Franklin: "Chapter XXXIV. The John Brown Tragedy.," by Alexander K. McClure, 1905
Summary: McClure describes John Brown's stay in Chambersburg during the weeks immediately preceding his notorious 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry. He also discusses the visit paid to Brown by Frederick Douglass; the capture of John Cook, one of Brown's associates; and his own unsuccessful efforts to help Cook escape from the Chambersburg jail.
THE John Brown raid on Harper's Ferry was one of the most startling and tragic events in the history of the Pennsylvania border, and it was as unexpected as a thunderbolt from an unclouded sky. In the midsummer of 1859 a tall, spare, plainly-clad and heavily-bearded man appeared in Chambersburg, and engaged boarding with a widow who lived quietly away from the center of the town. He gave his name as Dr. Smith, and announced that his purpose was the organization of a considerable force for mining operations in the State of Virginia. He remained there for six weeks or more, and became known by sight at least to most of the people of the village, but was exceedingly modest in seeking intercourse with those around him. The post office was next door to my law office, and the afternoon mail arrived about four o'clock, bringing the daily papers from the East, and it was common for a crowd of a dozen or more to gather waiting for their papers and mails.
Among those who appeared frequently to watch for the arrival of the train was Dr. Smith. He made few acquaintances, and rarely conversed with any except when conversation was opened by another. I saw him many times, and on several occasions conversed with him, never doubting that he was a quiet business man who decided to develop the mineral wealth of Western Virginia. I am quite sure that not a single citizen of Chambersburg ever had reason to doubt Dr. Smith's identity. Occasionally, he had visitors at his quiet boarding house, but not in such numbers as to attract attention. His last visitor before his fatal movement upon Harper's Ferry was Frederick Douglas, the great colored leader, and his presence in Chambersburg was not known until after the battle at Harper's Ferry. He visited Brown just before the movement was made upon Harper's Ferry, and made exhaustive efforts to have Brown abandon the enterprise. Douglas afterwards gave me the full account of that interview with Brown. He was not in sympathy with the movement, but was in very close relations with John Brown, and when he learned what Brown contemplated, he earnestly advised him against it, and when he found that Brown was about to start upon the expedition, he hurried to Chambersburg and spent a night with him in vain effort to have him abandon it.
A day or two before the attack on Harper's Ferry, a young man came into my office and asked me to write his will. He was accompanied by a man whom he introduced as Mr. Henry, and gave his own name as Mr. Merriam. We retired to a private office, where I drew his will. He told me he was from Massachusetts, that he was going on a trip South, that accidents might happen in traveling, and he thought it prudent to make a disposition of his estate before starting. There was nothing in his movements or any of his expressions to indicate anything at all out of the ordinary. The fact that he made the Abolition Society of Massachusetts his residuary legatee was not regarded as calling for inquiry into the plans or purposes of the testator. When I drew the will he signed his name, Francis J. Merriam, in a bold legible hand, and I inquired whether he would have his friend as one of the witnesses, but he said that he desired two witnesses from the office, as they could be found without difficulty if wanted. The man whom he introduced as Mr. Henry was J. Henri Kagi, who was among the killed at Harper's Ferry. The will was properly witnessed and mailed to the executor in Boston.
Within a few days thereafter I discovered the name of Mr. Merriam in the list of Brown's little army that attacked Harper's Ferry, and he was one of the few who escaped. He worked his way through the South Mountain, reached Philadelphia, registered his correct name at the Merchants' Hotel, and went to his home in Boston. Whether an effort was made to have him returned for trial I am not advised, but he never was arrested.
John Brown's entire force consisted of Brown and his three sons, Owen, Oliver and Watson; William and Adolphus Thompson, brothers of Henry Thompson, who was the husband of Brown's eldest daughter; John Henri Kagi, Aaron Dwight Stevens, John Edwin Cook, William H. Leeman, George Plummer Tidd, Jeremiah G. Anderson, Albert Hazelett, Stewart Taylor, Edwin and Barclay Coppock, and Francis J. Merriam, all of whom were white men, and Osborne P. Anderson; William Copeland, Lewis Sherrard Leary and Shields Green, colored.
