MOBRULES
Dozens of books have been written about abolitionist John Brown and his raid on Harper's Ferry, but until now no one has dramatized the story from the perspective of the men who sacrificed their lives for him inside that engine house.
In MOBRULES, readers witness this legendary event, considered by many scholars to be the catalyst of the American Civil War, through the weathered eyes of fugitive slave Shields Green, a young man who met Brown and his sons while living with Frederick Douglass. Green joined the raid in the hopes it might spark a nationwide slave revolt which would reunite him with his own son.
All of this is based on historical record, and specifically the writing of Frederick Douglass. In addition, MOBRULES offers some provocative and controversial insight into Brown's behavior during his doomed insurrection. Why did he send his son out to surrender with a white flag? Why did the mob open fire on the boy? Why did Brown refuse the offer of mercy and capture from Stuart and Robert E. Lee and instead choose to sacrifice all the men following him in a bloody confrontation? Did his followers have any say in that decision? What did they see within those four walls, starving and tired? What was John Brown like when the world wasn’t watching?
In MOBRULES, readers witness this legendary event, considered by many scholars to be the catalyst of the American Civil War, through the weathered eyes of fugitive slave Shields Green, a young man who met Brown and his sons while living with Frederick Douglass. Green joined the raid in the hopes it might spark a nationwide slave revolt which would reunite him with his own son.
All of this is based on historical record, and specifically the writing of Frederick Douglass. In addition, MOBRULES offers some provocative and controversial insight into Brown's behavior during his doomed insurrection. Why did he send his son out to surrender with a white flag? Why did the mob open fire on the boy? Why did Brown refuse the offer of mercy and capture from Stuart and Robert E. Lee and instead choose to sacrifice all the men following him in a bloody confrontation? Did his followers have any say in that decision? What did they see within those four walls, starving and tired? What was John Brown like when the world wasn’t watching?
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(Below...the first 20 pages)
(Below...the first 20 pages)
MOBRULES
October 20th, 1859
Charles Town, Virginia
My Dear Benjamin,
Post Hoc, Ergo Proctor Hoc. Latin, son. Mr. Douglass taught me the first day I met him. A phrase lawyers use meaning ‘after this, therefore because of this.’ Douglass said it’s often a mistake. People see causal relationships where none exist. One event following another doesn’t mean they’re related, but it applies now. I didn’t end up in this cell, awaiting the hangman, because of bad luck.
Last they told me – the Harper’s mob – before I lost the time, was that they’d leave one eye to see my master clapped in irons. J.B. called them mob-rule when we watched them through bullet holes in the door of the engine house. I recall dust mites hanging in tube-shafts of light through the holes and the sweat trickling through creases on the old man’s face, like tiny rivers, as he held his Colt pistol tight.
“How many soldiers now, J.B.?” I asked.
“They’re not soldiers no matter what they wear, Shields. They’re nothin’ but mob-rule.”
Mobs, J.B. once said, are capable of violence individuals don’t commit on their own, so that name stuck for me. Every slaveholder and every uniform that protects them. And it certainly applies to whoever’s holding your chains, son. Mobrules.
Their boots sealed my left eye, but they were right about seeing J.B. again. This morning, standing on my bunk opposite the iron bars, he exited the jailhouse with its three Roman columns, shackled at wrist and ankle. He squinted at a cold two-o’-clock Virginia sun and grimaced at the inability to shield his eyes.
The society men in top hats and layered suits, ladies with flowery bonnets, buttoned gowns and bustles – they all glowered at the abolitionist in rags who killed their kin, on his way to the judge that will surely find him guilty of treason.
J.B. stepped through the gates of the jail’s wrought-iron fencing, into the dusty street and its clipping horses. A colored woman with babe in arms, kerchief tied round her brow, leaned her infant out to him. To his long beard, tangled with wood chips from the floor of his cell, where Mobrules must’ve beaten him as well.
My cage just a stone’s throw away, the young woman’s hands reminded me of your mother’s. Gnarled and scarred, fingertips cracked like raisins from decades of field labor.
