Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen C. Guelzo Read Free Book Online Page B

and captured, and subsequently he was put on trial for treason, murder, and insurrection against the Commonwealth of Virginia. The trial gave Brown what he had always really wanted, a public pulpit, and what he revealed about the nature of his plot, the identities of the people who had backed it, and the cold fury with which he was prepared to execute it sent a shiver of horror down the back of the South. As Frederick Douglass wrote afterward, “With the Allegheny mountains for his pulpit, the country for his church, and the whole civilized world for his audience, John Brown was a thousand times more powerful as a preacher than as a warrior.” 53
    It could only have conjured up nightmares of Nat Turner, of slave rebellion, of wholesale race war, to listen to Brown’s description of his planned insurrection, especially since it was evident that he had absolutely no regrets about what he had done or what he had planned to do. “I see a book kissed which I suppose to be the Bible,” Brown said at his sentencing, “which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do to them. … I believe that to have interfered as I have done in behalf of His despised poor, is no wrong, but right.” If the court found that sufficient grounds for his execution, then he embraced the verdict with the fervor of a Christian martyr. “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 millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done.” Brown’s trial lasted seven days, during which he behaved himself with amazing composure. He was declared guilty on November 2, 1859, and hanged on December 2 in Charlestown. His last words, written on a slip of paper and handed to a jail guard, Hiram O’Bannon, hung like dark thunderclouds over the American horizon: “I John Brown am now quite
certain
that the crimes of this
guilty land
will never be purged
away
, but with Blood. I had
as I now think, vainly
flattered myself that without
very much
bloodshed, it might be done.” 54
    Brown’s raid caused an eruption in the South. Although Southern leaders publicly congratulated their slaves on their reluctance to rally to Brown’s banner, the behavior of Southern whites showed something entirely different from confidence. “Never has the country been so excited before,” wrote one Georgian in December 1859. “There was great feeling in 1820, but not like the present. The South is deeply stirred.” Governor Andrew Barry Moore of Alabama called for passage of a bill that organized volunteer military units in every Alabama county, authorized borrowing $200,000 to buy weapons, and established scholarships for young Alabama males to attend military schools. Slave codes were toughened, slave patrols were reinstated, and violence against blacks multiplied. White Northerners were particularly suspect, since travelers and strangers from the North could easily turn out to be emissaries of some future John Brown. Nonslaveholding white Southerners were also the target of suspicion. It had not escaped the notice of the planters and their friends in the Southern state capitals that Brown had chosen western Virginia for his raid, a region of comparatively few slaves but full of resentful white yeomen. It was even more disturbing to learn that the Harpers Ferry townspeople and even the militia had been less than enthusiastic in attacking Brown (the Virginia militia had, in fact, declined Lieutenant Colonel Lee’s invitation to make the final assault on Brown). “Watch Harpers Ferry people,” Virginia governor Henry Wise warned his agents in mid-November, and at Brown’s hanging, Wise ordered the local commander to “let no crowd be near enough to the prisoner to hear any speech he may attempt.” 55
    The ultimate message of John Brown for Southerners was the lesson