Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Soon the bell of the Lutheran church atop the hill starts to clang, summoning the citizens to an emergency meeting, and a rider has been sent to Shepherdstown to call out the local militia, and a second has been dispatched to Charles Town for the Jefferson Guards, formed for the express purpose of meeting precisely this circumstance after the Turner rebellion back in ’31.

Father and his men, when they hear the church bell ringing on and on for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, know what is happening. Don’t be frightened, boys, don’t panic. There’s still plenty of time, he assures the men. The hostages and practically every rifle in the town are in our hands. And the Lord is watching over us. We won’t go down, boys, but if the Lord requires it of us, then it will be as Samson went. These people know that, and they don’t want it, so we’re still safe enough here.

It is full daylight, around seven A.M., when Father strides through the gate of the armory yard and approaches the railroad station and calls out for Mr. Phelps, the conductor. Come here, sir! I wish to parley with you! Phelps pokes his head out the door but refuses to come forward. I have decided to let you move the train on to Baltimore, Father declares. But tell your employer, and tell all the civil and military authorities, that this is the last train I will permit in or out of Harpers Ferry, at the extreme peril of those men we have taken prisoner, until we have finished with our business here.

Phelps nods, and he and the engineer and the baggagemaster return to the train, fire it up, and take it slowly towards the covered bridge and across the Potomac into Maryland. From the schoolhouse on the heights opposite, I watch the train far below snake its way out of the bridge and wind along the north bank of the river towards Baltimore and Washington beyond, and I know that within minutes, as soon as the train has reached the station at Monocacy, news of the raid will reach the main offices of the B & O. An hour later, in Richmond, an aide to Governor Henry Wise will disturb the Governor’s breakfast with astonishing news, and shortly afterwards, in Washington, D.C., an adjutant general will burst into the office of the Secretary of War, who will read the wire from Governor Wise requesting federal troops and will at once ask for an emergency meeting with President Buchanan. More in line with Father’s purposes — and I know this, too — by evening, every newspaper in the land will be shouting the news of our raid:

FEARFUL AND EXCITING INTELLIGENCE! NEGRO INSURRECTION

IN HARPERS FERRY, VIRGINIA, LED BY JOHN BROWN OF KANSAS!!

MANY SLAIN, HUNDREDS TAKEN HOSTAGE, FEDERAL ARMS SEIZED!!!

In morning light, a few personal weapons, mostly antiquated muskets and squirrel guns, have been located by the townspeople, and five or six of the more adventurous men among them have taken up firing positions on the hillside above the armory yard. It is not long, however, before they are spotted by the raiders, most of them Kansas veterans and much more experienced than the locals at this sort of action and possessing weapons of surpassing accuracy, so that the townsmen are barely able to open fire, when one of them, a grocer named Boerly, is shot dead by a bullet from a raider rifle, which causes a quick retreat amongst the others. It is mid-morning. The militias from Shepherdstown and Charles Town have not yet arrived, and in Washington, fifty miles to the east, federal troops are only now being mustered for railroad transport to Harpers Ferry. Here in town, their feeble efforts at defense effectively curtailed by the raiders’ deadly accurate Sharps rifles, by their fear of endangering the hostages, and by their growing certainty that there are many more than Father’s seventeen raiders occupying the town and hundreds more escaped slaves than seven, the citizens are limited to taking occasional, erratic potshots in the general direction of the armory, causing more danger and havoc to themselves than to the raiders.

Even so, over at the rifle works on Hall’s Island, Kagi has grown increasingly anxious about the passage of so much time, for he and his two men, Copeland and Leary, though they have so far held the factory uncontested, are situated far from the hostages in the firehouse, and thus, of Father’s force, they are the most vulnerable to attack from the townsmen. Kagi dispatches Leary to town on foot to request Father to send back a wagon and additional men, so that they can quickly load the seized weapons from the factory and begin their escape into the mountains. It is time. None of the raiders has been killed or even wounded. According to the plan, they should all be departing from Harpers Ferry by now.

And I, up on the Maryland Heights, should also have left by now. That is the plan, Father’s plan, his vision of how it would go at Harpers Ferry on the night of October 16 and the morning of October 17, and everything up to now has gone accordingly. Except for the one thing: that the hundreds of escaping slaves whom we expected to come rushing to our side have not yet appeared, and the few who have are turning fearful and hesitant and may themselves have to be put under guard and made into hostages.

But that does not matter, I decide, as I watch from my perch above the town. Father’s plan can accommodate that, too. We have seized at least three wagonloads of weapons, we have terrorized the entire South into believing that an insurrection has begun, and in the North we have raised fresh huzzahs and enthusiastic promises of material support and a coming flood of volunteer fighters — we have, indeed, begun an insurrection, which surely, thanks to the presence of Frederick Douglass, will catch and burst into flame in a matter of mere days, and if Father leads his men out of Harpers Ferry now and makes his appointed rendez-vous in the Alleghenies with Mr. Douglass, we will still be able to feed those flames and follow them into the deeper South, just as Father wished. It is not too late.

The slaves will come in, Father insists. They will soon start to arrive. We must give them every moment up to the last possible moment to learn of our raid and our intentions and to overcome their natural fears and flee their masters’ farms and plantations for the town, which is still under our control. The second we abandon the town, the escaping slaves will have no place to go where they are not in terrible danger. For their sake, we shall continue to hold the town, he declares. Even as the Jefferson Guards ride in on the Charles Town Pike from the west and the Shepherdstown militia comes in along the Potomac road from the north and the troop train from Washington slowly approaches from the east.

But surely, Miss Mayo, surely you, of all people, must already know the part of my account that I am leaving out, and that it turns all I have been relating to you these many months into a fantasy, an old man’s wishful dream, and makes of Father’s exquisitely detailed plan a deadly chimera. For you, like the rest of America, have read and believed Frederick Douglass’s eloquent narrative of his life and are familiar with his version of his final meeting with Father and me in Chambersburg. I have no quarrel with it — what Mr. Douglass says there is true: that for an entire day he and Father wrestled like angels, as the one struggled to keep the other from martyrdom, and the other fought to convince the one to save him from martyrdom by joining him there. And that both men lost the fight.

It was a curious, paradoxical situation, for the two loved and admired one another past all reasoning, and each, to complete his work, needed the other alive and at his side. Thanks to the peculiarities of the disease of racialism and that all Americans, although differently, suffer from it, Negro as much as white, the War Against Slavery could never be won by white or Negro people alone. More thoroughly than almost anyone else in the movement, Father and Mr. Douglass knew this, which caused them both frequently to be criticized by their racial brethren, the whites disdainful of Father’s close, ongoing alliances with Negroes and the blacks suspicious of Mr. Douglass’s apparent, privileged ease of movement amongst white gentility. Then, as much as now, men like Father and Frederick Douglass made people of both races, regardless of their politics and principles regarding racial matters, anxious and mistrustful. They were, therefore, each other’s main comfort.