That babe curled her own little hand into J.B.’s beard and he smirked, leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. Just like I saw President Buchanan do once.
Mobrules freed my hands. Gave me this paper pad for confessions. But I’d rather write to you, keep your face in mind before they call my name for the gallows, and hope by some grace of God this letter reaches you, son.
A man of wild contradictions, John Brown went by “Captain” to most of the militia. But those of us in his inner circle called him J.B., and Watson corrected me the first time I called him “sir.” That’s the only informality he insisted on.
I first heard about the insurrection at Harper’s in the company of Frederick Douglass. Escaping my bonds in Carolina four years ago, fortune smiled on my travels and Douglass took me in, taught me my letters, my elocution, how to carry myself with dignity. For three years he kept my hope alive that I might see you again, and I’m grateful because I sometimes felt so guilty for abandoning you I couldn’t rise from bed.
Douglass spoke often of J.B. while we prepared dinner in his kitchen with its huge butcher block – one longer than most dining tables. This was at his home in Rochester. He said he admired the old man, that J.B. had innovative ideas about extending Tubman’s Underground Railroad, but Douglass also said Brown had an “impulsive grudge” which rendered him dangerous to the abolitionist cause.
I didn’t know he’d been talking to J.B. about me until Douglass took me to a tailor, bought me the only suit I’d ever own and told me I’d accompany him to Chambersburg, to meet the man and hear about an insurrection that would spread like wildfire throughout the South.
“I’m honored, sir,” I told Douglass, buttoning the cuff links on my dark blue suit. We stood alone in the tailor’s measuring room, an octagon with a platform and six mirrors. “But I don’t see how I’d contribute in your decision to join him.”
“He wants to speak to you. He’s assembling a militia and wants you in. I told him what kind of man you are. The strength I see in you – in body and mind. And of your desire to see your son again.”
His mention of you sent a rush of blood to my limbs. A tingle in my fingertips as I pictured my newborn son. Your mother passing you from her arms to mine in a tan horse blanket. The first time your eyes met mine I saw myself there and my heart soared.
Douglass offered a smirk in response to my expression, but I saw his hesitation to believe it would work – that J.B. could bring me back to you. “That would be a glorious reunion, wouldn’t it?”
“Will it work – his insurrection?”
He glanced back at the door where the tailor had exited. “Don’t know yet. I have to hear him out. He plans to liberate first Virginia then the Carolinas. When he said that, I thought of you. An ambitious man, no doubt. He anticipates a massive uprising will serve as his catalyst.”
“You think I should join him? That’s what you want?”
Douglass clasped his hands behind his back, spread his feet and raised his chin in deep thought; a position I saw him take before he said anything crucial. “Part of me feels J.B. is right. We’ve prayed for freedom half a century and our progress moved at a snail’s pace. Perhaps it’s time to pray with my legs and not my voice. But we follow Brown we’re giving up praying in favor of gunfire. The other part of me looks at a young man like you – so full of potential and courage. I’d hate to see a mind cultivated like the grapes of a fine wine wasted in an action that might get you killed. It’s a decision you must make yourself. A man must be true to himself, Shields, even if it incurs the wrath or ridicule of others, rather than be false and incur his own abhorrence. We’ll meet with J.B. and I’ll honor your decision.”
We met with Brown and two of his sons, Oliver and Watson (who’d soon become close friends before Harper’s), on woolen blankets across slabs of rock within a mountain of boulders. It was dusk, J.B.’s stone quarry stood deserted and a mist hung in the air, so warm and thick I felt droplets of moisture on my cheeks. We passed around rotgut whiskey as we talked, Douglass refusing the flask each time around with his familiar smirk.
J.B.’s imposing, intimidating presence struck me at once. Well over six feet tall with broad shoulders. And when he set his steely grey eyes on you, one found it difficult to look away.
“I need to know what your intentions are by ways of support, old friend,” J.B. said as he stoked the cinders of our campfire. A sweet and dark scent of cherry tobacco as Watson rolled himself a cigarette and J.B. lit his pipe.
Douglass stroked his beard. “I honor your intentions. But I fear for your life and that of your boys. What you’re talking about is far more dangerous than running off slaves.”
