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Journalists arriving in Harpers Ferry on Tuesday, October 18, found gruesome proof of the violence that had just ended. David Strother, who wrote and sketched for Harper’s Weekly, visited the railroad trestle where the town’s mayor, Fontaine Beckham, had lain for hours after being shot. “The boards were stained with dark blood marks and tufts of white hair were visible sticking to them,” he wrote. Beckham’s exposed body had finally been carted away in a wheelbarrow by Christine Fouke, the same woman who kept gunmen from shooting one of Brown’s men held prisoner in the Wager House. No one had yet bothered to collect the slain insurgents, most conspicuously Dangerfield Newby, whose maimed corpse still lay on the pavement, twenty-four hours after he became the first of Brown’s men to die. “A dog was smelling the mass of coagulated blood which surrounded his head and a couple of pigs were rooting at the body,” Strother wrote. The bullet-riddled bodies of John Kagi, William Leeman, and William Thompson floated in the Potomac and Shenandoah. Six other insurgents lay dead or dying near the rifle works and engine house. When the bayoneted Jeremiah Anderson finally expired in the armory yard, his body was crammed into a barrel and taken away for dissection at a medical school in nearby Winchester. The same fate befell Watson Brown. The other eight dead, most of them still wrapped in the shawls they’d worn into battle, were piled into a pair of pine storage boxes. A local man, paid $5 to bury them in an out-of-the-way location, carted the boxes half a mile up the Shenandoah, and dumped them in shallow unmarked pits. With the fighting over, the dead disposed of, and the surviving insurgents under heavy guard, the disturbance at Harpers Ferry appeared at be at an end. “The work is done,” W. P. Smith telegraphed the B & O president, soon after Brown’s capture. “No difficulties have attended our trains except their slight irregularity by the interruption.” Even before the marines stormed the engine house, Robert E. Lee had turned back additional federal troops headed to Harpers Ferry, judging reinforcements unnecessary. Now that the fight was over, he expected to return to Washington with the marines and prepared a report that minimized the significance of Brown’s actions. “The result proves that the plan was the attempt of a fanatic or madman, which could only end in failure,” Lee wrote, “and its temporary success was owing to the panic and confusion he succeeded in creating by magnifying his numbers.” Lee’s tactical analysis was acute. But the panic and confusion he mentioned went deeper than he realized. Locals’ anxiety resurfaced immediately after Brown’s capture, when Sharps rifles were found in the cellar of a house by the Shenandoah. They’d been left there by two insurgents, Albert Hazlett and Osborne Anderson, who had managed to slip away from their posts at the arsenal and escape in a stolen boat. From Maryland, reports also filtered in that John Cook and an unknown number of insurgents were still at large in the hills near Harpers Ferry. Townspeople were so jittery that even the “shaking of a tree on the mountain opposite” sparked a rumor that guerrillas were “throwing up entrenchments,” the New York Herald reported. The panic crested on the night of October 19, thirty-six hours after Brown’s capture, when a man rode into Harpers Ferry crying, “To arms! To arms! They are murdering the women and children!” The herald told of hearing gunfire and screams from a neighbor’s farmhouse in Pleasant Valley, Maryland, five miles east of Harpers Ferry, and he claimed to have seen slaves running off to the mountains. On the way to the Ferry, he’d sounded the alarm in Sandy Hook, the Maryland community just across the Potomac, causing families to stream across the river in search of refuge. Colonel Lee, characteristically, responded with calm dispatch. Though he doubted the report, he set off with Jeb Stuart and twenty-five marines “for the scene of the alleged outrage.” Upon reaching Pleasant Valley, he found its residents “safe and asleep.” Lee also sent troops to the Maryland school and the Kennedy farm, where locals believed Brown’s men might still be holed up. These rumors proved unfounded: both buildings were vacant, except for the dog that had been given to the Browns, which someone had left tied to the porch rail of the Kennedy farmhouse. The soldiers nonetheless made a series of astonishing discoveries. Butting in the door of the log schoolhouse, they found sixteen heavy boxes of rifles, revolvers, bayonets, swords, and ammunition. At the Kennedy farm, they found tents, blankets, axes, knives, boxes of clothing, and almost a thousand pikes, which Brown had planned to put in the hands of freed slaves. Carried in wagons back to Harpers Ferry, the combined haul from the school and farm constituted a formidable arsenal. In addition to hundreds of carbines and revolvers, the hoard included 23,000 percussion rifle caps, a heavy swivel gun, fourteen pounds of lead shot, and enough clothing, tools, and other supplies to outfit a large mountain army—“all the necessaries for a campaign,” Lee wrote. In light of these finds, Brown’s claim that he had expected a long operation and thousands of reinforcements seemed more than an idle boast. The Kennedy farm yielded an additional cache: trunks and carpetbags stuffed with letters and other documents that revealed the breadth of Brown’s ambitions. Among the papers were thousands of copies of his Provisional Constitution (“done up in small bundles, apparently for convenient distribution,” a reporter wrote); hundreds of copies of Hugh Forbes’s manual on guerrilla tactics; and, most ominously, large maps of southern states, with cross marks and census figures denoting counties where blacks greatly outnumbered whites. These maps, carefully mounted on thick cambric cloth, appeared to offer a blueprint for a far-reaching invasion of the slaveholding South. The soldiers who ransacked the Kennedy farm also uncovered troubling correspondence, including a letter from the U.S. Ordnance Department in Washington, “answering inquiries as to the disposition of the United States troops.” Other letters pointed to a network of prominent northern supporters, such as Gerrit Smith and Frederick Douglass. Some letters were entirely in code. All told, the papers suggested “the existence of an extensive and thoroughly