brown chose to present to them, many blacks assessed that Brown would face insurmountable challenges that they astutely believed he was not prepared to overcome.
When Brown “unfolded his plan” to abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet nearly two years before Harpers Ferry, Garnet rejected it. According to Rev. J. Sella Martin, a fugitive slave from Alabama, Garnet told him tactfully, “Sir, the time has not come yet for the success of such a movement. Our people in the South are not sufficiently apprised of their rights, and of the sympathy that exists on the part of the North for them; our people in the North are not prepared to assist in such a movement in consequence of the prejudice that shuts them out. . . . The breach between the North and the South has not yet become wide enough.”58 Whether Brown told Garnet, a fugitive slave from Maryland, of his intention to incite an armed slave insurrection and seize the armory at Harpers Ferry is unclear. But he may have, since Brown helped pay for the publication of Garnet’s famous speech “An Address to the Slaves of the United States,” in which Garnet advocated forceful resistance in 1848.59 Yet Garnet specifically did not call for an insurrection in his address.60 For although Garnet cited Nat Turner as a patriot who followed in the footsteps of the “martyr” Denmark Vesey, he told the enslaved not to follow their unsuccessful strategy of violence in liberating themselves from enslavement. Garnet set the actions of Turner and Vesey apart from what he advocated in his address by stating that he did not advise the enslaved to use the approach of those “noble men” who had tried to “blast the trumpet of freedom” to no avail. An often-missed but important aspect of Garnet’s speech is his unambiguous warning: “We do not advise you to attempt a revolution with the sword, because it would be inexpedient. Your numbers are too small, and moreover the rising spirit of the age, and the spirit of the gospel, are opposed to war and bloodshed.”61
Garnet’s biggest concern was whether northerners would aid the enslaved in the South in any confrontation between blacks and whites. He insisted that the enslaved would need to know with certainty that northern assistance was forthcoming in order for them to participate, something that Brown repeatedly argued as unnecessary. Brown had to realize that he could not guarantee that the northern states would support those enslaved fighting for their freedom and that the North would not intercede at the behest of the South.
The black community found proof of the continuing alliance between the North and the South in the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which effectively repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise. Congress, motivated by industrial expansion and plans for a transcontinental railroad, allowed for the territories of Nebraska and Kansas to determine the status of slavery when they were admitted as states to the Union. As the Free-Soilers and proslavery citizens of the North fought each other over the issue of slavery, the Republican Party was born. The newly formed party, however, refused to take up the issue of civil equality for free blacks. Equally disturbing to black abolitionists was the party’s position on slavery, which allowed slavery to remain where it existed. Republican support for colonization was also troubling to the black community, as calls for black removal continued to have salience among northerners and southerners alike. And the Dred Scott case in 1857, which determined that black people were not citizens and therefore held no constitutional rights in America, also signaled the rise of antiblack sentiment in America. Thus, there was reasonable uncertainty in the black community about the noninterference of northern states in suppressing any organized confrontation between master and slave, essential in any legitimate call for action from Garnet’s point of view.
When Frederick Douglass found out that Brown intended to capture Harpers Ferry, he also rejected the plan because it would be dangerous to the black community. Douglass told Brown that “to me, such a measure would be fatal to all engaged in doing so. It would be an attack upon the federal government and would array the whole country against us.” Douglass discovered that Brown “had completely renounced his old plan, and thought that the capture of Harper’s Ferry would serve as notice to the slaves that their friends had come, and as a trumpet to rally them to his standard.” Incredulous that Brown thought he would be successful, Douglass recalled: “I looked upon him with some astonishment, that he could rest upon a reed so weak and broken, and told him that Virginia would blow him and his hostages sky-high, rather than that he should hold Harper’s Ferry an hour.” Douglass admitted that over the years “once in a while” Brown “would say he could, with a few resolute men, capture Harper’s Ferry, and supply himself with arms belonging to the government at that place, but he never announced his intention to do so. . . . I paid little attention to such remarks.” Nevertheless, during Brown’s meeting with Douglass in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, they talked “long and earnest . . . Brown for Harper’s Ferry, and I against it; he for striking a blow which should instantly rouse the country, and I for the policy of gradually and unaccountably drawing off the slaves to the mountains, as at first suggested and proposed by him.”62 According to Douglass, “The taking of Harper’s Ferry was a measure never encouraged by my word.” In his view, he was “ever ready to write, speak, publish, organize, combine, and even conspire against slavery, when there is a reasonable hope for success.” To take on something “so wild and rash as this,” as Brown’s plan, was not Douglass’s style.63 Late nineteenth-century civil rights activist and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois noted that Douglass “knew, as only a Negro slave can know, the tremendous might and organization of the slave power. . . . Only national force could dislodge national slavery. As it was with Douglass, so it was practically with the Negro Race.”64
Charles H. Langston, a leader of black supporters of Brown in Cleveland, expressed that he was against Brown’s plan to capture Harpers Ferry. Langston did not think that Brown had enough men to succeed65 At Harpers Ferry, although he had hoped for more supporters, Brown had only twenty-one men, sixteen whites and five blacks. Statistically, Harpers Ferry would have been the least plausible place to begin an insurrection in the South, as there were not many slaves living in the six counties around the town. The 1860 census data show that there were 115,449 whites, 9,891 free negroes, and 18,048 slaves in the area, most of whom lived in the southern part of Maryland and Virginia. In Harpers Ferry there were nine whites for every one black person, slave or free.66 Langston later acknowledged that he had the “deepest sympathy with the Immortal John Brown.” However, Langston couched his view of the wrong-headedness of a slave insurrection by stating that to not view Brown as a hero would be “in my opinion more criminal than to urge the slaves to open rebellion,” which was what Brown intended. Langston also noted that after Harpers Ferry, the South saw “in every colored man the dusky ghost of Gen. Nat Turner, the hero of Southampton,” a repercussion with potentially deadly consequences.67