“My boys are equal to the task, and when this insurrection succeeds General Tubman won’t have to run anyone off their fields anymore. We won’t have to smuggle anybody because the oppressed will break their own chains, en masse.”
“Even if they do, you’re taking a fight to the Federal government. Buchanan’s front door. You sack Harper’s, you’re stepping into a steel trap from which there will be no release.”
“Every enslaved man and woman from Tallahassee to Little Rock will flock to my staging point at Harper’s. That will be the release.” J.B. sighed and tapped out his pipe. “Sir, how long have we been friends? You know I wouldn’t ask except I see you as indispensable. Your very presence will lend this action a vital gravity and strength which it will not carry otherwise. Consider how many of our friends, free and enslaved, are on the fence about me. With you as my right hand, no one will hesitate to take up arms with us.”
Douglass barely smiled, then shook his head. “I truly admire your courage. Always have. But look what we’re doing now. Look at Kansas. We’re answering the crack of the whip with violence of our own. We can’t call the slaveholder barbaric if we’re resorting to barbarism ourselves. It won’t win any converts to abolition, and those fence-riders you speak of, with luke-warm commitment to us, will flee from this controversy and call us butchers.”
“Have we not tried everything but this? The battle for converts is over. This fight can’t be won with a vote count. You said yourself if there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
“The struggle is to turn the sympathizer to the cause of active abolition – that is progress. Though noble in intention, the message you’ll be sending to that undecided man is: we cannot achieve abolition without an attack on our own government. How will those we seek to persuade view us then?”
J.B. pursed his mouth. “Diplomacy is dead. You told me a year ago we need now no gentle storm but thunder, earthquake, whirlwind!”
“True, but one of mind, not murder. Your clock is fast. Killing men to change their mind is always the last resort.” Douglass offered his giant hand.
J.B. took it with a look of respectful resignation, then covered the two of them with his own. “My offer still stands. When we are triumphant in Virginia, you become President of the provisional government.”
“When that time comes, I shall give the honor studious consideration.” Douglass kept his eyes fixed on Brown for a moment, as if trying to memorize his face. “I’ve known you too long to believe I can dissuade you. So I wish you Godspeed.”
Watson spoke after a long inhale that transformed his caterpillar cigarette into a bead of shrinking ash. “What about you, Shields? J.B. says you’ve a sharp eye for a mark.”
I started to speak but Douglass answered with more eloquence than I could muster. “True. But Green’s talents of mind far exceed his gun hand.”
Watson grinned through a gate of white teeth and a couple silver fillings. What I remember most about that first meeting is how dissimilar the brothers were. Four years apart but inseparable, they were polar opposites. Outside J.B.’s company, Watson almost never stopped talking while Oliver hardly spoke. As if to compensate for his reticence, the younger brother tapped on everything rhythmically and picked at his stubble with his opposite hand.
Watson had patches of scaly, flaking and irritated pink skin on his neck (and presumably his whole body) which made it impossible for him to shave. A razor would bite his skin with its first pass. He scratched his chin as he spoke. “That’s perfect. Just the kind of marksman strategist I’m looking for.”
The four men questioned me with their eyes.
“Can I take an hour to consider?”
“Take two,” J.B. frowned. “And I’d be honored if you and Mr. Douglass would dine on my dollar.”
That night, as if to symbolize my indecision, the train back to Rochester docked at the station for engine difficulties. Barring that, we would’ve returned North.
Douglass could’ve afforded lodgings far better, but he sensed my frenzied consternation and chose to sleep across from me in the train’s overnight car – the only distance between us a plaid carpet tread by the ticket-taker. His tired eyes, peppered with freckles, remained closed as I spoke to him.
“How many sons does J.B. have?”
“Oh, man’s got twenty children, mostly boys. Many died being born or soon after”
“Oliver and Watson seem steadfast to him.”
“They follow because that’s all they know. Whole family’s thick as thieves since I met him.”
“What do you remember about your father, sir?”