Brown had rented the Kennedy farm in Washington County, Maryland, four miles from Harper's Ferry. It was isolated and of little value, as the rental was $35.00 a year. At that place his consultations were held, and his pikes and other implements of warfare, which had been forwarded ostensibly as mining tools, were stored. On Sunday morning, October 16, 1859, Brown had his entire force at the Kennedy farm, and they were all summoned to unusually early Sunday morning prayers. He read a chapter from the Bible, followed by a very fervent prayer for the deliverance of the slaves. Every man responded to his name at roll call. At ten o'clock the force was again assembled with Anderson, colored, in the chair, who read the constitution of the organization, and gave out detailed orders for the attack to be made that night. The story of the two days' battle, the loss of a number of lives, including several citizens, and the final capture of Brown and the remainder of his band by Colonel Robert E. Lee, who had been sent by the government to recover possession of the Harper's Ferry works, need not be repeated here. Of Brown's men, Oliver and Watson Brown, William and Adolphus Thompson, Kagi, Leeman, Taylor, Leary and Jeremiah Anderson were killed in the battle; Owen Brown, Cook, Tidd, Coppock, Merriam, Hazelett and Osborne P. Anderson escaped. Of these, Cook and Hazelett were captured and executed with Stevens Coppock and the others. Brown was severely wounded.
Oliver Brown, Coppock, Tidd and Anderson escaped into the South Mountain together, but had to move very slowly on account of the severe wounds of Brown and one or two of the others. They reached Chambersburg a week or more after they had gotten into the mountain, and were hidden for several days in a forest near the town, where they were fed and had medical assistance. Mr. Deal, who afterwards filled the position of postmaster under Lincoln, was in communication with the underground railway organization of the State, and learned from Dr. Rutherford, of Harris-burg, the best method of getting fugitives to the home of the Browns in Crawford County. As soon as they were able to travel they moved northward, traveling only at night, crossed the Juniata at Bell's Mills, and were piloted and cared for by the underground agents until they reached Crawford County, where Brown remained undisturbed, although his presence there was well known. Morrow B. Lowery, a very active agent of the underground road, met them soon after they crossed the Juniata, and personally accompanied them to Crawford, where he resided. Why no effort was made to arrest Brown's son I have never understood. One thousand dollars reward was offered by the State of Virginia for each of the fugitives, but no attempt was made to capture any others than Hazelett and Cook, and Hazelett was first captured believing him to be Cook, and that blunder cost Cook his life, as will be seen later in the narrative.
Captain Cook was altogether the most brilliant of John Brown's lieutenants. He had fought through the Kansas war when the Missouri border ruffians, as they were then called, had a price set upon his life, and he was completely infatuated with the idea of taking revenge upon the South by provoking negro insurrection as the beginning of the extermination of slavery. There was great anxiety on the part of Virginia to accomplish the arrest of Cook, and he was arrested finally by walking right into the hands of the only man in Franklin County who would have attempted to capture him. That man was Dan Logan, a most accomplished natural detective, who had many times arrested fugitive slaves, and who was constantly advised of all rewards offered for slaves or fugitives from the South, as they very often took refuge in South Mountain, where Logan lived. A man of great self possession and courage, he well knew that Cook would prefer death to surrender, so he captured him by strategy.
Cook had been several days in the South Mountain, and was greatly in need of food. In his search for some hamlet in the mountains where he could obtain bread and meat, he suddenly emerged on a number of workmen employed at the Hughes Furnace, where Cleggett FitzHugh, a Southern man, was manager, and Dan Logan was in conversation with FitzHugh at the time that Cook appeared not many yards distant. The moment Logan saw Cook he recognized him, as he had a full description of him, and Cook's unique personality made it impossible to err. He was under medium size, skin as soft as a woman's, and his deep blue eyes and wealth of blond hair made it easy to identify him. Cook stopped short when he saw he was in the immediate presence of a large number of men, but he was feeble from starvation, and knowing that he would be pursued, he walked boldly up to FitzHugh and Logan and said that he was hunting in the mountains, and desired to get some bread and bacon. Logan, without showing any emotion whatever, told him that he would take him to his store, although Logan had no store, and supply him with all the food he desired.