By 1859 Rev. Jermain W. Loguen’s enthusiasm had also faded away, and he was no longer willing to participate. According to John Brown Jr., one of Brown’s two sons who participated in Harpers Ferry, Loguen was now lukewarm toward “our cause.”68 Loguen’s lack of support would have disappointed Brown, as Loguen’s call for violent action in his published letter to Frederick Douglass and his participation in aiding the fugitive slave Jerry’s rescue in Syracuse, New York, had inspired Brown to seek his help69 Formerly enslaved in Tennessee, Loguen professed in 1853, “I believe that slavery has yet to be done with, whether by agitation or bloodshed. I sometimes think that I care not which. . . . I have an old grey mother, and sisters, and brothers, all in slavery at this time. . . . I would . . . rather today hear them swimming in blood and nobly contending for their rights, even at the cost of their lives, than have them remain passive slaves all the rest of their days.”70 These were just the sorts of sentiments that would have appealed to Brown, but this singular espousal urging internecine violence at the cost of his family’s lives was mere rhetorical speech inspired by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Loguen’s biography in 1859 indicates that he had extremely close ties with his family, especially his mother: “I value my mother, brother, and sister . . . more than my own life.”71 And he made consistent references to his “dear mother and sisters and brothers,” whom he intended to see liberated from enslavement: “I mean to embrace you again, mother.”72 Loguen certainly did not want his family to die in violent conflict against their enslavers, as Brown might have thought. But Loguen would have supported the idea of facilitating the escape of greater numbers of those enslaved, and thus he introduced Brown to Harriet Tubman, giving Brown access to the black community in Chatham, Canada, in 1858.
Since the fall of 1857, Loguen had been actively engaged in and a leader of the Underground Railroad in Syracuse, New York. Loguen “devoted himself wholly to this humane work” and was responsible for shepherding hundreds of fugitive slaves “to Canada or to places of safety on this side of the St. Lawrence” River.73 Again, we cannot know which plan Brown told Loguen, but by the time Brown was ready to invade Harpers Ferry, Loguen had found a different strategy, one with which he could “advance the movement . . . where he could do something for humanity.”74 Thus, the three black men apparently closest to Brown—Douglass, Loguen, and Garnet—did not support him. Nor did they intend to participate in Brown’s plan for attacking Harpers Ferry in order to instigate an insurrection.75
Although Brown “strenuously” insisted that no women were to be told of his plan, Mary Jones, the wife of black abolitionist John Jones, knew all about it and was against it as well. Brown and Douglass stayed at her house in Chicago many times in 1858. As an active participant in the Underground Railroad, Mary had some knowledge of the slave South, and she “told Mr. Jones I thought he [Brown] was a little off on the slavery question and that I did not believe he could ever do what he wanted to do. The next morning I asked him [Brown] if he had family.” Mary’s attempt to prod Brown to think beyond the men he hoped to recruit suggests that she had serious doubts about the viability of Brown’s plan and concerns about what might happen to the women and children caught in the middle of his battle against slavery: “I thought to myself, how are you going to free them?” Her husband, John, a prosperous black tailor and Underground Railroad conductor, held a similar opinion. When Brown dropped by their house “he would talk about slavery and say what might be done in the hills and mountains,” but Mary recalled that her husband “told him that he did not believe his ideas would ever be carried out.”76
Chicago’s leading Underground Railroad conductor, George DeBaptiste, also believed Brown’s plan would fail. Although DeBaptiste’s obituary cited him as a supporter “who helped arrange the plan” for Brown’s insurrection in Harpers Ferry, DeBaptiste actually “disapproved” of Brown’s scheme. De-Baptiste wanted Brown instead to plant gunpowder, whereupon “fifteen of the largest churches in the South would be blown on a fixed Sunday.” De-Baptiste, a free black man born in Fredericksburg and living in Richmond, Virginia, in the 1830s, cited “the Nat Turner insurrection in 1831, by which fifty-three white lives were lost,” as his model of what was required to shake up the South. It was the cost of white lives that led “the next Virginia legislature to consider a bill for the gradual emancipation of the slaves, which lost by only two votes.” Brown, however, objected to DeBaptiste’s plan “on the score of humanity . . . the intention being not to shed blood unless it became absolutely necessary.” For DeBaptiste, Brown’s plan did not go far enough. And this, DeBaptiste prophesied, would “perhaps cause the loss of a million lives before the troubles likely to ensue were ended.”77
When Brown went to Chatham to recruit men for his effort, some black and white Canadians thought that Brown’s plan was doomed to fail as well. To enable the enslaved to “take [their] liberty and to use arms in defending” their right to do so was risky business that required not only the will but also the means.78 After meeting with Brown in April 1858, Martin R. Delany called and helped organize a convention to introduce Brown to the broader antislavery community. Brown believed that Canadian blacks were different from northern free blacks or those still enslaved in the South who, according to him, were afraid to fight.79 Yet his distinctions were false ones, as many of the men Brown talked to were fugitive slaves who also had sufficient experience with the South to know whether Brown’s scheme would be successful.80 There was some support for the idea of instigating a massive runoff of enslaved people, but there was no consensus during the Chatham convention or within the broader black and white communities that Brown’s plan was a good one. For starters, two powerful white members of the Canada West community “declined to attend.” George Brown, the highly influential editor of the Toronto Globe, and Rev. W. King, the founder of the Buxton settlement, just south of Chatham, “doubted the wisdom of Brown’s plan.” Perhaps King’s support and “influence would have been of weight with his colored friends and former pupils,” but black Canadians questioned the viability of Brown’s plan on their own.81
