Massachusetts & South Carolina In The Leadup to the Sectional Crisis, Part 7: The Secret Six And Their Role in John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry

 

 

I've devoted the lion's share of this article arguing what the South was doing to preserve and expand slavery during the 1850, how Massachusetts politicians were trying to combat its spread during this period and how this played out among elected officials in Congress and in the White House. Largely absent from this discussion has been what the abolitionists were doing to achieve their goals.

And there's a reason for that. All of the above groups have strategies to achieve their ends and understood that the way to achieve them was through political means. All of the research I have done on abolitionists both for this article and in much of my previous career finds that there may never have been a grand strategy by them to realize the end of slavery and that if there was, it failed because of their own approach.

No one can deny the activity of anti-slavery advocates during this period. The rallies held in New England and the North, the writing by those such as Garrison, the running of the Underground Railroad, the resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act and endless speeches given by those such as Frederick Douglass. But the most generous interpretation was that this met the  old standard as 'raising awareness'. Considering that Garrison and so many of his brethren considered slavery solely a moral issue and that the laws of man could not solve it, they chose to spend most of their time rejecting even those politicians who were trying to fight it. By that end men like Henry Wilson and Charles Summer – officials who were considered even by some northerners as radicals  - were mocked by Wendell Philips as being insufficiently loyal to the cause because they were busy using politics to try and fight it rather than attending anti-slavery rallies.

Indeed they considered the Republican Party – which the South was increasingly considering a threat to slavery – as utterly inadequate to the cause because it wasn't sufficiently in favor of the cause  of abolition. That this cause was still anathema to the majority of Americans even by the end of the 1850s was irrelevant. That the abolitionists never seemed to have much of a plan to end slavery or even comprehend that it could only be ended through political means is never echoed in their writings or speeches.

Had they been willing to be more active in the political process, try to moderate their views the same way men like Sumner and Wilson had done to achieve higher office, they would have at least had a voice where it mattered. But even by the end of the 1850s  - when the South's manipulation of the political system at every level had all but made slavery national – they remained unwilling to relent on the issue. Indeed after the Dred Scott decision, there was an increasing momentum for national disunion from Massachusetts in particular. Garrison argued "the quickest way to abolish slavery was to break up the nation remove that constitutional protection and paralyze the power of the master." That many in the South such as Rhett had made a similar argument at the start of the decade in order to preserve their power never entered the thoughts of Garrison; that what it might end up doing is creating two nations one slave, one free doesn't seem to have entered the thoughts of any. And by the end of the decade, a number of prominent Massachusetts citizens were making a movement to what might be consider the abolitionists' only real attempt to try and mark an end to slavery.

John Brown, in my opinion, is the greatest example in American history as to how one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. That he is celebrated by so many, particularly on the side of the left, shows their own double think because even before Harper's Ferry he was so many things they claim to loathe. A psychotic murderer who killed with no remorse, a man who had led a bloody insurrection that had led to the death of four of his sons, and who had a fundamentalist certainty that God was directing his actions. This is hardly a man deserving of so many books trying to paint him as a hero..

Frederic Douglas spoke of Brown: "I could only live for the slave, but he was willing to die for the slave." That, however, was not the quality that so many admired about him, particularly in Massachusetts. John Brown was willing to kill for the slave, something not even the most devoted abolitionists in New England were willing to do.

Brown was a friend of Gerrit Smith, a New York anti-slavery activist who never seemed quite willing to argue whether violence was justified in the cause. In his political life, he advocated for peaceful process of emancipation, later he'd argue for violent insurrection, usually backing away from it. Brown approached Smith first for funding for his next raid in January of 1857 but he walked away.

He found better prospects in Boston but men like Philips and Garrison thought he would become a blot on the caused. Others in that sate were more willing to hear him out. One such man was Franklin Sanborn, a young schoolmasters trying to get settlers from Massachusetts into Kansas. The two men developed a natural affinity, partially based because of Brown's portrait of a man of military brilliance destined to play a heroic role in the eradication of slavery. Sanborn saw him as 'a fighter and a purifier such as long overdue." He quickly offered to get him money and weapons needed for his plans.

Sanborn introduced him to some of his friends and while Garrison and Phelps rejected him outright several others were quickly drawn to him. Sanborn and five others, including Smith, became what would become known as the Secret Six, men who shrouded their connection to Brown because they suspected he intended to initiate a Southern Slave revolt.

These included Samuel Gridley Howe, a polymath who had served in the Greek revolution as a military doctor, publisher of a fiery antislavery newspaper, and tireless activist of the cause. His own wife, Julia Ward Howe, decried her husband's "terrible faults of character… often unjust in his likes and dislikes, arbitrary and cruel, with little mastery over his passions.)