organized conspiracy,” wrote a reporter who accompanied the troops to the Kennedy farm. Lee either disagreed with that assessment or chose to downplay the documents; he barely mentioned them in his official report. But Governor Wise seized on the papers, portraying them as incendiary evidence of northern complicity in the attack. He read from the captured letters before a crowd at the Wager House in Harpers Ferry, where he stayed for two days, orating from the hotel porch to “Sons of Virginia!” Upon returning to Richmond, he delivered a long speech at the statehouse, declaring “I would have given my right arm to its shoulder” for Virginians to have defeated the insurgents on their own. “But, my fellow citizens, you must not imagine that this invasion was so insignificant, or that Commander Brown was mad because his force was so small.” Newspapers published selections from the captured documents, and Wise ordered them transcribed and entered into Virginia’s official record just weeks after their discovery. In an accompanying ten-thousand-word address, he darkly conjured “a numerous host of enemies” for whom the twenty-two insurgents were “mere tools,” sent ahead “to kindle the sparks of a general conflagration.” Wise, like Brown, wanted to shock and mobilize his countrymen and lead them to the ramparts—in his case, to protect southern white property and sovereignty. It therefore served his interests, just as it had Brown’s, to inflate the size and menace of the Harpers Ferry attack. The two men also shared a taste for martial bluster. If he’d arrived in time to lead the counterattack, Wise claimed, he would have shown the insurgents “no quarter” in battle; he would have “tried the survivors, if any, by court martial,” and “shot the condemned on the spot.” The governor’s words were belied by his actual treatment of the prisoners. He protected Brown and his men from summary justice in Harpers Ferry and put them on trial in a civilian Virginia court. This required considerable legal legerdemain, since most of the violence had occurred at a federal armory, on land owned by the U.S. government. But Wise was intent on enabling Virginia to claim Brown’s scalp, and in this he was aided by the passive executive in the White House. Apart from dispatching federal troops to the scene, President Buchanan did little and said less about Harpers Ferry. Known as a “Northern man with Southern principles,” he was content to let Virginians take the lead. As he later wrote the prosecutor who took charge of trying the insurgents, the question of jurisdiction in Harpers Ferry was “a matter quite indifferent to me.” And so, two days after the recapture of the engine house, the Virginia governor accompanied John Brown and the other prisoners, under heavy guard, past crowds crying “Lynch them!” and onto a train from Harpers Ferry to Charlestown, the Jefferson County seat, where Brown and his men would be jailed and tried. Wise also issued a thousand-dollar reward for the capture of John Cook, who was believed—incorrectly—to be Brown’s chief lieutenant and still in command of an unknown force in the Maryland hills. These fears were stoked by alleged evidence of Cook’s contacts with local blacks. One of his supposed allies was an elderly woman who was arrested soon after the fighting ended on charges of having fed Cook during the fray and promised to spy on Harpers Ferry. “A supper basket was found in her hut ready to be carried into the mountains,” read the newspaper report on her arrest. Another black woman was seized after telling someone she had visited Cook’s house before the attack and heard him say “he would turn Harper’s Ferry upside down.” To panicky whites, it began to seem plausible that the affable Yankee living in their midst for the past year had quietly aroused legions of slaves who might yet rise up. This prompted false alarms like the one at the farmhouse in Pleasant Valley, and gave urgency to the manhunt that followed the fighting at Harpers Ferry. Patrols fanned out across the hills and valleys between the Potomac and the Pennsylvania line, searching for “the notorious Captain Cook” and his guerrilla band. THE MAN THEY HUNTED wasn’t nearly so threatening as locals supposed. Cook had acted alone in sniping across the river during the Harpers Ferry fight, and he’d received little aid from Marylanders, apart from passersby he’d questioned in the road and an Irish family he visited for food and coffee. The intelligence he received from them was also flawed: they said not only that his comrades were trapped, but that John Brown was among the dead. On Monday night, as darkness settled on the besieged engine house, Cook had delivered this sobering status report to the rest of Brown’s men in Maryland. Together, after concluding that it would be “sheer madness” to attempt a rescue, they returned to the Kennedy farm for India-rubber blankets and other supplies, and then retreated into the mountain woods nearby. The party consisted of Cook, Charles Tidd, and the three men who’d been left to guard the farm: Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Francis Meriam. With them was a slave from John Allstadt’s estate who had been taken to Maryland to help transport arms. The other slaves who’d accompanied Brown’s men into Maryland had fled back to Virginia upon learning the uprising was doomed. In the night, the last of Allstadt’s freed slaves did the same, slipping away while the others slept for a few hours in the rain. The next morning, fearing their location would be exposed, Cook and his four comrades trekked east to a parallel swell of the Blue Ridge. They then turned north and began traveling through the mountains toward Pennsylvania. The going was slow and the weather foul, first a cold rain and then an early snow. The men traveled only at night; by day, they hid in laurel thickets as mounted patrols galloped past in the valley below. They couldn’t risk building a fire, and for food they had only a small supply of biscuits and sugar, supplemented by raw corn foraged from fields. Within five days, the men were so hungry that they agreed to a desperate plan. One of them would approach a Maryland farmhouse and use the little money and barter they possessed to buy food. The obvious man for this mission was Cook, since “he could wield the glibbest tongue, and tell the best story,” as Owen Brown later explained. Owen and the others waited anxiously for several hours. When Cook finally