During one of the Chatham meetings, the black members in attendance “discussed the chances of the success or failure of the slaves rising to support the plan proposed,” and gun shop owner and former slave James Monroe Jones remembered evidence of their skepticism. Jones recalled that he “expressed fear that he [Brown] would be disappointed because the slaves did not know enough to rally to his support. The American slaves . . . were different from those of the West India Island of San Domingo, whose successful uprising is matter of history, as they . . . were not so overawed by white men.”82 The Saint-Domingue revolution was the model that Brown studied in making and developing his plan; ironically, it was a revolution led by blacks. First and foremost, Jones was concerned that Brown insisted on keeping the enslaved in the dark up until the last minute. Clearly, Brown did not understand, according to fugitive slave William Wells Brown, that slaves viewed “every white man as an enemy.”83 Indeed, J. Sella Martin argued that the enslaved “have learned this much from the treachery of white men at the North, and the cruelty of the white man at the South, that they cannot trust the white man, even when he comes to deliver them.”84 Second, the ratio of whites to blacks in the slave South and the nation made insurrections implausible as a strategy for blacks in Canada. Jones went on to say that “one day in my shop I told him how utterly hopeless his plans would be if he persisted in making an attack with the few at his command.” Brown made it clear to Jones, however, that he was ready to “sacrifice himself,” as did Jesus Christ.85
According to James Jones, some convention members questioned whether the time was right for “making the attack. . . . Some advocated that we should wait until the United States became involved in war with some first-class power; that it would be next to madness to plunge into a strife for the abolition of slavery while the Government was at peace with other nations.” Again, Brown dismissed the concerns of black leaders. It is important to point out, however, that members attending the Chatham convention were not concerned about whether Brown should take over the federal armory at Harpers Ferry. According to Jones, there was no mention of taking Harpers Ferry, as “John Brown never, I think . . . communicated his whole plan” to the Chatham convention.86
Martin Delany also affirmed that those participating in the Chatham convention did not know of Brown’s plan to invade Harpers Ferry. According to Delany, “The idea of Harper’s Ferry was never mentioned or even hinted. . . . Had such been intimated, it is doubtful of its being favorably regarded.”87 Nevertheless, Delany supported the idea of a slave runoff to Kansas, which Brown proposed, and he, along with thirty-four other black men, signed Brown’s “Provisional Constitution for the Proscribed and Oppressed People of the United States” and his “Declaration of Liberty.”88 Convention members only heard what was contained in these two documents, as Brown had been unable to secure copies for distribution. The length of the documents made it impossible for those attending the convention to engage with the specifics of it.89 It is significant, however, that Delany was adamant that the preamble, which acknowledged that blacks were at risk of extermination, stand “as read”:
Whereas slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion—the only conditions’ of which are perpetual imprisonment and hopeless servitude or absolute extermination. . . . Therefore, we, citizens of the United States, and the oppressed people who, by a recent decision of the Supreme’ Court, are declared to have no rights which the white man is bound to respect . . . ordain and establish for ourselves the following Provisional Constitutional and Ordinances, the better to protect our persons, property, lives, and liberties, and to govern our actions.90
Still, Delany did criticize Brown’s plan of assisting slaves to escape the South. Although Delany made many comments that were positive, he “objected to many propositions favored by Captain Brown, as not, having the least chance of giving trouble to the slaveholders, except the fortification at Kansas.” Delany’s questions aggravated Brown to such an extent that he challenged Delany’s manhood. Brown “sprang suddenly to his feet, and exclaimed severely, ‘Gentlemen, if Dr. Delany is afraid, don’t let him make you all cowards!’” Having already heard Brown describe all free black men in the North as cowards because “blacks are afraid of the whites,” Delany chastised Brown, stating, “There exists no one in whose veins the blood of cowardice courses less freely; and it must not be said, even by John Brown of Ossawatomie.”91 Despite Brown’s attempts to get Delany personally involved in his scheme of helping the enslaved run away, Brown was unsuccessful. Delany had written a serial fictional essay entitled Blake that advocated violence. Perhaps Brown read it, as it was published in the Anglo-African Magazine from January to July in 1859. But it was fiction, “imagined solutions” to no doubt stoke white fear92 Delany and many other emigrationists at the convention already had other plans and were involved in Delany’s “African Exploration movement; which he had been developing prior to his meeting Captain Brown.” Indeed, Delany was in Abbeokuta, West Africa, researching the possibility of a black American settlement there when he heard about “the Harper’s Ferry insurrection.”93
Although Harriet Tubman recounted that Brown told her he did not intend “to destroy property, nor to hurt men, women or children, but to fetch away the slave when they could,” she did not join Brown either94 Tubman, known as the Moses of her people because of her success in helping at least two hundred slaves escape from the South, impressed Brown95 At their first meeting, which Loguen arranged in Saint Catherines, Canada, Brown called her “General Tubman” out of respect for her legendary leadership. However, in much the same way that southerners viewed female abolitionists as women who “unsexed themselves” because of their work in the public sphere, Brown called Tubman a man. Brown wrote in his letter to his son, John Brown Jr., “Harriet Tubman booked on his whole team at once. He (Harriet) is the most of a man.”96 Just as they invented the idea of “Sambo” to represent all black men, white men constantly stereotyped black women, and Brown’s reconfiguration of Tubman’s gender is a conspicuous example.97 Indeed, Tubman was “proud of being a black woman,” and Brown’s erasure of Tubman’s womanhood by using masculine pronouns to describe her as an intelligent, courageous woman who was worthy of respect was an experience shared by black female abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Frances Harper as well.98 Nevertheless, despite the sincerity of Brown’s platitudes, there is no evidence that Tubman committed to recruiting black Canadians for Brown, nor did she attend the Chatham convention. Furthermore, there is no evidence that Tubman herself intended on participating in his initiative in Harpers Ferry.99
It is reasonable to conclude that Tubman, a spiritually gifted and sophisticated strategist, foresaw the failure of Brown’s plan. Tubman told Loguen that she dreamed about Brown before ever seeing him in Saint Catherines and that in her dream “a great crowd of men rushed in and struck down the younger heads and then the head of the old man. . . . This dream she had again and again.” Tubman had a premonition that Brown and his two sons would be killed. Therefore, it is highly doubtful that she seriously entertained involving herself in what she must have perceived would end in failure.100
