The most remarkable thing about John Brown’s raid is that it was allowed to happen at all. Months beforehand it was known in Washington’s corridors of power that he intended to invade Virginia, and that his first target would be Harper’s Ferry. At least eighty people in the country, including the Secretary for War and two U.S. Senators, had been told of the plan; how many others had picked up the rumours, or had reason to believe that some great stroke was imminent, it is impossible to say. Yet nothing was done to stop him. No defensive measures were taken.
This should be one of those great historical mysteries that scholars love to debate; when one considers the oceans of ink that have been spilled over Little Big Horn and the Alamo, the comparative neglect of the question: “Why wasn’t Brown stopped?” is almost as baffling as the mystery itself.
Brown had invasion in mind as early as 1847, when he described to Frederick Douglass how he would use a small picked band to run off the most restless and daring slaves and wage a guerrilla campaign in the Alleghenies. In late 1854 or early 1855 he proposed a raid on Harper’s Ferry to Colonel Daniel Woodruff, a veteran of the War of 1812; Brown’s daughter Annie, the sentry of Kennedy Farm, remembered the Ferry being specifically mentioned at the time. Hugh Forbes knew about the plan in some detail in 1857, and revealed it to Senators Wilson and Seward in 1858, at which time the Secret Six also knew of it, and the scheme was postponed. Early in 1859, James Redpath, who had met Brown and was to become his first biographer, published a book dedicated to “John Brown, senior, of Kansas”, citing him as a believer in slave insurrection, advocating revolt, and hinting at future “servile and civil wars” – not hard information, but a significant straw in a wind that had been blowing for some time.
Secret intelligence-gathering was fairly makeshift in the U.S. before the Civil War, and it is possible that the government had no substantial knowledge of Brown’s intentions before 1859, or, if they had, that they did not take him seriously. The wild schemes of a crazy farmer might well be dismissed as moonshine, although given the growth of abolitionist feeling in the North, and Southern anxiety about slave unrest, it seems odd that no one thought them worthy of any inquiry at all.
But “odd” is not the word for the behaviour of John Floyd, Secretary of War, when he received a detailed and (one would have thought) compelling warning of the raid on August 25, 1859 – seven weeks before it took place. It came in a letter, admittedly anonymous* but obviously the work of a responsible person, who named “Old John Brown” of Kansas, stated that he intended to liberate the slaves of the South by general insurrection, gave particulars of his preparation and armament, identified Harper’s Ferry as the point of invasion, and predicted that the slaves would be armed and the blow struck within a few weeks.
Nothing could have been clearer, but Floyd, whom Bruce Catton generously describes as a bumbling incompetent, ignored the letter because, among its wealth of cogent information, it contained one trifling error – the writer stated that Brown had an agent “in an armoury in Maryland”. Floyd apparently had not the wit to connect “Old John Brown” of the letter with the notorious John Brown on whose head President Buchanan and the State of Missouri had put a price, but like a good little bureaucrat he knew that there was no armoury in Maryland – that there was a large undefended armoury within a stone’s throw of Maryland, just across the river in Virginia, did not occur to him. He decided, incredibly, that the rest of the letter must be untrue; according to Sanborn, he did not even bother to read it twice. Explaining himself later to the Mason Committee investigating the raid, Floyd said that he was satisfied that “a scheme of such wickedness and outrage could not be entertained by any citizens of the United States”. And the committee decided that no one apart from Brown’s gang had “any suspicion of [the raid’s] existence or design”.
Committees know their own business best, and there is no reason why a senior minister should not be an ill-informed idiot; such things have been known. But even if Floyd was guilty of nothing worse than stupidity and negligence, it is still remarkable that despite all the advance publicity John Brown and his projected raid had received, from the halls of Congress to the Kansas border and from the drawing-rooms of Boston to the saloons of Ohio, no one in Washington took any notice or apparently felt a moment’s unease.
To be sure, governments can be uncommonly blind, deaf, and lazy – to which the last survivor of John Brown’s band would certainly add: “Aye, especially when they don’t want to see, hear, or move.” There were many in the North, and doubtless some in the South, who wanted the raid to happen; Crixus and Atropos were not alone; but probably only a cynic like Flashman would speculate that there were those in authority who, knowing of the plot and having the power to prevent it, allowed it to go ahead, for their own inscrutable ends. Since there is no evidence to support this view, we can only accept the alternative: that it was just monumental bad luck that no responsible person got wind of the plot, or took it seriously, or bothered to investigate it, or thought it worth posting even a couple of armed sentries on an unguarded arsenal at a time when talk of slave insurrection was in the air, or decided to keep an eye on the most violent and ruthless abolitionist in the country, the butcher of Pottawatomie, who was stumping the sticks and cities preaching the invasion of Virginia …
Bad luck indeed, for the upshot was that against all the odds, and in spite of all his follies and hesitations and mismanagement, John Brown was given what he had no right to expect: a clear run at Harper’s Ferry.
* The writer of the letter was one David Gue, who had learned of the plot from a Quaker named Varney. Many years later Gue claimed that he had written out of no ill will to Brown, but “to protect [him] from the consequences of his own rashness and devotion” by alerting the authorities who, Gue hoped, would deter the raid by setting a guard on the arsenal. Two copies of the letter were sent to Floyd, but only one reached him.