Cook was thrown entirely off his guard, and walked along between the two men. At a signal from Logan, each grasped Cook by the wrist and he was helpless. His identity was clearly established by his commission, which was in his pocket, and his powder flask, on which his name was blown. Cook was disarmed, and in his feeble condition Logan knew that he could not escape. He put him in a buggy without tying his hands or feet, and started immediately for Chambersburg, some eight or ten miles distant. On the way Cook attempted to negotiate for his escape. He asked Logan what reward had been offered, to which Logan answered, a thousand dollars. In answer to Cook's question, whether Logan wanted him to be hung, Logan answered that he did not; if the reward was paid he would deliver him to any person he would name. Cook told him that the reward could be readily arranged, as he was the brother-in-law of Governor Willard, of Indiana, and had another brother-in-law, a rich merchant, in Brooklyn. Cook had told Logan the truth about his relations to Governor Willard, as Mrs. Willard was his sister, but Logan suspected that it was the beginning of an effort to deceive him and let Cook get away without him receiving the reward.
Finally Cook appealed to him to take him to some one in Chambersburg who might feel an interest in him with whom an arrangement might be made for the payment of the reward. I had just been elected to the senate a few weeks before, and Logan had very actively supported me in my several campaigns. He finally told Cook that he would take him to my office, and that if I told him to go home he would go and ask no questions. They arrived in town near sunset, and Logan at once sent to my office, house and other places where I might be found, but I had gone that evening to look at some suburban lots with a view of purchasing a cow pasture, and on my way home at the extreme end of the town, where they never thought of looking for me, I stopped at a little store where a number of friends had gathered who had been very active with me in the senatorial fight just recently closed, and I chatted with them for an hour.
Soon after dark I walked down the street on my way home, and in passing the office of Squire Reisher I found quite a crowd assembled, and stopped to inquire what it meant. Some one told me that Captain Cook had been captured, and was there before the justice. I went inside, but as soon as Logan saw me he took me to one side, and begged of me to get Cook away, as he did not want the responsibility of having a man hung. He told me that he had hunted for me, and now regretted that he had arrested Cook. I went in and Logan introduced me to Cook, and I told the justice that Captain Cook would waive a hearing and he should remand him to prison, which was done. I went with him to the prison, and Cook was faint and nervous, but game to the limit. I found myself in the rather delicate position of being counsel for a prisoner whose escape I wanted to effect, and at the same time was counsel for the sheriff whose duty it was to prevent him from escaping.
I did not apprehend any serious difficulty in Cook escaping from prison if he could remain until the next night, and so told him. We found that a requisition could not possibly be delivered to Chambersburg from Richmond to arrive any time the following day, and it was decided that he must remain in prison over night, when everything would be in readiness for his escape the following night. After the programme was arranged I talked with him for an hour on his wonderful exploits in Kansas, and found him a man of fine culture, rare intelligence, but keenly emotional. I did not doubt that he would escape the following night, and said to him that if he escaped this time he must cease his reckless revolutionary methods against slavery. His face at once flushed and he jumped up, declaring that as long as God gave him life he would battle to the death against the men who held the slaves in bonds.
Soon after nine o'clock I left him, telling him to be quiet, as he would hear in due time as to how he might escape on the following night. I went to J. Allison Eyster, then one of the commissioners of the county, and asked him whether the man was living who had built the jail. He said he was, and then one of the oldest citizens. We went together to call upon the builder, told him we wanted to know where a prisoner should be placed to best get out of jail. He gave us minute instructions as to the best method of making the escape, and I started for home, confident that on the following night Cook would be free.
When I reached my residence and entered the library, I found Mrs. McClure and Miss Riley, daughter of the Democratic Congressman of our town, a very intimate associate of Mrs. McClure's, and later known in Philadelphia as Mrs. Rev. Thos. X. Orr, waiting for me; and both were clad ready for the street with a considerable bundle on the floor beside them. When I asked what it meant, Mrs. McClure informed me that they had decided to visit Captain Cook in the jail, as the sheriff would not refuse Mrs. McClure admittance, and after remaining for some time, they intended to use the contents of their bundle in dressing Cook in female apparel, when one of them would walk out of the jail with him, and the other remain in the cell. Both were women of unusual earnestness of purpose and heartily sympathized with the Free State people in the bloody Kansas struggle, and there was no doubt that they could have carried out their plan, as they would not have been closely scrutinized by the sheriff.
I at once explained that a requisition could not be obtained for Captain Cook from Virginia until the second day, and that the arrangements were all completed for his escape from prison on the following night. They both earnestly protested against the delay, and insisted upon making the venture, as they were apprehensive that Cook would not escape as had been planned. I had finally to be peremptory in forbidding their visit to the jail, and with tears in their eyes they said they would abandon it. Their apprehensions were fearfully verified, as at eleven o'clock the next morning an officer appeared at the jail with a requisition from the Governor of Virginia, and Cook was remanded to the gibbet at Charlestown.