The reluctance of black Canadians to join Brown in the South does not mean that blacks in Canada were unwilling to engage in violent confrontations with slave owners. John H. Hill signified in his letter to William Still, a leading force in the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, that those southerners who talked of reclaiming their slaves from Canada should think again. Hill, a fugitive slave living in Toronto, forewarned slaveholders that “they had better keep their side for if they comes over this side of the lake I am under the impression they will not go back with something that their mother borned them with. . . . I know of someone here . . . [who] wants to retaleoate upon his persecutor. . . . [P]eople here would kill them.”101 Rumors that there were three black companies from Buxton, Chatham, and Ingersoll making their way down to Detroit to join Brown, however, were without foundation. At best, there were a few Canadian immigrants making their way South to assist Brown when the Harpers Ferry raid occurred.102
As the only black Canadian participating in the Harpers Ferry raid to escape alive, Osborn Anderson joined Brown without knowing what he really intended to do.103 According to Douglass, Anderson met with him after the raid and told him that Brown “was careful to keep his plans from his men, and that there was much opposition among them when they found what were the precise movements determined upon; but . . . like good soldiers were agreed to follow their captain wherever he might lead.”104 This account is corroborated by John Brown Jr., who claimed that in “the early part of September, 1859,” he and his father “had many earnest discussions as to the feasibility of making the attack at Harper’s Ferry,—which plan was not known to any of us until after our arrival at the Kennedy Farms. All of our men, excepting Merriam, Kagi, Shields Green, and the colored men (the latter knowing nothing of Harper’s Ferry), were opposed to striking the first blow there.”105 According to Charles Tidd, “All the boys opposed Harper’s Ferry, the younger Browns most of all. In September it nearly broke up the camp.”106 Brown became depressed at the opposition of his men and subsequently resigned so that they could choose a new leader, whom Brown vowed to “obey.” Within “five minutes, he was again chosen as the leader, and though we were not satisfied with the reasons he gave for making our first attack there, all controversy and opposition to the plan . . . ended.”107 Thus, blacks in the North and in Canada could not have known about Brown’s Harpers Ferry plan, just as they asserted afterward, because Brown’s own men did not know about it until after they arrived at the Kennedy farm in Maryland.
After the Harpers Ferry raid occurred, those still enslaved in the South related similar assessments of and concerns about Brown’s plan. It would seem that Brown’s penchant for secrecy may have diminished the ability and willingness of those blacks he did recruit to participate. Consider the testimony of Antony Hunter, a slave who asserted that there were large numbers of enslaved blacks ready and organized to join Brown from the Harpers Ferry area. When asked why blacks did not join Brown at Harpers Ferry and help him, Antony retorted, “Cos we was afraid. De culled people’s been cheated so offen by de white folks, dat when dey struck de blow too soon at de Ferry, we was ’fraid we was goin’ tar be cheated.” Moreover, their decision ultimately not to join Brown seemed based on a different understanding of what was to occur. Antony and the rest of the “folks” were troubled that “Mr. Brown an’ his men . . . was killin’ de white an culled folks” and that if they showed themselves in support of such an event, they would then be killed or sold. Apparently, Brown’s men had instructed them to be ready to join him on Monday, and “we’d wait in de mountains back ob de Ferry, till Mr. Brown gabe de word an’ den all hurry dar ter jine him.” If the enslaved could have “beliebed in de white men being true” and if Brown had stuck to the appointed day instead of beginning Sunday evening, Antony claimed, “many . . . would hab fought fur him till all was killed.”108 Again, that the enslaved viewed “every white man as an enemy” was commonplace, according to fugitive slave William Wells Brown.109 Apparently to counteract any interference from northern whites, Henry Bibb stated, white slaveholders “told the slaves to beware of the abolitionists, that their object was to decoy off the slaves and then sell them off in New Orleans. Some of them believed this, and others believed it not.”110 That Brown did not take the time to gain the slaves’ confidence and cooperation was a serious mistake.
Without information, it was impossible for those enslaved to know if Brown was truly engaged in an effort that would end in their freedom. In J. Sella Martin’s opinion, if it was Brown’s intent not to shed any blood, then
this was one of the faults of his plan. In not shedding blood, he left the slaves uncertain how to act; so that the North has said that the negroes there are cowards. They are not cowards, but great diplomats. When they saw their masters in the possession of John Brown, in bonds like themselves, they would have been perfect fools had they demonstrated any willingness to join him. They have got sense enough to know, that until there is a perfect demonstration that the white man is their friend—a demonstration bathed in blood—it is all foolishness to co-operate with them. . . . So it was not cowardice, nor their craven selfishness, but it was their caution, that prevented them from joining Brown.111
Thus, if Brown’s real intent, as Tubman understood, was merely to “attract the attention of the country and to strike for freedom” without actually achieving freedom for those enslaved, he could do so without them.112
Yet, according to slaves like Harrison Berry, tactics like Brown’s did not help their cause, because the strategy of agitating the slave owners into confrontation was wrongheaded and dangerous. Berry claimed that the enslaved experienced greater oppression because of antislavery efforts.113 Living in Georgia, Berry offered his assessment of the futility of rebellions like Brown’s, thus demonstrating the seriousness with which the slaves viewed the threat of their demise: “I can imagine that I see gibbets all over the Slave-holding States, with negroes stretched upon them like slaughtered hogs, and pens of lightwood on fire! Methinks I hear their screams—I can see them upon their knees, begging, for God’s sake, to have mercy. I can see, them chained together by scores, and shot down like wild beasts. These are but shadows to what would have been done, had John Brown succeeded in his plan of getting up a rebellion among the Slaves.”114
Berry made one other argument that contested Brown’s claims that death would be a better fate for those enslaved. Berry stated it was not their destiny to kill themselves off as a race; instead, “if it be so that the children of Israel were enslaved, for the express purpose of saving much people alive, how much more might it be possible that the Slaves of America are enslaved to save many Africans alive?”115 Berry rightly imagined that the history slaves made was in their ability to stay alive, so that they too as a race of oppressed people might contribute to the future of African people everywhere.