returned, he said he’d “made himself very agreeable” to the farm family, dining with them and spinning tales about the hunting party he belonged to. He also brought back bread loaves, salt, boiled beef, and a pie, which made his fellow fugitives “exceedingly merry.” But this bounty quickly ran out, so Cook set off again. This time he descended into a valley near the Mason-Dixon Line. The others waited long into the night for his return, lingering until two A.M. and calling his name in the starlight. “Cook never came,” Owen said. Hoping he might have gone to a hideout near Chambersburg—the Pennsylvania town that Brown’s band had used as a transit point for the Kennedy farm—the men decided to push on. They also hoped to get food from Mary Ritner, who ran the Chambersburg boardinghouse where John Kagi had stayed that summer. On reaching the house, shortly before dawn, Charles Tidd climbed a beanpole to rap on Mrs. Ritner’s bedroom window. Upon seeing him, she motioned him away, whispering “Leave, leave!” The house was being watched by armed men. Unbeknownst to Tidd and the others, Cook was already in custody just a few blocks away. His search for food the previous afternoon had led to a rural iron works, where he said he belonged to a hunting party and wanted to buy bacon. But one of the men he approached had seen wanted notices for Cook, and he communicated his suspicion to a colleague. Both were southern sympathizers and one of them was experienced at capturing fugitive slaves. The two men offered to take Cook to a nearby store; en route, they overpowered him. On his person they found documents that erased any doubt about his identity. He carried a commission as a captain in Brown’s army, sketches of roads near Harpers Ferry, and a piece of parchment attesting to the lineage of the antique pistol he had taken from Lewis Washington during the raid on the Virginian’s plantation. Bound and put in a wagon to Chambersburg, Cook tried to sweet-talk his captors, claiming he could pay them more than the official bounty. But the men took him before a judge, who committed Cook to the Chambersburg jail. A crowd of curious onlookers trailed the fugitive as he was escorted to prison, and among them were two abolitionist women who concocted a daring scheme. Carrying extra clothes, they planned to visit Cook in jail and dress him as a woman. Then one of the women would walk out of jail with Cook while the other remained in his cell. But they were discouraged from this plan by the lawyer appointed to represent Cook. He told them that the prisoner wouldn’t be handed over to Virginia authorities quickly or without a legal contest. He was wrong. A request for Cook’s rendition arrived in the morning and at noon the manacled prisoner was put aboard a train for Charlestown, Virginia. His captors collected their $1,000 reward and Wise offered a new one of $500 for each of the men still at large. Authorities also issued wanted notices describing the remaining fugitives on the basis of information Cook provided. The muscular and heavy-bearded Charles Tidd, the notice said, “looks like a fighting man, and his looks in this respect are in no way deceptive.” Owen Brown was described as spare and freckled, with red whiskers. Barclay Coppoc had a light mustache and “a consumptive look.” The even sicklier Francis Meriam “sometimes wears a glass eye” and had a face “blotched from the effects of Syphilis.” Cook may have provided this information knowing that the men would be long gone by the time the notice circulated. Meriam, so weak he couldn’t walk much beyond Chambersburg, managed to slip aboard a train to Philadelphia and make his way home to Boston. After seeing him off, Charles Tidd, Owen Brown, and Barclay Coppoc continued their cross-country trek from Chambersburg, enduring rain and snow and subsisting on stolen chickens and apples. They finally found refuge with Quakers in northwest Pennsylvania. Only then did they learn the fate of those they’d left behind in Harpers Ferry, including the news that Owen’s siblings Watson and Oliver were dead, and that Barclay’s brother, Edwin, was alive but imprisoned. They also learned that two other insurgents had taken flight. Albert Hazlett and Osborne Anderson, who had been posted at the arsenal across the street from the armory, had managed to slip away under cover of darkness or the heavy fighting around the engine house. After finding a boat, they made their way to Maryland and undertook their own hard journey through the mountains to Pennsylvania. The two men were even more conspicuous than the others, since Hazlett was white and Anderson black. Hazlett, the rugged Kansas veteran who had apologized to Annie Brown for his tobacco spitting at the Kennedy farm, was overcome by exhaustion and blistered feet near Chambersburg and persuaded Anderson to go on alone. Hazlett then hitched a ride in a wagon and reached the Ritner boardinghouse, where he was quickly spotted and pursued. Described as being of “very rough and shabby appearance,” he limped on for another thirty miles before being captured and relieved of a pair of revolvers and a bowie knife. Like Cook, he was sent to the jail in Charlestown. Osborne Anderson Anderson, meanwhile, found shelter among free blacks and abolitionists in Pennsylvania and traveled north from there to his home in Canada. In his long flight from Harpers Ferry, the black fugitive had essentially followed the Underground Railroad from a slave state to a free country. He published a short account soon after his escape, “A Voice from Harper’s Ferry.” Despite the attack’s failure, he wrote, John Brown “dug the mine and laid the train which will eventually dissolve the union between Freedom and Slavery.” IN LATE OCTOBER, WITH all of Brown’s men dead, captured, or hiding in the North, the action shifted to the Jefferson County seat of Charlestown—a town extremely hostile to the insurgents now housed in its jail. Illustrative of the mood was the headline in the local Independent Democrat on the day of Brown’s capture. THE INFERNAL DESPERADOES CAUGHT, AND THE VENGEANCE OF AN OUTRAGED COMMUNITY ABOUT TO BE APPEASED. The newspaper’s editor, like many other men in Charlestown, had taken part in the fighting. Courthouse and street scene, Charlestown, 1859 On the day Brown was brought to jail, advertisements appeared in the local paper offering “Cash for Negroes” and seeking “MEN, WOMEN, BOYS, GIRLS, and FAMILIES, for the Southern markets.” One