Clergyman Theodore Parker, a theologian who was known for incorporating views of transcendentalism into his vision of Christ, so radical for his day, he was barred from Church pulpits. Parker had been a proponent of violent action since the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Unitarian minister forced to resign in 1848 because of his unorthodox views. During the protests against the capture of Fugitive slave Anthony Burns, he was scarred for life by a saber. He was adamantly in favor of disunion.

Finally there was George Luther Stearns, a self-made industrialist whose Medford mansion held dinners for luminaries of the anti-slavery movement. He believed bondage could never be abolished through constitutional means.

After Kansas had become a free state, Brown did turn to a far more brash and far reaching idea: an insurrection against the southern oligarchy designed to unleash a massive slave revolt, kill the masters and their families and destroy the South's hold over its four million slaves. He believed many would flee to the North or Canada, but the more adventurous blacks would join his guerilla army he planned to establish in the Alleghany mountains.

The operation would begin Harper's Ferry, then in Virginia, where Brown planned to seize the federal arsenal, which produced much of the government's military weaponry. Throughout the fall of 1857 he pulled together a small group of 'twelve to twenty 'misfits, idealists and charlatans', to lead the attack. Inevitably he returned North and discussed his plan with the Secret Six. To a man, they enthusiastically endorsed it.

By the time Brown left Boston on March 8^th, the Secret Six had become a formal committee with a treasurer (Stearns) financial commitments and a resolve to provide counsel and guidance as the plan unfolded.

Quickly complications arose. The previous summer Brown had lured a man named Hugh Forbes, who had fought for the Italian Revolution in 1848, who fancied himself an expert on military tactics. Brown hired him as a military adviser for $100 a month. They couldn't get along and Brown fell behind in the payments. Forbes left Iowa in a hurry and began writing letters to the Secret Six attacking Brown and threatened to expose the upcoming campaign if he didn't get his back pay. More ominously he traveled to air his complaints with Henry Wilson in person. Wilson understood enough of what he was hearing to write his friend Hoqwe and warned him that if he had contributed any weapons to him for Kansas, they couldn't be used in any other provocative purposes.

What followed was a flurry of letter-writing, consultations, arguments and hand wringing about their exposure. Finally they agreed he should postpone his insurrection until the following winter of spring giving time for the rumors to die down and for the Six to raise another $2000 to $5000 for the venture. They also made it clear that from this point forward they wanted no further details, giving them plausible deniability should they be charged with crimes related to Brown. Brown complained about his collaborator's lack of courage but headed to Kansas to draw attention way from him with $500 from the Secret Six.

Under normal circumstances these intelligent men had to have known this plan was at best, entirely fanciful. They certainly would have questioned whether Brown was the man who could achieve their ends and not get away unscathed. And it wasn't like Brown was going to be subtle in the meantime. On December 20^th he would lead a raiding party in Missouri that would plunder the raids of two slaveholders, shoot one of them dead, liberate eleven slaves and spirit them to freedom in Canada in the course of a remarkable 1000 mile journey. It was perhaps the most successful operation Brown ran – but it attracted the wrong form of attention as President Buchanan offered a $250 reward for the capture of Brown. (Brown offered $2.50 cents for anyone who would capture Buchanan.

In June of 1859 Brown arrived in Harper's Ferry and rented a farm about five miles from the town to which he transported multiple boxes of guns and ammunition. The plan was on October 16^th, telegraph lines connection the town were severed. Around the same time, Brown and several of his men overwhelmed the lone guard at the armory and took possession of the federal facility. The Virginia-Maryland bridge was seized and its sentinel taken to the armory where employees were commandeered when they showed up Monday morning. They eventually took nearly thirty hostages.

Several of Brown's men were dispatched to transport his cache of weapons from the farm to a schoolhouse about a mile from the armory. There they were planned to be distributed to slaves who, it was assumed, would flock their was they learned that their savior John Brown was there to free them. Brown would lead these grateful slaves into military action against slaveholders or send them north to freedom.

The biggest gap in the plan was how the slaves would learn about it. It didn't help there weren't that many slaves in that part of Virginia and Brown's misperception of how residents would react when alien agitators sought to spread racial havoc through the town. Indeed few blacks showed up at the schoolhouse and most of those who did returned to their masters when they heard gunfire. That came from local men, who grabbed whatever weapons they possessed and went to crush the invasion. Militias from local village quickly joined them. Meanwhile Brown's men detained for several hours a B & O train through town but eventually let it proceed – a huge blunder because Washington officials got word by telegraph Harper's Ferry was under assault.

