Flashman’s was not an affectionate nature. That he loved (or at least was enthralled by) his wife, Elspeth, is evident from his memoirs, and now and then his regard for other ladies goes some way beyond the merely physical – usually, one suspects, when he is writing in a mood of brandy-assisted nostalgia. But outside his family – he plainly doted on his great-grandchildren, and felt for his natural son, Frank Standing Bear, a paternal affection which lasted for several days – he seldom finds much to like in people. He betrays an occasional fellow-feeling, at a safe distance, for such rascals as Rudi von Starnberg, and has a half-amiable tolerance of acquaintances whom he has no cause to detest, like his old chief, Colin Campbell, and his Afghan blood-brother, Ilderim Khan. But that, as a rule, is his limit.
Yet he seems to have had a kind of protective affection for John Brown. Underneath the sneers and curses there is a hint of indulgence, an inclination to defend the old nuisance and even to give him a Tuscan cheer, which is not characteristic of Flashman. We may be sure it springs from no kindly or charitable impulse, or the least sympathy with Brown’s aims; he found the man and his mission ridiculous, and writes of them with contempt. At the same time, he remembers Brown as “a bloody hard man to dislike”, which is a rare tribute. Of course, it may have been a gratifying novelty to Flashman to come across a strong and fearsome autocrat who treated him with some deference and respect; a strong man, moreover, whom he could manipulate, and in whom he detected an appealing streak of humbug. And however lofty his disdain of Brown, there is no doubt that he took a perverse pride in their association: “I was one of John Brown’s pet lambs, after all.” This is pure Flashman. Throughout his memoirs, he revels in reflected glory, the more so when it is ingloriously undeserved, and when it comes to “dining out”, Harper’s Ferry plainly ranks with Balaclava and Little Big Horn and Cawnpore. One detects a condescending gratitude to Brown and his ragged commandos for adding another leaf to the Flashman laurels, and a complacent satisfaction that he helped them along the road to immortality.
Whether he liked Brown or not, he has done him justice. The figure who stalks his narrative is the man of the biographies and contemporary accounts, even to his quoted speech, thoughts, manner, appearance, and the small details of everyday. From their first meeting at Concord to the last glimpse of the weary, serene old prisoner lying in the paymaster’s office, Flashman’s story tallies convincingly with recorded fact, and differs no more from the standard authorities than they do from each other. His record of Brown’s travels in the North may be verified in Villard, as may his account of life at the Kennedy Farm, of which Mrs Annie Brown Adams, Brown’s daughter, who acted as look-out for the conspirators, has left a lively record.
As invariably happens when there is a multitude of eyewitnesses, there are many discrepancies to be found in accounts of the actual raid on Harper’s Ferry. It would have been tedious and confusing to footnote them all, and most of them are trivial: it hardly matters whether John Brown visited the rifle works in person, or at which end of the Potomac bridge the watchmen were posted, or whether Lee was on horseback, or what kind of hat Jeb Stuart wore, or the precise moment when Brown retreated to the engine-house, or the exact place and time of certain incidents. There is no conflict on the main course of events, and here Flashman is in step with other historians.
It was a weird affair, the handful of men invading in the dark, the hold-up and release of the train, the taking of the prisoners, the first haphazard shootings, the bewildered township waking to find itself menaced by terrorists, gunfight and murder alternating with parleys and demands for breakfast, the militia storming in and taking to drink, the brutal lynchings and the local doctor tending the invaders’ wounded, the siege of the engine-house, the final call to surrender, the last bloody mêlée with the Marines, and, most bizarre of all, the wounded Brown holding court while his captors bombard him with questions. The whole thing has elements of a modern hostage drama followed by a television press conference.
It was a fiasco; the irony is that it need not have been. Brown, the most incompetent of planners and irresolute of leaders, gained an initial success of which a commando leader might be proud – and then did nothing. He could have stripped the arsenal and been in the hills without losing a man; that he could have organised a slave rebellion is highly improbable, but he would have struck a blow to shake the nation (it was shaken enough, even by his failure). Why did he delay? Did he cling to the hope that the slaves would rally to him, as Cook had assured him they would? It is possible, yet it seems more likely that Flashman’s diagnosis is sound: faced with crisis Brown simply did not know what to do. His judgment failed him, as his courage never did, and with that fatal indecision which was his besetting weakness he threw away what little chance he had.
But while Flashman may have read him aright at the Ferry, and while his whole portrait of Brown is a fair one, he has probably come no closer than other biographers to explaining the old abolitionist’s strange and complex character. It is not surprising. Brown was not understood in his own time, and much that has been written about him since has done more to embellish the legend than to clarify the nature of the man. He and his cause are emotional subjects, and the emotions often run to extremes. He has been described in terms that would become a saint, and vilified with an intemperance that is self-defeating. The impression persists in most people’s minds of a good and simple soul on fire with a dream, a fanatical crusader pursuing a splendid goal with imperfect means, a misguided Quixote whose head was wrong but whose heart was right. Great men and women have given him the accolade, and who that reads his story can dissent? Kindness, compassion, a burning love of liberty, a gift of inspiring devotion, and matchless courage, he had; if, as has been charged, perhaps not unjustly, he was also devious, foolish, vain, selfish, unscrupulous, and irresolute in crisis, his admirers can say that these are human faults, and far outweighed by the simple nobility of the martyr who died, and died gladly, to make men free. And then there is Pottawatomie.
The question of his sanity cannot be answered now. He was held fit to plead at his trial; rightly, so far as we can tell, but not many laymen would, on the evidence, call him normal or balanced. “Reasoning insanity” is the judgment of one eminent historian, and it will do as well as any other. We cannot know him, but it does not matter. He is part of history and historic legend, and if what he tried to do was not heroic, then the word has no meaning.