Looking at Brown’s plan from outside the black community, some whites not only shared their assessment but also understood why blacks perceived Brown’s plan to be flawed and dangerous to those enslaved. One southern Republican argued that it was a “fatal mistake to infer that the negroes have no desire to be free, because they remained passive at Harper’s Ferry. They knew their own strength too well in that vicinity to rush upon destruction.” The writer noted that the idea of a grand runoff of slaves, however, was plausible and would not necessarily have required Brown’s leadership: “They are . . . the class of slaves from whom we should least expect an effort at insurrection. They are on the border of the Free States, and it would be much easier and safer to liberate themselves by running away than by revolting.”116 Indeed, during the 1840s and 1850s, the enslaved organized several, albeit unsuccessful, massive runoffs to freedom across the South.117 Abolitionist Lydia Maria Childs lamented in a letter to her friend Mary Stearns that she honored “Brown’s motives; but he made a great mistake; a very great mistake. The efforts may be favorable to freedom in the long run; but it is impossible to foresee the consequences.”118 Black people, enslaved and free, knew what the consequences would be for instigating an insurrection, which is why some free blacks were only willing to support Brown’s plan of running off slaves to free territory. African Americans “knew the slave system.” And they rightly predicted that any direct confrontation to disrupt slavery in the South would create a new reign of terror, heightening fears of a race war and the slaughter of black people everywhere.119
It took less than thirty-six hours for the Virginia militia and federal troops to capture and arrest John Brown in Harpers Ferry. Hours before Brown’s capture, there were reports of white mobs “one thousand to two thousand strong” roaming the streets of Harpers Ferry looking for anyone who might have been involved in John Brown’s insurrection.120 Fear was as palpable among whites in the area as it was within the black community. White slaveholders responded swiftly. The black community was terrorized, and some were even killed. As far as white southerners were concerned, not only was John Brown a traitor to the nation, but by attempting to incite violence among the enslaved he was also a traitor to the white race. Black Americans, foreseeing what would come, did their best to protect themselves.
Although Brown embraced the possibility that he would end up sacrificing his life and that of black Americans for his cause, he did so with the expectation that standard military rules of engagement would apply. Brown complained to Captain Sims, the commander of a Maryland militia, that “his men had been shot down like dogs while bearing a flag of truce; [Captain Simms] told him they must expect to be shot down like dogs, if they took up arms in that way.” When Brown cried out for quarter in surrender, he was apparently unaware of how white southerners waged war on those who engaged in slave insurrections, even if they were white. Two other white men, John E. Cook and Edwin Coppoc, also had similar impressions about what their fate would be in participating in Brown’s plan. When “both addressed the Court, denying that they had any knowledge of Brown’s intention to seize the Ferry until the Sunday previous . . . [t]hey expected to be punished, but did not think they should be hung.”121 Their understanding of what punishment they would face would have been accurate if they had been merely helping the enslaved run away. The penalty that whites and blacks generally suffered for that crime was imprisonment. Attempting to lead those enslaved in insurrection usually meant death. Cook and Coppoc were executed, as was Brown, but Brown did not shirk from responsibility for his actions, nor did he back away from the idea that the annihilation of black people would be better than the continuation of enslavement: “I believe that to have interfered as I have done . . . I did not wrong but right. 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 my children, and 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.”122
Although Brown testified that he was not attempting to instigate an insurrection, southern whites believed that he was, which would have led to a war between the races. Edmund Ruffin, a Virginia planter and writer, assessed in his diary that “the great mass of the people of the north . . . do not entirely condemn the attempt to excite insurrection of the slaves, with all the unspeakable atrocities and horrors which would attend even their partial success. Their complete success, in establishing their freedom, even with all the aid of our northern white brethren, is utterly impossible. . . . [R]enewed & extended attempts of this kind may produce a war of races, to be terminated only in the extermination of the blacks, & ruin, with their victory, to the whites.”123 Journalist David Hunter Strother reported that it was Brown’s plan to “overthrow the Government of the United States and the Anglo-Saxon race in the South.” Strother further claimed that he had heard Brown state that “he had entered Virginia for the purpose of making war on the white race, determined to kill all who opposed his views.”124 Certainly, Strother may have misinterpreted what Brown said, if he heard him say it at all, but he was not alone in believing that unlimited warfare was what Brown intended.