of the slave dealers named in these ads was John Avis, who also served as the county jail keeper. This was the man now responsible for Brown and his fellow insurgents. Avis, a Mexican War veteran, had also taken a prominent role in the fighting at Harpers Ferry. He was nonetheless considerate to his new inmates, treating them as he did all others. They were given fresh clothes, allowed to send and receive mail, and quartered close to Avis and his family, who occupied one part of the jailhouse, a two-story brick building with barred windows and a high-walled yard that otherwise resembled a private home. Brown and Aaron Stevens shared a ground-floor room that visitors described as large and well-lit; it was heated by a stove and furnished with chairs and a writing desk. Diagonally across from the jail stood the county courthouse, a Greek Revival edifice fronted by Doric columns and topped by a bell tower. At the time of Brown’s capture the circuit court for western Virginia was in autumn session; the session would end in another few weeks, not to resume until spring. If the insurgents weren’t tried quickly, they would have to be kept under guard for months, a prospect few Virginians relished. “There is danger on the one hand of a rescue by their friends, and on the other of Lynch-law from the indignant populace,” Governor Wise wrote on October 22. While he fretted about security, his lead prosecutor, Andrew Hunter, worried that Aaron Stevens might “die of his wounds if we don’t hang him promptly.” The court should observe “all the judicial decencies,” Hunter wrote Wise, “but at double quick time.” On October 25, exactly one week after their capture, Brown and his men were led between ranks of militiamen from the jail to the cannon-ringed courthouse. The town was swollen with soldiers and journalists. To accommodate the press, the telegraph line had been extended from Harpers Ferry to Charlestown. Fresh developments were quickly transmitted by wire to a national audience; as well, leading artists for publications such as Leslie’s and Harper’s Weekly provided a pictorial record, at a time when photographs weren’t yet reproduced in newspapers and magazines. This publicity worked to Brown’s advantage. Even anti-abolitionist papers noted the swiftness of the proceedings and the defendants’ questionable fitness for trial. “There is an evident intention manifested here to hurry the trial through, and to execute the prisoners as soon as possible,” the Baltimore American noted upon the men’s first appearance in court. Brown, manacled to Edwin Coppoc, looked “weak and haggard, with his eyes swollen from the effects of the wounds on his head,” while Stevens was so feeble that he fainted during the initial testimony and had to lie on a mattress. The first day’s session concerned itself with a formality: whether there was enough evidence to call a grand jury. Brown nonetheless seized the moment to speak beyond the courtroom, answering a straightforward legal question with a short speech. “Virginians, I did not ask for any quarter at the time I was taken. I did not ask to have myself spared,” he said. But, having been promised a fair trial by Governor Wise, he wanted no part in a legal charade that rushed him to judgment without time to prepare or recover from his wounds. “If you seek my blood, you can have it at any moment, without this mockery of a trial,” he said. “I am ready for my fate.” His words had no practical effect. The court kept up the pace, assigning lawyers, selecting jurors, and summoning witnesses within twenty-four hours of the proceedings’ commencement. But Brown’s defiant, unflinching demeanor, in spite of his wounds and manacles, reinforced the impression he’d made while lying bloodied at the armory. He was “game,” to use Governor Wise’s cockfighting term, a courageous foe who commanded respect. “I have now little to ask,” Brown stated that first day in court, “other than that I be not publicly insulted as cowardly barbarians insult those who fall into their hands.” Brown may have misjudged many aspects of southern society, but he intuitively grasped—and identified with—its chivalric code of honor. Virginians believed they were holding to their own high standards by conducting a trial in a civilian court, before the eyes of the nation, rather than administering “drum-head justice” in a closed military tribunal. All the legal “decencies” would be duly observed in the Charlestown court. But given the realities of antebellum society in Jefferson County and its surrounds, an impartial hearing for Brown and his men was impossible. Richard Parker, the presiding judge, was a respected, by-the-book jurist. He was also a slave owner and a former paymaster at the Harpers Ferry armory, who stated in his opening instructions to the jury: “I will not permit myself to give expression to those feelings which at once spring up in every breast when reflecting on the enormity of the guilt” of the defendants, who had invaded “our common country” and shot down Virginians “without mercy.” Then, having given expression to precisely those feelings, he reminded the jurors, most of whom were slaveholding farmers, that the defendants should be given “a fair and impartial trial.” Like Parker, the two lawyers appointed to defend Brown were competent and highly regarded—and, like him, they were slaveholders. They had also taken part in the military action at Harpers Ferry. The lead prosecutor, Andrew Hunter (another slaveholder), was related by marriage to Fontaine Beckham, the slain mayor of Harpers Ferry. And Hunter’s son, Henry, was one of the gunmen who had burst into the Wager House to avenge Beckham’s shooting by dragging William Thompson to his death on the Potomac bridge. As well, Andrew Hunter was a close associate of the governor and shared Wise’s desire to implicate—and, if possible, indict—prominent Northerners. “What we aim at,” Hunter stated, “is not only the destruction of these men whom we have in confinement,” but “higher and wickeder game.” Virginians’ ferocious hostility to abolitionism was reflected in the far-reaching indictment that Hunter drafted. It charged Brown and his men with first-degree murder, with conspiracy to induce slaves “to make insurrection against their masters,” and with having “traitorously” levied war and rebellion against Virginia. Treason was generally understood as a crime against the nation, and none of the defendants were citizens of the state