FROM CHAPTER ONE

For me the war started at about seven o’clock on a Monday morning, October 17, 1859. My wife, Rosalie, and I were eating breakfast when a knock sounded on the front door, not particularly ominously, though earlier than usual for callers of any kind. Jacob, a slave in our household, went to answer it. I saw him pulling on a jacket over his shirt sleeves as he went along the hallway past the dining room doorway. Try as I might, though, I couldn’t hear his conversation.

"It’s a boy from the telegraph," Jacob told me. He handed me a folded sheet of note paper, and I gave him a nickel for the courier.

I regularly paid the key operator at the telegraph office of the B&O Railroad to send me whatever came across the wires he thought might be of interest to our readers. Most of it was disappointing. This was not.

"Slaves upprising in Harper’s Ferry, Virg. Telgrf lines cut. Trains held. Calling for militia." The message was in smudged pencil.

I glanced across the table at Rosalie. The ruffles on her morning wrap framed her glossy black hair. She raised her eyebrows a little in curiosity. I looked down at the eggs on my plate. She was from South Carolina, where a slave uprising inspired more terror than a hurricane. She now slid a small plate of buttered toast across the table toward me.

"There’s a riot of some kind in Harper’s Ferry," I said. "Virginia. On the railroad line."

"A riot?" she asked.

"It’s garbled. We’ll have to find out." I scooped up an egg on a slice of toast and washed it down with coffee. "I’d best be off."

"Where is Harper’s Ferry?" she asked, alarmed now.

"In the mountains."

"Oh, I know. It’s where we change cars on the way to the Springs."

"Yes," I said, getting to my feet.

"They make gunpowder there," she observed. "Don’t they? Didn’t you tell me that?" She followed me down the hallway to the front door, held my jacket as I struggled into it, picked a piece of lint from my lapel. I tried to kiss her good-bye.

"Is it the workers do you suppose?" she asked.

"I don’t know, Rosalie. It’s miles away. Nothing for you to worry about."

"Well, you be careful," she said.

She stood at the door for a moment and watched me, as though I might be heading somewhere other than the newspaper.

Roger Pugh was already at the office when I arrived. He was owner and publisher of the Baltimore Weekly Intelligencer and I was editor. As the person who dealt with the advertisers and more prominent subscribers, he had sources of information in high places, "ears in Annapolis," he called it. And he’d already heard about Harper’s Ferry.

He was sitting in the old wing chair behind his huge oak desk, smoking a segar, something that generally waited until after lunch. He brushed at the ashes on his cravat, knocking them onto his capacious belly.

"They’ve cut the telegraph lines," he said. "Held up that train until six o’clock this morning."

"Has it arrived yet?"

He nodded no and rolled the segar around in his mouth.

"Have they attacked the armory?" I asked.

"Very likely. I would guess that’s why they chose Harper’s Ferry," Roger said. "The townspeople have contacted the governor, here and in Virginia. They want the militia."

"How many slaves involved? Have you heard?"

"Slaves? What do you know?"

"Slave uprising. That’s all. Didn’t know they had many—"

Roger shook his head. "No. That’s not it. It’s Brown. That fellow from Kansas."

"Ossawattomie Brown," I said, and felt a tingling at the back of my neck. What I knew of John Brown was the raids on the pro-slavery faction in Kansas. According to reports, Brown and his sons killed five border ruffians in Kansas, splitting open their skulls with a broadsword. It was an act of vengeance. He was a fanatic abolitionist, believed himself God’s messenger. "What’s he doing in Virginia?"

Roger only stared at me. If he lacked any information, it was my duty to provide it.

"I’ll go to the station, be there when the train pulls in," I said.

"Is Brill here? Take him with you. Send back any news."

Baltimore was the center of several rail lines running both north and south, and east and west. Two large terminals were situated about a mile and a half apart along Pratt Street, connected by a horse-drawn trolley running on its own tracks down the middle of the avenue. The Intelligencer office overlooked Pratt, and Brill and I hurried toward the B&O terminal, a mile west.

Pratt Street bustled with morning traffic. I hoped to hop a trolley bound for the terminal, but the only car that passed us was moving at a near gallop, warning bell going frantically like a fire engine. Yet it was mainly empty, raising curses and resentful cries from the pedestrians forced to make way for it.