Governor Henry Wise of Virginia wrote in his message to the Senate and State Assembly that Brown’s purpose was to force the enslaved “to fight to liberate themselves by massacreing their masters . . . combining with Canadians . . . for the purpose of stirring up universal insurrection of slaves throughout the whole south.”125 In a private letter to white abolitionist L. Maria Childs, ultimately published in the New York Tribune, Wise described Brown’s “attempt” as one that “whetted the knives of butchery for our mothers, sisters, daughters and babes.”126 White southerners, invoking memories of what happened during other slave insurrections, retained an infinitely old understanding of what was at stake during this sort of warfare. And regardless of whether Brown believed that arming the enslaved would result in a massacre, he seemed willing enough for that level of violence to ensue. Indeed, southerners shared the black community’s fears of how such actions might play out. One woman’s chastisement of Childs for her willingness to care for Brown in prison demonstrates how resilient the idea of exterminatory warfare remained for many white southerners: “You would soothe with sisterly and motherly care the hoary-headed murderer of Harper’s Ferry! A man whose aim and intention was to incite the horrors of a servile war—to condemn women of your race . . . to see their husbands and fathers murdered, their children butchered, the ground strewed with the brains of their babies.”127
Clearly, whites remained fearful of their slave population despite the claims of Governor Wise and other southerners that the enslaved did not have any desire to rise in rebellion.128 In fact, whites were “wild with terror.” According to Osborn Anderson, who provided important testimony in his A Voice from Harper’s Ferry, he saw white men, women, and children “fleeing” from what they believed was “their doomed city.”129 Concerns over whether Brown’s ideas had reached slaves beyond Harpers Ferry created overwhelming panic, especially among women: “At the time of the John Brown affair,” Harper’s Weekly reported, “Governor Wise told us that Virginia matrons living miles and miles away were beside themselves with terror.”130 Another report observed that “local whites were heavily armed even in daylight.”131 Someone from Petersburg, Virginia, reported that “the panic has seized all classes of the people. . . . If five or six negroes are seen talking together, they are speedily magnified by rumor into a hundred, armed with pitchforks and scythe blades.”132 These rumors, based on imagined fears of slave insurrections, were pervasive. According to Col. Robert W. Baylor, commander of troops at Harpers Ferry, after returning from “the Maryland side of the river,” where there were reports that there were “disturbances still occurring,” another “alarm was occasioned by a gentleman . . . riding into town in great haste, stating that he saw firing and heard the screams of the people, and that a large number of insurgents had collected and were murdering all before them. Forthwith Col. [Robert E.] Lee . . . proceeded to the spot. . . . [T]he alarm . . . proved to have been false.”133
White fear about the enslaved population insurrecting after Brown’s invasion at Harpers Ferry caused “universal alarm” in many other parts of the South.134 Plantation mistress Ann Agnes Coe expressed trepidations that she claimed were “fears entertained by many” in South Carolina that “the northern abolitionist will not rest until they bring upon the South all the horrors of a servile war nothing but such scenes as was witnessed at St. Dominge will ever satisfy those wild fanatics.”135 These fears are affirmed by another slave-owning woman in South Carolina, who stated, “We tremble in our own homes in anticipation and expectancy of what is liable to burst forth at any moment—a negro insurrection. . . . Not a night passes that we do not securely lock our field servants in their quarters. . . . Our planters and owners of slave property do not allow their servants to have any intercourse with each other, and the negroes are confined strictly to the premises where they belong.”136 William S. Pettigrew wrote from Plymouth, North Carolina, that “the people [were] . . . ready to slaughter the negroes indiscriminately.” Pettigrew went on to say that in his opinion, “in case of a panic on the subject of insurrectionary designs the negroes are in much more danger . . . than the whites are from the negroes.”137 Indeed, if the slaves were emancipated due to the “intermeddlings” of the “Abolitionist” and the “new recruits of John Brown,” Judge John Townsend of South Carolina claimed,
there will be a general uprising among the whites of all classes to drive them out of the country. Thus will commence that war between the races, which every reflecting mind perceives to be inevitable, where an inferior and degraded race has been forced up, by foreign interference, to an equality with their former master race. In such a war . . . [h] orrible tragedies may be enacted in a few neighborhoods; but it must soon terminate in the indiscriminate slaughter of the negros, by the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands, until they shall be either exterminated, or driven out of the country.138
Brown’s insurrectionary attempt galvanized white animosity, and “rage had taken the place of . . . alarmed surprise.”139
Thus, the panic of whites in the South resulted in the black community being terrorized and tortured. According to Pastor Charles White’s account of the affair, “The negroes about Harper’s Ferry were terribly alarmed. . . . We have patrols out every night.” White managed to save the “slave of Mr. Alstadt” from “being randomly murdered.” The “fellow stated that he had orders from the Captain of Charlestown Company,” yet “so enraged were the multitude that it was with difficulty they were restrained from hanging and shooting several [slaves] on the spot.”140 Osborn Anderson observed that they sent “poor whites . . . to do the safe but cowardly judicial murdering afterwards.” Anderson footnoted at the end of his narrative that it was “more like a great hunting scene than that of a battle.”141
Many blacks were killed in the aftermath of Harpers Ferry. According to a Harpers Ferry mill worker named Kindle, “many of the negroes . . . ran for the river and they were shot.” Another source noted that “in surrounding towns there were several deaths of slaves blamed on overreaction of slaveowners due to Brown’s raid.”142 In Somerset County, Maryland, after an alarm sounded of an impending insurrection at a prayer meeting, white citizens went out and scoured the neighborhood looking for slaves in revolt but could not find one black person. The next night, a patrol was organized, whereupon they went about searching the huts of all the free negroes, until finally they found one man in his hut and then shot him to death.143
