Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

Buchanan had lost one of the most vicious political struggles in the history of Congress, Southern Democrats had seriously damaged the patience of their Northern counterparts, and Buchanan loyalists in the North were unseated wholesale by upstart Republicans in the 1858 congressional elections. In the state elections a year later, Republicans seized control of the legislatures and governorships of the New England states, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Iowa. To add insult to injury, Douglas successfully won reelection to the Senate after a grueling campaign against the new rising Republican star of Illinois, Lincoln. In fact, almost the only Northern Democrats who survived Northern anger over Lecompton were anti-administration Douglasites.

Buchanan’s troubles had only begun, and they were now about to be worsened by one of the weirdest episodes in the history of American politics. Few people outside Kansas knew anything about John Brown, and those within Kansas knew him only as the anti-slavery fanatic who had taken his own private revenge on the pro-slavery cause in the murders at Pottawatomie in May 1856. Brown raged against slavery with all the ill-controlled violence of his being. If Brown was a fanatic, he was also something of a visionary: profoundly moved by the injustice of slavery, a champion of the political equality of blacks, willing to break any man-made law in the interest of obeying a higher law of justice and right. “He was always an enigma,” wrote one anti-slavery journalist who met Brown in 1856, “a strange compound of enthusiasm and cold, methodic stolidity,—a volcano beneath a mountain of snow.”48

Unfortunately for Brown, the temporary peace that Governor Geary brought to Kansas after the Pottawatomie massacre dried up most of the excitement Brown had derived from butchering hapless slaveholders. He took little interest in the debate over the Lecompton Constitution, and instead he began to cast around for more substantial opportunities to wreak havoc on what he perceived as the satanic minions of the slave aristocracy. In December 1858 he participated in another raid, this time on Fort Scott, which liberated a free-state prisoner and killed a shopkeeper. Brown then raided into Missouri, liberating eleven Missouri slaves whom he then transported to Canada. But Brown got no thanks among the free-staters in Kansas, since his raids only drew the wrath of pro-slavery thugs down on their heads. “I consider it my duty to draw the scene of excitement to some other part of the country,” Brown announced, and once he deposited his fugitives in Canada in March 1859, he gave no more thought to Kansas.49

Instead, Brown’s eye fell upon Virginia. Between January 1857 and June 1859, Brown began recruiting volunteers and money for a guerilla raid into the Old Dominion. Brown’s plan was to liberate as many slaves as he could find or who would flock to him, establish himself in a stronghold in the western Virginia mountains, and from there engulf all of the South in a massive slave insurrection. The initial object of the raid would be the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, on the upper Potomac River, where Brown would be able to seize the arms he would need to defend himself in the Virginia mountains. Listened to dispassionately, Brown’s scheme was bizarre to say the least, and Frederick Douglass, who had known Brown since 1847, tried to talk him out of it, down to almost the last minute. “My discretion or my cowardice made me proof against the dear old man’s eloquence,” Douglass said, reporting that he attempted to convince Brown in his last meeting with him that Harpers Ferry was “a perfect steel trap and that once in he would never get out alive.”50

Brown had made up his mind, however, and by mid-October he had managed to recruit and train twenty-two fighters, some of them free blacks, such as Dangerfield Newby, who hoped to liberate their families still in slavery. More significant, Brown had traded in on his reputation as a hero of anti-slavery militancy to approach prominent Eastern abolitionists such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, George Luther Stearns, Franklin B. Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and Samuel Gridley Howe, and easily hypnotized them with his fire-and-brimstone eloquence into giving him the money he needed to finance the attack on Harpers Ferry. “God has honored comparatively but a very small part of mankind with any possible chance for such mighty & soul-satisfying rewards,” he assured Franklin Sanborn. “I expect to effect a mighty conquest even though it be like the last victory of Sampson.”51

Early in the morning of October 17, 1859, Brown and his followers descended upon the Harpers Ferry arsenal, disposed of its two guards, captured the Baltimore & Ohio railroad bridge over the Potomac, and sent squads out to gather up slave recruits. Instead of an army of slave volunteers, two companies of Virginia militia arrived to pin Brown down in the arsenal and begin picking off his men. By midafternoon, Brown and his beleaguered band were barricaded into the arsenal’s brick firehouse. The next morning, a detachment of U.S. Marines under a lieutenant colonel of cavalry named Robert E. Lee assaulted the firehouse and captured or killed all of Brown’s remaining men.52

It might have been best for the emotional well-being of the entire country had Brown himself died in the assault, but he was only wounded 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