they’d allegedly betrayed. But Hunter cited Brown’s Provisional Constitution as evidence that he and his men sought to usurp Virginia’s laws and establish a new government. They did so, he added, “not having the fear of God before their eyes, but being moved and seduced by the false and malignant counsel of other evil and traitorous persons and the instigations of the devil.” The defendants were required to stand during the reading of the seven-page indictment, which took a full twenty minutes. Brown stood with difficulty and Stevens had to be held up by two bailiffs before returning to his mattress. “He has the appearance almost of a dying man; breathing with difficulty and panting for breath,” one reporter wrote. The defendants pleaded not guilty and asked to be tried separately. Hunter elected to prosecute Brown first. Brown sought a short delay, saying that his wounds had left him enfeebled and hard of hearing. But Judge Parker, eager to move the process along, denied this request (as he would almost every other defense request). Returned to jail during the lunch recess, Brown took to his bed and claimed he was too weak to get up for the afternoon session. So he was carried back to the courtroom on a cot, where he lay with his eyes closed and a blanket drawn to his chin, “determined to resist the pushing of his trial by all the means in his power,” the Baltimore American reported. Brown’s theatrics heightened what was already a colorful courtroom scene. Hundreds of spectators packed the vast chamber, cracking chestnuts and peanuts as they watched the legal drama. “The floor of the court, excepting within a few feet of the Judge, was inches deep, in places, with nut shells, and the noise of people moving about was like that which would be made by trampling on glass,” wrote a reporter for the New York Herald. One of the prosecutors chewed tobacco, a wad sometimes slipping from his mouth; he showed up in court with his face bruised from a brawl the night before. Even the judge appeared casual, “comfortably reclining in his chair, his legs resting upon the table before him, amid the chaos of law-books, papers, and inkstands.” Charlestown courtroom with Brown on cot at left center The legal proceedings were also irregular. Brown frequently lurched up from his cot to challenge a witness or make a pronouncement, before slumping back down and closing his eyes. His defense team kept changing: six different lawyers acted on his behalf in a trial that lasted less than five days. And the proceedings had barely gotten under way when a telegram arrived from a prominent citizen of Akron, Ohio, stating that a number of Brown’s relatives had been committed to “a Lunatic Asylum” or died insane. “These facts can be conclusively proven by witnesses residing here, who will doubtless attend the trial if desired.” THE INSANITY DEFENSE WAS a new but widely accepted doctrine in American courtrooms. In a sensational murder trial just months before Brown’s, a New York congressman, Daniel Sickles, had successfully pleaded temporary insanity after shooting his wife’s lover dead in a park in Washington, D.C. Brown, with his wild hair and even wilder scheme for slaves’ liberation, fit many people’s notion of a lunatic. “As mad as a March hare,” opined the Chicago Press and Tribune, offering a typical view of Brown a few days after his capture. The telegram from Akron also contained a certain amount of truth. Nineteen Ohioans later supported it by submitting affidavits about Brown’s mental state. While these statements were collected in an obvious effort to win clemency for Brown, they attested to his family’s long history of mental illness. A number of relatives on his mother’s side had been committed to asylums. And two of Brown’s children, Frederick and John junior, were clearly disturbed, though their instability may have been inherited from their mother, Dianthe, who was described as mentally afflicted. More telling, perhaps, were the words used to describe Brown in the affidavits and other accounts of people who knew him well. They frequently called him “excitable” or a “monomaniac”—a term that Herman Melville applied to Captain Ahab. In 1857, almost two years before the question of Brown’s mental health arose in court, a free-state official in Kansas had written a striking letter to Franklin Sanborn, reporting that Brown was acting so oddly that some free-staters “openly express[ed] the opinion that one of his old fits of insanity has returned upon him.” Brown’s own writing also spoke to his violent mood swings; he oscillated between periods of giddy, frantic activity and sloughs of despond that left him almost paralyzed. To modern eyes, this might suggest manic depression. So would Brown’s recurrent grandiosity—his unassailable faith in his own plans and abilities, and his belief that he was “God’s instrument,” singled out for the liberation of slaves. But diagnosing mental illness at a distance of a century and a half is a dubious exercise. Even if Brown gave signs of bipolar tendencies, there’s no evidence he had hallucinations or other symptoms so severe that he could have been considered legally insane—in the parlance of Virginia’s antebellum code, “an idiot, lunatic, non compos, or deranged.” In any event, Brown wanted no part of an insanity defense. As soon as his lawyer read the telegram from Ohio in court, he raised himself from his cot and objected. “I look upon it as a miserable artifice and pretext of those who ought to take a different course in regard to me,” he said. “I am perfectly unconscious of insanity, and I reject, so far as I am capable, any attempt to interfere on my behalf on that score.” This pleased Virginians but left his lawyers little to argue in his defense. There was no real dispute over the facts of the case. Under Brown’s leadership, the insurgents had seized the armory, taken hostages, armed slaves, and killed five men and wounded many others. At Brown’s insistence, his lawyers elicited testimony that showed he had treated his hostages well and ordered his men not to shoot unarmed civilians. Brown felt this demonstrated that he never intended violence; he and his men had shed blood only in self-defense. But to Virginians, this argument held no weight. At least one of those slain, Heyward Shepherd, was a noncombatant. And Brown could hardly have expected to seize the town, take hostages, and free and arm a legion of slaves without sparking a fight. The prosecution