The murder of innocent blacks was not limited to the Harpers Ferry area. According to another report, “So terrible was the alarm created by that trumpery attempt” among whites that “down on the Gulf shore negroes whose behavior had attracted attention were imprisoned, whipped, and even shot by scores.”144 Johnson J. Hooper of Montgomery, Alabama, told Virginian Edmund Ruffin “of much that had not entered the newspapers, in which indeed there has been very little said, either of statement or comment. . . . No doubt there are gross exaggerations of the facts, & probably many innocent negroes may suffer for the guilty . . . [but] discoveries have been made in different parts of Alabama—and that the infuriated inhabitants have in sundry cases executed summary vengeance (or justice, if not mistaken) on the detected culprits, white and black.”145
Certainly, newspaper editors may have not been able to separate whether fears of the enslaved rising were “real or imaginary,” but they did not exaggerate the violence and trauma that blacks experienced at the hands of whites.146 In Alabama, slave owners went “from plantation to plantation, taking up and whipping slaves without cause.”147 Evidence of an insurrection plot was “extorted” from one slave after “the application of eight hundred lashes to his back.”148 Another female slave received similar treatment until she was “ready to confess anything to escape the lash.”149 In Texas, fears of slave insurrections caused what is considered “one of the greatest witch hunts in American history.”150 In response to what southerners called the “Texas Troubles,” or the “John Brown Foray in Texas,” many innocent slaves were hanged after the outbreak of several fires in the region.151 As far as one southern correspondent was concerned, “it is better for us to hang ninety-nine innocent (suspicious) men than to let one guilty one pass. . . . Such is the universal sentiment of this community, and soon must and will be of the entire South.” When the supposed plot to “poison as many people as they could . . . to burn the houses and kill as many women and children as they could . . . and then kill the men as they returned home” was uncovered, hundreds of blacks were arrested and examined.152 Three men, Cato, Sam Smith, and Patrick, were lynched by a mob for supposedly being the leaders of this thwarted insurrection in Waxahachie, Texas. Afterward a resolution was passed, and “every negro in the county” was whipped.153 Across northern and central portions of Texas, “about sixty-five of negros . . . were hung or burnt, as to the degree of their implication in the rebellion and burning.”154 In Natchez, Mississippi, during the campaign for the presidency in 1860, “two slave men were overheard repeating what their masters said, that if Lincoln was elected he would free all the slaves, . . . and they declared that if this was true they would go to the Yankees and help to free their nation.” Rumors then circulated that there was going to be an insurrection in “that part of the State,” and “all slave men or boys who were overheard to pray for freedom, or to say anything indicating a desire to be free, were marked.” A large group of over one hundred white men organized to compel confessions from “all these marked slaves and then to hang them. . . . Many negroes were dragged out of their cabins or yards without knowing the cause, stripped, tied to the whipping-post or taken to the calaboose, and given as many lashes as could be endured. . . . Some hundreds were thus hanged in the edge of the city, and on an adjoining plantation.” According to abolitionist Laura S. Haviland, the total number of slaves executed was 209, but she was “told by a number of persons, both white and colored, that there were over four hundred tortured to death in this reign of terror.”155 Whatever the actual number was, clearly blacks throughout the South were under siege. They were tortured, terrorized, and lynched without cause long after Brown’s execution at Harpers Ferry.
Many slaves were also sold to the Deep South states as a result of the Harpers Ferry insurrection, the thing that enslaved people dreaded most because of the brutal working conditions there. In Harpers Ferry, the majority of the enslaved worked in the mills, but in the 1850s, declining productivity made their labor less in demand.156 Thus, in order to reduce the risk of any future insurrectionary attempts, slaves “who were suspects, unruly, or turbulent” were sold at reduced prices in Maryland and Virginia.157 Slaves were also sold off in South Carolina: “Negroes are selling at enormous prices not withstanding the later outbreak at Harper’s Ferry.”158
Free blacks in the South did not escape the white backlash either. Rev. Thomas W. Henry fled from Baltimore because of a reference to him in a letter in John Brown’s possessions. Henry, formerly enslaved for twenty-two years, stated that after Harpers Ferry, a “Black Person could not leave the city of Baltimore unless he was vouched for by some responsible white person.”159 White southerners closed black churches not only in Virginia but also in South Carolina, and “other gatherings [were] prohibited” as well.160 In Georgia a law was passed that “free negroes wandering or strolling about or leading an idle, immoral . . . course of life, shall be sold into slavery.”161 Former slave Bethany Veney remarked that “after John Brown made his invasion into Virginia; the excitement that followed made it unsafe for any one who sympathized with or defended him to be seen in any Southern State.”162 Perhaps the increase in blacks escaping from the South reported by northern abolitionists was motivated, as Mary Ann Shadd Cary observed, by terror as well as by the thirst for liberation.163
That the black community lived in terror in the aftermath of Harpers Ferry is also evidenced by events in the northern states. In making his escape from the South to return to Canada, Osborn Anderson stopped at the home of “William Goodridge, a seasoned fugitive slave abetter” in York, Pennsylvania, which “produced great fear and consternation in the Goodridge family. Goodridge ordered him away from the house.”164 According to Annie Brown, John Brown’s daughter, Anderson’s father also “drove him away from his door with threats of having him arrested and sent back to Virginia . . . and called him all manner of vile names for what he had done.”165 Apparently, the black community was aware that there was “an indictment against him. . . . [T]he government officials,” black abolitionist Charles Langston stated, “live only to hunt ‘niggers’ and guard the interests of the peculiar institution.” In secret, members of the Fugitive Aid Society in Cleveland, Ohio, “rushed forward to take him [Anderson] by the hand, and to rejoice that he had the good fortune to escape Virginia’s bloody halter.” But out in the public sphere, Anderson was a pariah. He told Annie Brown when visiting Brown’s grave in North Elba, New York, in 1860 that he “dreaded to go back and into the world where he would be so friendless and alone.”166 He was friendless because blacks who had nothing to do with Brown’s insurrection lived in constant fear. Black seamen from the North were now at risk of being abducted from ships docked in southern ports and sold into slavery.167 Douglass, in fear of apprehension by federal authorities, fled to Canada.168 Free blacks feared the long hand of southern white violence in the North just as they did in the South, leading John Rock to conclude that “the whole country has entered into a conspiracy to crush him [blacks]; it is against this mighty power that he is forced to contend. Some persons think we are oppressed over in the South: this is a mistake. We are oppressed everywhere on this slavery-cursed land.”169