The terminal was crowded, filled with angry passengers who’d been turned away even though they had tickets. The B&O agents and conductors offered no explanation, saying only all the trains out of Baltimore were being held for special purposes. Men demanded to know what was going on, while women, children, and servants gathered around their luggage, forming colorful little islands of confusion. With Brill in tow, I pushed along to the telegraph office, where representatives from four other newspapers were lounging impatiently, perking up when a message came in or was transmitted, and all jostling each other to peer over the key operator’s shoulders.

"Meeting someone?" Harold Anthony asked me. He was from the Commercial.

"My old granny’s due in from Harper’s Ferry," I said.

"We all have relatives on that one," he said.

"It’s not in yet?"

"Unaccountably delayed," he told me, turning his back.

Anthony had attacked me in print several times, accusing me of personal ties with "that crew of Boston reformers." In fact, I was from New York and said so in a counterattack, claiming reason as my sword and shield, and if that were so, then what ground did he occupy? It went back and forth. Anthony made it personal. I was a moderate on slavery; he called me a mealy-mouthed, weak-kneed compromiser and denounced me as a hypocrite as well, for I owned slaves. He was a Democrat; I was more or less a Whig, but didn’t like any of the parties or politics much and frequently criticized both sides. Anthony called it inconsistency, pandering to advertisers, and what else could one expect of Yankees?

Baltimore was a peculiar city. The railroads and shipbuilding provided a flavor of industry, like Philadelphia or New York. However, Maryland was a slave state, and many well-established planters kept houses in town, so Baltimore also resembled Richmond or Charleston. That was why Rosalie and I lived there.

My bought-and-paid-for telegrapher pretended he didn’t know me. I sent Brill back to the office with news of the secrecy, proposing Roger work something through his channels. Meanwhile, I tried to look into the yard to see if the cars had arrived. Police guarded every portal, and they were a rabble of police—a hastily recruited posse.

And the population of the terminal was changing. The ladies and gentlemen had been replaced by a more ragged crew of only men, toting muskets, knives, sabres, even pikes, wearing boots, carrying rough bundles. Here and there stood a man in some unusual uniform featuring brass and feathers, the man running a finger down his muster roll. The militia was assembling.

At eleven o’clock, Brill found me in the terminal. He carried a small carpetbag and a billfold and handed me these. "He says you must get to Harper’s Ferry by any means," he said.

"The cars aren’t going. They’re being held for the militia."

"He says try the stage coach or hire a carriage."

"Has he had any news?"

"Only about the militia. I’d go, Nick, but he says no."

Brill was nineteen.

"I’ll ride," I said. "Tell him that. It’ll be the quickest way." I opened the billfold. Roger had sent fifty dollars and a letter identifying me as a bona fide correspondent for the Baltimore Weekly Intelligencer. Inside the carpetbag were pencils and paper and nothing more.

I hadn’t ridden for some time, except as recreation. Rosalie had taken it up lately as a means of physical culture, likely because perching directly on a horse scandalized the older women. At a ticket counter I scribbled a note to her, telling Brill to deliver it into her hands alone and before he returned to the newspaper. He promised to inform her if I was to be away for any length of time. We left the terminal together, Brill to my house in Mount Vernon Square, me to find a livery.

By three o’clock I’d ridden twenty-five miles and was approaching Monocacy Station, south of Frederick, Maryland. This horse had a springy, jaunty gait and an especially willing spirit. He loved to run, but I hadn’t galloped for ten years or more. I didn’t lack experience, but was rusty and now sore.

On the highway I pulled alongside a wagon carrying three men in militia uniforms, their coats bearing the folds of a long stay in the wardrobe. I identified myself and paced beside them.

Their rumors were much more colorful than those in Baltimore. They told me the rebelling slaves belonged to Lewis Washington, George’s grandnephew, who lived five miles west of Harper’s Ferry. The slaves had abducted their master in the night, marched him down to the town and seized the armory and arsenal to arm themselves.

"You ridin’ down to Harper’s Ferry?" one of the men asked.

"I imagine. The cars are reserved for militia."

"Come along with us. You’re like to be waylaid by insurrectionists on the road," the man said.

They smuggled me aboard the crowded cars at Monocacy. All the seats were packed with men and their equipment, and I stood in the aisle with a dozen others, finally settling amidst the bundles of bedrolls and haversacks as the locomotive built up steam.