regarded Brown’s defense as “too absurd to require argument” and didn’t even bother to cross-examine the witnesses called on his behalf. Though the trial testimony did little but confirm Brown’s guilt, it provided moments that aroused the hundreds of white spectators. One witness testified to Brown’s words about his provisional government, including mention of “an intelligent colored man elected as one of the members of the House.” This notion caused a “sensation” in the courtroom, one reporter wrote. Another witness, John Allstadt, who had been taken hostage with his slaves and clearly loathed Brown, testified that the blacks in the engine house “were doing nothing, and had dropped their spears: some of them were asleep nearly all the time.” The southern audience laughed, delighted by this stereotypical portrayal of blacks as lazy and docile. A few witnesses expressed nobler sentiments. The Maryland officer, Captain John Sinn, was called by the defense and ended his testimony by stating: “As a Southern man, he came to state the facts about the case, so that Northern men would have no opportunity of saying that Southern men were unwilling to appear as witnesses in behalf of one whose principles they abhorred.” The last day of testimony brought one final surprise—the arrival of two eminent lawyers who had been recruited by Brown’s supporters in the North. The trial had been so hasty that the attorneys arrived without having had a chance to so much as study the indictment. They’d also missed hearing the prosecution witnesses. But the judge was intent on forging ahead and allowed the prosecution to begin its closing arguments that same afternoon. When the defense’s turn came, it could do little but argue technical points about jurisdiction and appeal to the jury to show “moral courage” and maintain Virginia’s reputation for “chivalry unstained.” The closing arguments ended at one thirty on the afternoon of Monday, October 31, two weeks to the day after Brown’s men had been trapped at the engine house. The jurors withdrew, but returned after just forty-five minutes, having put ballots in a hat and found their opinion was unanimous. The courtroom was now so packed that the crowd spilled into the hallway and outside the building’s front door. “Gentlemen of the Jury,” the court clerk asked, “what say you, is the prisoner at the bar, John Brown, guilty or not guilty?” “Guilty,” the foreman replied. “Guilty of treason, and conspiring and advising with slaves and others to rebel and murder in the first degree?” “Yes.” There was no sound in the courtroom, “not the slightest expression of elation or triumph,” reported the New York Herald. Brown, who had listened to the day’s proceedings from his cot, often with his eyes shut, sat up to hear the verdict. Once it was read he “said not even a word, but, as on any previous day, turned to adjust his pallet, and then composedly stretched himself upon it.” Though the judge did not sentence Brown until a few days later, the verdict left little doubt about his fate. Convicted of three capital crimes, he appeared certain to hang. It also seemed likely that he would go to the gallows quickly, in company with his co-conspirators. The court began trying them immediately after Brown’s verdict was handed down on Monday afternoon, and it would hastily convict three more of the insurgents before the week was out. As the judge and prosecutor had hoped, Virginia was dispensing justice in “double quick time.” Even the temporary telegraph office in Charlestown closed a few days after Brown’s conviction, in expectation of a swift and uneventful conclusion to the affair. BROWN, HAVING FAILED TO sway the Virginia jury, had thus far fared poorly in the North as well. Conservative, pro-southern organs like the New York Herald blasted Brown and his allies as “Nigger-Worshipping Insurrectionists.” The middle-of-the-road New York Times called Brown “a fanatic; sui generis,” and later termed him “a wild and absurd freak.” Papers strongly aligned with the antislavery cause were critical, too, and they sought distance from Brown’s violent abolitionism. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune called Harpers Ferry a “deplorable affair” and “the work of a madman,” adding that “the way to Universal Emancipation lies not through insurrection, civil war and bloodshed, but through peace, discussion, and the quiet diffusion of sentiments of humanity and justice.” William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the radical but nonviolent Liberator, was sternly disapproving, calling the Harpers Ferry attack “misguided, wild, and apparently insane.” Worse still, Brown’s innermost core of supporters had all but deserted him. Just after Brown’s capture, Franklin Sanborn broke the news in a letter to another member of the Secret Six, Theodore Parker, who was in Italy sick with tuberculosis. “Our old friend struck his blow in such a way,—either by his own folly or the direction of Providence—that it has recoiled and ruined him, and perhaps those who were his friends,” Sanborn wrote on October 22. By then, the teacher had fled Concord for Quebec, writing en route to Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “According to the advice of good friends and my own deliberate judgment I am to try change of air for my old complaint.” Sanborn ended his note: “Burn this.” Two other members of the Secret Six soon followed Sanborn to Canada, even though a lawyer advised them that they were safe from arrest in Massachusetts. Frederick Douglass also fled north, and then left Canada for England on a previously planned trip. Though not a member of the Secret Six, Douglass was linked to Brown in papers found at the Kennedy farm, and Virginia authorities sought to apprehend him. “I have always been more distinguished for running than fighting,” Douglass wrote in a letter from Canada to a New York newspaper, “and tried by the Harper’s Ferry insurrection test, I am most miserably deficient in courage.” Douglass, at least, was forthright about his flight, and he called Brown “noble and heroic.” Very different was the response of Gerrit Smith, the philanthropist who had bankrolled Brown from the start. He immediately destroyed all correspondence linking him to Brown and then, amid press speculation that he might be indicted, became so agitated that he was committed to the New York State Lunatic Asylum. Diagnosed as suffering from acute mania, Smith was treated with