In the aftermath, blacks nevertheless continued to fight for the liberation of the enslaved and used Brown and his martyrdom to advance a nonviolent approach in resolving what they saw as the inevitable confrontation between the North and South over slavery. At an antislavery gathering, H. Ford Douglass, a fugitive slave from Virginia, claimed that in order to end slavery, “We must do as John Brown did, not necessarily in the way he did it, but we must labor with the sure determination to effect, in some way, the complete overthrow of slavery. I am not an advocate for insurrection. I believe the world must be educated into something better and higher than this before we can have perfect freedom, either for the black man or the white.”170 Harriet Tubman expressed deep admiration for Brown in his efforts to end slavery, calling his death a “second Crucifixion.” Yet she was adamant that violence was not part of his vision in ending slavery. According to Tubman’s grandnephew Harkless Bowley, Tubman told him, “It was not John Brown’s idea to murder the white people but to stir the slaves so as to attract the attention [of the] country and to strike for freedom.”171 Nevertheless, Frederick Douglass, addressing Bostonians on Brown’s contributions to the abolitionist movement, argued that violence had indeed been “the John Brown way.” Douglass reasoned that the antislavery movement could use Brown and the fear that his actions generated throughout the South to its advantage. At the same time, abolitionists could continue with the nonviolent strategy of assisting slaves in making their escape: “We must . . . reach the slaveholder’s conscience through his fear of personal danger. We must make him feel that there is death in the air about him . . . that there is death all around him. We must do this in some way. . . . The negroes of the South must do this; they . . . must make them feel that it is not so pleasant, after all, to go to bed with bowie-knives, and revolvers, and pistols, as they must. . . . Every slave that escapes helps to add to their discomfort.” Despite the rhetoric, Douglass was not calling for an organized South-wide insurrection but rather for the instability that the possibility of one could cause: “I know that all hope of a general insurrection is vain. We do not need a general insurrection to bring about this result. We only need the fact to be known in the Southern States generally, that there is liberty in yonder mountains, planted by John Brown.”172
While most blacks revered and admired Brown for his martyrdom, some also linked his efforts at Harpers Ferry with those of Nat Turner and other black freedom fighters in order to rally northern sentiment on the issue of slavery. Osborn Anderson argued that what Brown attempted to do was quintes-sentially African American, that white men were not the only ones who fought and died for freedom. Anderson began his narrative by claiming:
There is an unbroken chain of sentiment and purpose from Moses of the Jews to John Brown of America . . . to the untutored Gabriel, and the Denmark Veseys, Nat Turners and Madison Washingtons of the Southern States. The shaping and expressing of a thought for freedom takes the same consistence with the colored American—whether he be an independent citizen of the Haytian nation, a proscribed but humble nominally free colored man, a patient, toiling, but hopeful slave—as with the proudest or noblest representative of European or American civilization and Christianity. . . . Nine insurrections is the number given by some . . . whether correct or not. . . . Gabriel, Vesey, Nat Turner, all had conference meetings; all had their plans.173
Anderson stressed that Brown’s insurrection should be viewed as a “progressive,” an “elevated” version of what had occurred in the past—that what Brown did was not new.
John Rock also placed Brown and Turner on the same moral footing, as the “only events in the history of this country which I think deserve to be commemorated . . . the organization of the Anti-slavery Society and the insurrections of Nat Turner and John Brown.”174
The editor of the Anglo-African Magazine, Thomas Hamilton, also reflected on Nat Turner and John Brown after Harpers Ferry and made comparisons between the two freedom fighters. Where Turner and Brown differed was that in Turner’s method of warfare, used historically by both blacks and whites, he “could only see the enfranchisement of one race, compassed by the extirpation of the other; and he followed his gory syllogism with rude exactitude.” John Brown, Hamilton argued, was not attempting to exterminate white people, as Brown believed that “the freedom of the enthralled could only be effected by placing them on an equality with their enslavers.” As a white man not eligible for enslavement, Brown “in the very effort at emancipation” was “moved with compassion for tyrants as well as slaves, and seeks to extirpate this formidable cancer, without spilling one drop of Christian blood.” Hamilton went on to suggest that Turner was a greater threat to the South than Brown ever was because of his leadership, his determination, and his condition of being oppressed: “Had the order of events been reversed—had Nat Turner been in John Brown’s place at the head of these twenty one men, governed by his inexorable logic, and cool daring, the soil of Virginia and Maryland and the far South, would by this time be drenched in blood, and the wild and sanguinary course of these men, no earthly power then could stay.” Hamilton challenged his readers to think deeply about the fact that there were “a hundred Nat Turners. . . . So people of the South, people of the North! . . . choose ye which method of emancipation you prefer—Nat Turner’s or John Brown’s?”175
John Brown’s detachment from the lived experience of blacks made it impossible for him to foresee that his capture of Harpers Ferry would inevitably end even more violently than he imagined. Unlike during the 1960s civil rights movement, when nonviolence was favored among whites for its shining example of moral refinement, blacks in the 1850s had to defend their decision not to use force as a strategy for liberation. Brown and other radical abolitionists, however, believed that armed resistance was the only way to gain the respect of white Americans. Who was most at risk in his willingness to dismiss the potential of a race war and black extermination seems very clear. Black Americans in the United States and Canada knew that arming large numbers of slaves would be perceived by the South and North as an act of insurrection requiring state and federal military action. It would jeopardize the lives of innocent men, women, and children in what blacks viewed would be an unwinnable war. Yet, importantly, Brown’s miscalculations emanated from his “head,” not his “heart.”176 And this the black community well understood, using his name, as well as Nat Turner’s, as a symbol of where America’s moral conscience should be on the issues of freedom and equality. Ideas about black freedom and the inevitability of a race war between blacks and whites, however, remained unchanged in the southern mind, coming out in full relief during the Civil War and post—Civil War years.