No later than five o’clock, the train stopped at a place called Sandy Hook, a wide space on the bank of the Potomac River about a mile before it met the Shenandoah. Hard rain the night before made the water high and rapid. A soft blue haze of mist and evergreen shrouded steep bluffs rising over both rivers. Where the rivers converged, Harper’s Ferry loomed up like a giant slice of pie, constructed on roughly terraced slopes like stair steps. From where I stood, the view was partially blocked by the covered railroad bridge spanning the Potomac and ending inside the town.

All was massive, amateur military confusion at Sandy Hook. One officer ordered the men to form into ranks and await orders; another demanded they fall into columns and march across the bridge. The men postured and strutted, argued and challenged each other. They sat down to chunks of bread and ham or wandered along a towpath running beside the C&O canal parallel to the river. I followed my traveling companions along the towpath, but we were halted twenty yards from the bridge by the guards posted there. One of them raised his musket.

Under their watchful eyes, the two militiamen and I stepped over the tracks to the far side of the bridge for a closer look at Harper’s Ferry. One of my companions nudged me, pointing to a body lying face-down on a sandy bar in the river. As the river flowed past, the water carried along a wisp of rusty red. With a popping sound, a little puff of smoke arose from the window of a building on an upper tier of the town’s winding streets.

The United States Armory stretched along the bank opposite us, a double column of low, ugly buildings surrounded by a fence of stone topped by iron pickets. The shooter was firing down into the armory compound from a house on a hillside. Other armed men lined up around the corners of buildings facing the armory grounds, pushing toward it, yet anxious to protect themselves. Just inside the main gate stood a building like a stable with three wide doors. All its windows were broken out.

"They must be holed up in there," one of the militiamen said.

"They could about hit us, they got a good enough rifle," the other man noted. For him, the corpse on the sand bar had put a damper on this escapade.

"What happened to him?" I called to a guard at the bridge.

"Kilt escaping," he said. Now the guard stepped toward us, took aim, and fired at the corpse. It jerked when the bullet hit it. One of the militiamen gripped my shoulder to steady himself.

"Sonsa bitches tore up this town. Kilt the mayor," the guard explained. "Boys come down from Martinsburg, drove them into that-there engine house."

This close, he reeked of whiskey. He reloaded his musket and took careful aim at the engine house. "Can’t do no harm from here," he said, lowering the weapon. "It’s just the satisfaction."

"So there’s militia?" I asked with a deliberate calm.

"You bet. Boys come down from Charles Town, Martinsburg, all over. Where you from?"

"Frederick."

"Don’t see how you goin’ to shake them loose outa there. Unless you set the place afire," the guard said. "I hope you do."

The guard was happy to tell me what happened that day, though my companions were inching back to rejoin their regiment. John "Ossawattomie" Brown with a dozen raiders attacked Harper’s Ferry an hour before midnight, seizing control of the armory as well as the arsenal and arms factory on the other side of town. Raiders posted at this very bridge stopped a train pulling in from the west about one a.m. In the resulting scuffle, a man was gutshot by a railroad spike fired from a musket. This first casualty was a black freeman, a baggage handler for the B&O. Brown had released the train at daylight, and the engineer stopped at Monocacy Station to wire ahead to Baltimore. That was the message my telegrapher had intercepted.

The guard rambled on about several separate skirmishes throughout the day, pointing a grubby finger at the landmarks in town. The last battle began at three o’clock, when the Martinsburg Militia herded Brown’s remaining men into the fire engine house. Several of the raiders had been killed and others escaped across the Potomac, but Brown still held Lewis Washington, his slaves, and other hostages. They were now surrounded on all sides. The guard showed me a second body in the river, under the bridge near the opposite bank. The insurrectionist had been taken prisoner, then executed for one thing or another.

"Who’s in charge?" I asked.

The guard looked at me blankly. Clearly, chain of command was a foreign notion. "Ain’t no one in charge. We got the various militia and people from town. The sonsa bitches kilt our mayor."

My friends in the militia had abandoned me, me in a suit and carrying a carpetbag. And now gunfire erupted from the town, random shooting, stopping as quickly as it started.

"You best join your comp’ny," the guard said, nodding toward the locomotive parked on the tracks. "Looks like they preparin’ to move."

Back to Top