Hazelett had been arrested near Shippensburg the week before, and when arrested he was supposed to be Captain Cook, as he partially answered Cook's description. He was taken to Carlisle, and the authorities at Richmond were notified that Cook was a prisoner there. A requisition was promptly forwarded for his rendition, and by the time it arrived his identity was discovered, and the requisition was lying there not more than an hour distant from Chambersburg by rail. Cook was taken to prison in Virginia, and the night before his execution he managed to escape from his cell and attained the outer wall of the prison, but, strange as it may seem for one of his courage, and knowing the doom that awaited him, he surrendered to the guard without requiring it to end his life there by the bullet.
He seemed to have been strangely fated. Had I been in my office, at my home, or in any of my usual visiting places, when he arrived in town, Logan would have disappeared in ten minutes with absolute certainty of his reward; and had I permitted Mrs. McClure and Miss Riley to execute their heroic plan for his escape, he would certainly have been out of the jail before midnight, but the decree of a different destiny was inexorable, and Cook, with his captive associates who had survived the conflict, paid the penalty of his lawlessness on the gallows. There was very general regret throughout the county that Cook had been captured and executed, and the man who most keenly regretted it was Dan Logan, who had captured him in the South Mountain.
The John Brown raid was the maddest of all mad attempts ever made in a revolutionary enterprise. Brown and Cook, while different in almost every chief attribute of character, except in their sincere and intense hatred of slavery, were hopeless fanatics in their revengeful policy against the slaveholders. They had faced the rifles for several years of the "Missouri ruffians," who attempted to force slavery into Kansas, and they had often hidden for weeks or months when a large price was offered for their capture dead or alive, and all their instincts and feelings seem to have been centered in the desire to avenge their wrongs by revolutionary and bloody emancipation of slavery. John Brown was as sincerely and severely a religionist as any of the many millions of the land, and he organized, attempted to execute, and went through the whole Harper's Ferry tragedy, firmly believing that he was obeying the commands of his Creator; and Cook, while less zealous as a religionist, was fully persuaded that it was his duty to bring about the release of the bondsmen in the country. They were not wild, hap-hazard buccaneers, but their deep convictions, intensified by long and bloody sacrifice, made them organize the raid on Harper's Ferry, believing that a slave rebellion would speedily follow.
The entire country was profoundly impressed by the Brown tragedy at Harper's Ferry. A decided majority of the Northern people, including a very large element of the Democratic party, had no sympathy with the warfare waged in Kansas to force slavery into that State, and all confessed that the movement was as lawless as it was visionary and hopeless. Had Henry A. Wise, then Governor of Virginia, taken the advice of the cool-headed leaders of the North, such as Fernando Wood and others, he would have commuted their punishment to imprisonment for life on the ground that they were simply madmen. Wood and others earnestly urged them to do so, as it would have been a declaration from the South that the Harper's Ferry tragedy was only the creation of a score of madmen; but Wise summoned the militia in grand martial array, and made the execution of Brown and his fellows one of the great events of Virginia history. Even the sober sense of the South revolted at Wise's ostentatious exhibition of the authority of a great Commonwealth in dealing with a few desperate fanatics, and he thus alienated the sympathy of the North and largely the respect of the South. Thaddeus Stevens was then in Congress, and when Congress assembled a few weeks after the Harper's Ferry tragedy, some of the Southern fire-eaters haughtily criticised [sic] Stevens by pointing to the logical fruits of his revolutionary teaching. He answered only as the grim old Commoner could answer. He said, "John Brown deserved to be hung for being a hopeless fool. He attempted to capture Virginia with seventeen men when he ought to have known that it would require at least twenty-five."
None then had any conception of the immortality that was to attach to the name of John Brown. Within less than two years, overwhelming armies were in battle array in the Southern States, and from the first disaster of Bull Run until the final surrender at Appomattox, every Confederate force that met their brethren of the North on the battlefield heard the song of "John Brown's body lies moulding in the grave, but his soul goes marching on;" and to-day his modest grave in Northwestern Pennsylvania is visited by the lovers of liberty with a reverence for his memory that few even of the grandest of our chieftains have commanded.
Bibliographic Information: Source copy consulted: Alexander K. McClure, Old Time Notes of Pennsylvania, 1905, pages 360-371.