cannabis and morphine and quickly recovered his wits—though not, apparently, his memory. He denied any knowledge of, or complicity in, Brown’s Virginia campaign, later stating that he had “but a hazy view of nearly the whole of 1859.” Samuel Howe, like Smith, was frequently named in letters published after Brown’s capture. Yet he, too, loudly disclaimed any association with Harpers Ferry. “That event was unforeseen and unexpected by me,” he wrote from Canada in a statement published by the New York Tribune. “It is still, to me, a mystery, and a marvel.” This disavowal enraged the combative preacher Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the only member of the Secret Six who didn’t leave the country or take refuge in an asylum. It was “the extreme of baseness,” he wrote, for the Six to deny knowledge of Brown’s enterprise, and he judged Howe’s disingenuous letter and Smith’s alleged insanity as “two sad results of the whole affair.” He also complained to Sanborn, who returned from Canada but kept urging Higginson to stay quiet about their role in the insurrection. “Sanborn is there no such thing as honor among confederates?” Higginson fired back, disgusted that Brown and his men had suffered while “silent safe partners make haste to secure our good reputation by a lie!” He refused to destroy Sanborn’s letters, and signed one of his own: “There is no need of burning this.” Henry David Thoreau WHILE HIGGINSON STEWED IN private, another New Englander went boldly public in defense of Brown. A few days after the Harpers Ferry attack, Henry David Thoreau told townspeople in Concord that he planned to give a speech supporting the jailed abolitionist. Though many citizens of the freethinking town had backed Brown strongly just months before, they now dreaded any association with Harpers Ferry. Local abolitionists discouraged Thoreau from speaking and town selectmen refused to ring a bell announcing his lecture. Undaunted, Thoreau rang the bell himself—on October 30, the eve of the abolitionist’s conviction—before delivering a stirring oration that was published under the title “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” Harking back to his famous essay “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau cast Brown as an exemplar of principled resistance to authority. “Is it possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?” he asked. “Are laws to be enforced simply because they are made?” Brown, he said, had resisted unjust laws and stood up for human dignity, “knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. In that sense he was the most American of us all.” Thoreau contrasted this individual heroism with the “cackling of political conventions” and the cravenness of the northern public, particularly “the herd” of commentators who condemned Brown or pronounced him “insane.” Thoreau also mocked his Yankee neighbors who saw everything in terms of gain, and therefore felt that Brown had thrown his life away. “No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to,” Thoreau said. He reserved his greatest praise for the words spoken by Brown to the Virginians who had questioned him at the armory soon after his capture. All of the many antislavery speeches by northern congressmen, combined and boiled down, Thoreau said, “do not match for manly directness and force, and for simple truth, the few casual remarks of crazy John Brown” as he lay bleeding on the floor of the paymaster’s office. As Thoreau memorably put it: “He could afford to lose his Sharpe’s rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,—a Sharpe’s rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.” THREE DAYS LATER, ON November 2, Brown would show himself fully worthy of Thoreau’s praise. Brown was now well enough to walk, though with difficulty, and during the court session that day he sat instead of lying on a cot. “It was late, and the gaslights gave an almost deathly pallor to his face,” one reporter wrote. “He was like a block of stone.” Brown remained impassive as the judge denied a defense motion seeking to overturn his verdict. Then the court clerk told Brown to rise and asked him if he had anything to “say why sentence should not be pronounced upon him.” This caught Brown off guard. He’d expected to be sentenced with the other prisoners, once they’d all been convicted. “He seemed to be wholly unprepared to speak at this time,” one reporter wrote. If so, Brown recovered very quickly. Leaning slightly forward and resting his hands on a table, he spoke in a clear, distinct voice. “I have, may it please the Court, a few words to say,” he began. “In the first place I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, of a design on my part to free slaves. I intended certainly to have made a clean thing of that matter, as I did last winter when I went into Missouri and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moving them through the country and finally leaving them in Canada. I designed to have done the same thing again on a larger scale. That was all I intended. I never did intend murder or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection.” This summary wasn’t altogether true. In Missouri, one of Brown’s men had shot a slaveholder dead. And the attack on Harpers Ferry was clearly intended as more than a large-scale reprise of his slave rescue. Brown later admitted as much in a letter, telling the prosecutor Andrew Hunter that he misspoke in court “in the hurry of the moment.” His intent at Harpers Ferry had been to arm slaves to defend themselves within the South, rather than to “run them out of the slave States.” But the point was legally moot. As he continued speaking in court, Brown no longer sought to question the specifics of the prosecution’s case. He even declared himself “entirely satisfied” with his treatment and praised the “truthfulness and candor” of the witnesses. What he challenged instead was the very basis of his indictment. Why was it a crime to try to free slaves? “Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved,” Brown said in his courtroom speech, “had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.” Brown accepted his conviction under Virginia law. But he invoked another, higher code. “This Court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things ‘whatsoever I would men should do to me I should do ever so to them.’ It teaches me, further, to ‘remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.’ I endeavored to act up to these instructions.” He had abided by the Golden Rule and the scriptural injunction to care for the afflicted. This was all he had done. To do otherwise would have been a much greater crime. “I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, was no wrong but right.” This brought Brown to the climax of his speech—in effect, to the climax of his long struggle against slavery. “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I submit. So let it be done!” BROWN SPOKE, IN ALL, for about three or four minutes. If his words had any effect on the judge, there was no sign of it. Parker moved immediately to sentencing. “You have been found by an impartial jury of your countrymen to be guilty of the offenses charged against you,” he said. “In mercy to our own people—to protect them against similar invasions upon their rights—in mercy and by way of warning to the infatuated men of other States who, like you, may attempt to free our negroes by forcing weapons into their hands, the judgment of the law must be enforced against you.” Judge Parker then declared: “The sentence of the law is that you, John Brown, be hanged by the neck until you are dead.” Furthermore, “for the sake of the example,” the execution should occur in public rather than in the jail yard. He set December 2, a month hence, as the date for the hanging. “And may God have mercy on your soul.” Earlier in the court session, the many spectators crowded in the room had uttered execrations, calling Brown a “damned black-hearted villain” and other slurs. But they listened to his speech and sentencing with solemnity and silence. Then, after the judge had spoken, one man broke the quiet by clapping his hands. “This indecorum was promptly suppressed and much regret was expressed by citizens at its occurrence,” a reporter wrote. The crowd also remained silent as the defendant returned to prison. The first press reports on Brown’s sentencing were likewise muted. Correspondents in the court faithfully recorded his words but made little comment on them. One wrote that Brown’s “composure, and his quiet and truthful manner” commanded respect and even some sympathy. Another thought he “spoke timidly—hesitatingly, indeed—and in a voice singularly gentle and mild.” A Virginian in the court described Brown’s tone as “indifferent” and quoted only the speech’s opening line. The courtroom clerk didn’t even bother to reproduce that much. His official record consisted of ten words. Brown, upon being asked if he had reason why judgment should not be passed against him, “said he had nothing but what he had before said.” In a sense, the clerk was right: Brown had said all of this before, in letters and in reply to his interrogators at the armory. Many elements of his speech, particularly his invocation of the Golden Rule, were decades-old touchstones for him. Brown may not have been fully prepared when the court called on him to speak in his own defense, but he’d been rehearsing for this moment his entire life. And he had, at last, found the perfect stage, before a mostly hostile audience and a collection of correspondents who quickly transmitted the scene across the land. Brown’s public speaking style often lacked punch, but in print, his words and manner carried tremendous force. In a speech of just six hundred words, without notes or apparent preparation, he had cut through decades of cant and equivocation over slavery. Moreover, he had done so, not from the safety of a northern pulpit or editorial page, but while standing in a slave state courtroom, on trial for his life. “Has anything like it been said in this land or age,” marveled a Philadelphia minister, writing the next day “with joy unutterable” to an abolitionist friend. “Slavery & Freedom brought face to face standing opposite; the one all black wrong, the other white as an angel.” In essence, Brown’s speech had turned the case against him on its head. He had put his accusers on trial and pronounced them guilty, of crimes before God. He had also denied Virginians the righteous satisfaction of hanging a convicted felon. Feeling “no consciousness of guilt,” he told the court, he would gladly go to the gallows for “the ends of justice,” in solidarity with the slaves he had sought to free. Instead of pleading for his life, he made his death sentence a triumph. So let it be done! Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most eminent intellectual of his day, hailed Brown’s speech as one of the finest in history, and he would later call it and the Gettysburg Address “the two best specimens of eloquence we have had in this country.” This praise reflected the strong shift in northern opinion that occurred following Brown’s conviction and sentencing. Emerson, like many others, had initially viewed Harpers Ferry with horror, writing that Brown “lost his head” and committed a “fatal blunder” in attacking Virginia. Now, moved by Brown’s words—and those of his neighbor Thoreau—Emerson reconsidered his earlier stance and became one of the abolitionist’s greatest champions. Like Thoreau, Emerson trafficked in ideal types. Years before, in an essay titled “Heroism,” he had conjured an “unschooled man” who feels rather than thinks and “finds a quality in him that is negligent of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of reproach.” Unafraid of suffering and censure, and heedless of learned authority, Emerson’s hero also had to be persistent: “When you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself to the world.” Above all, heroism demanded certitude and self-reliance, right to the end. “Its ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood and wrong, and the power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents.” Brown seemed to exemplify these attributes, and once Emerson embraced him, he did so without reserve. Brown’s words conveyed “his simple, artless goodness joined with his sublime courage,” while his character fused the “perfect Puritan faith” and the revolutionary fervor of his forebears. “He believes in two articles—two instruments, shall I say?—the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence.” Emerson’s loftiest praise came in his lecture “Courage,” which he delivered at the Music Hall in Boston five days after Brown’s sentencing. “None purer or more brave was ever led by love of men

Horwitz, Tony. Midnight Rising (pp. 191-215). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.