When Buchanan learned the news on Monday he dispatched a contingent of marines under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee. The troops arrived on Tuesday morning, by which point the armory had become a scene of mass bloodshed. Brown and a contingent of his men were pinned down in the engine house of the armory, surrounded by several hundred armed locals. The center of the action quickly became the armory,  where locals were determine to kill any raiders who posed an inviting target. Osborn Anderson, who managed to escape , would later report Brown seemed 'puzzled' at the scenes of whites reveling in ways he had hoped to see among throngs of blacks after their liberation. This reveals Brown never considered the possibility things would go against him.

Sensing the helplessness of the situation Brown twice sent out emissaries to 'negotiate a truce'. The second time he sent out his own son, who was shot. Watson Brown scrambled back to the protected armory ground, whimpering in agony. "If you must die, die like a man," his model father told him.

This pattern of bloodshed continued until Lee appeared. He dispatched his lieutenant Jeb Stuart to parlay with Brown. Stuart handed Brown a note from Lee ensuring the safety of him and his men if he surrender with no conditions. Brown refused and slammed the door shut. The marines smashed the door down with bayonets. In a few minutes it was over. Watson and one of his brothers soon died but Brown would survive.

Brown's redemption came between the 45 days of his capture and execution. He did everything in his power to make it clear he died not in leading an insurrection but for his opposition to the scourge of slavery. In his court case and an address he gave on November 2,  he basically whitewashed his role in so much slaughter and butchery under the idea that he had done so in the name of God.

And the antislavery North was more than willing to turn Brown into a saint, increasingly taking on violent rhetoric. Henry Wilson chose to use this as a way to a way to advocate against 'pro-slavery Democrats' and that the specter of slavery expansion was why Brown had done it. The North shows to swallow Brown's biggest lie: that he never intended to lead an insurrection or harm other people. He was just there to free slaves and lead them north to freedom.

Of course, the Secret Six knew better. Among Browns many lapses when he set out on his mission was leaving behind at the Maryland farmhouse a passel of letters to and from followers and supporters including the six. They were complicit in Brown's crimes, which included, according to the charges against him, treason, murder and seeking to insight a slave rebellion. As early as October 19^th, they found letters and checks from Gerrit Smith among his letters.

Smith appeared to suffer a mental breakdown and was admitted to an asylum. Sanborn was advised to leave the country. Parker was in Rome and would soon die of tuberculosis. The remaining six thought they could avoid extradition due to a legal opinion which turned out to be faulty.

On December 5^th Senator James Mason of Virginia formed a committee to investigate the Harper's Ferry raid to see if any citizens were implicated as an accessory. Howe and Stearns testified before it and perjured themselves when asked if they knew anything about Brown's plot. Sanborn ignored his summons. Smith was unable to testify due to his 'condition'. Sanborn ignored his summons. When marshals came to arrest him, the arrest was quashed on a technicality, the handcuffs removed, and the schoolmasters avoided testifying.

Mason's committee failed to indict or even implicate anyone. Historians would later theorize that Mason, who was far from incompetent, opted to get the country past Harper's Ferry as quickly as possible because they had no desire to further inflame the nation. Indeed tensions were now so high that more and more members of Congress were carrying small weapons on the floor of the House and the Senate.

John Brown is a controversial and well-known figure in history: the Secret Six are completely forgotten. With the exception of Parker, who died in Rome in May of 1860, all of them went on to live eminently respectable lives, either serving in combat, raising money for antislavery causes and later working for the causes of racial equality. None of that should excuse that all six of them were essentially financially and legally complicit in sponsoring an insurrection on American soil and were responsible indirectly for the deaths of all involved in that fight. And they did so knowing full well the murderous capabilities of that man well before they starting funding him.

The myth of John Brown is that he only killed for a righteous reason – that he killed because he thought slavery was wrong. Even if you allow that was a moral right, does that justify all of his followers dying in the cause, many of whom were his own children? Does that make up for the fact that the most charitable definition of Brown is that he was true believer and at worst was almost certain insane? Does it justify the fact that even at his basic attempts, he was a massive failure in his previous strategies and had no self-awareness of the reality of the situation right up until the raid on Harper's Ferry?

John Brown was willing to die for the slave – though his actions at the armory argue he wanted to delay that possibility as long as possible – but he also made it clear that he felt human life was meaningless to him, whether he took it or whether it was that of his followers. The legend of John Brown is what most of those who admire him respect him for. The reality – that he was a fundamentalist extremist who butchered people without remorse, who had no empathy for even those who died around him and who was a financially funded freedom fighter for people who were not willing to get their hands bloody themselves – is far uglier. He was more valuable to the cause dead then alive and I'm sure he would have been fine with that. For those who admire his legacy without considering what it was based on, they would do well to reckon with that.

In the next article I will deal with the circumstances that were going on in Congress that were leading to the collapse of the Buchanan Presidency – and the rise of Abraham Lincoln.