Douglass gave a little huff of a laugh through his nose. “I haven’t talked about him in decades. Bits and pieces, now. He had dimples so deep when he smiled it formed a little canyon in his cheek. When he laughed, which was seldom, he’d pinch the bridge of his nose, as if humor left him vulnerable. When I’d come in for dinner from the fields, he’d lay his palm on the back of my head and steer me toward the washing basin. His hands felt as rough as the bark of a sugar maple.”
“I’m still not sure what you want me to do.”
“And I told you it’s not my place. Besides, do you want me to choose for you or agree with your decision?”
“My mind is too restless for it. You approach every decision reasonably. And that’s what I need.”
“Not every decision can be reached through the Philosophes’ logic and reason. Were I in your place, with one of my precious boys destined for a life of servitude, even if my chance to save him were the roll of a hundred-sided die... I would not be able to divorce myself from emotion. Nor should you.”
“You say that but you don’t believe Brown will succeed.”
“I never said that. And my record for predicting the future is dismal. I believe Brown’s militia will be trapped. That doesn’t mean he will fail to inspire an insurrection. That is to be contemplated.”
“What is?”
“Your actions could bring your Benjamin north and you may never know it. You could wind up surrounded, with J.B., by Southern cavalry, while field hands throw down their tools and march North with your son in their arms.”
“Then by that rationale, if I say no to Brown’s rebellion and it succeeds, someday Benjamin will ask me what part I played. And I’ll have to tell him: when I had the chance to fight for his freedom, I chose safety.”
“That’s how you see this? A fight for freedom?”
“What else?”
Douglass took a moment, one long enough for me to appreciate how the vibrating thrum of the engine under repair covered the snores in the train cabin. “You should know that while you’re trying to save somebody, Brown is not.”
“He’s not saving somebody. He’s trying to save all of us.”
“To his mind. In the abstract. Maybe.”
“Meaning what?”
“He sees you and I as brothers, as equals. He’s a champion for our cause. But Brown’s love of God long ago evolved into zealotry. That means he’s not driven by logic and reason but only by the fury in his heart.”
“Maybe that’s what this cause needs now.”
“His cause is larger than us. He’s fighting the institution of slavery, not just our chains, and when men fight against an idea – an abstract – they’ll grind whatever grist the mill requires. Whatever sacrifice deemed necessary will be sacrificed.”
“You’re talking about Kansas.”
Three years ago, arguments over whether Kansas would be slave or free had turned bloody. Abolitionist Republican Charles Sumner beaten on the floor of the Senate. Douglass talked of politics constantly that year – to me and to our every visitor. “Democrats,” I overheard him scoff to Will Garrison. “Untethered, they will spread the chains of human bondage from here to the Pacific.”
Avenging Sumter, and abolitionists in Kansas who’d been burned out of their homes and even lynched, J.B. took Oliver, Watson and three other sons to Pottawattamie Creek, dragged five Pro-slavery settlers out of their cabins at night and hacked them apart with sabers. Watson said they used blades, not guns, to keep the action silent. Douglass didn’t agree with J.B.’s methods, but he had no intention of holding Brown back. Now he seemed to be suggesting that the action at Harper’s would be like Pottawattamie, on a much grander scale.
“Could be like that again, I suppose. They’ve no scruples against it.”
“I’m not terribly concerned with their victims right now. I’m worried about the consequences for you as a perpetrator. One year ago, over dinner, Brown told me ‘I’ve a short time to live. I plan to die fighting for this cause.’”
“So you think J.B. would sacrifice me... to give a man like me freedom.”
“Now you see. You are a symbol to him. John and his boys know they’ll die at Harper’s and they’re going anyway. You follow him in his insurrection and you will follow him in that sacrifice. You have to decide what your life is worth: if the risk is worth the reward.”
“What reward?”
“Is the certainty of your death worth the slightest chance of your son’s freedom?”
I studied his eyes for a moment, unable to answer. Then Douglass turned over, adjusting his pillow, as if this discussion had taken no more out of him than deciding on breakfast. The man could’ve orchestrated the Congress of Vienna while peeling potatoes.
“Whatever your decision, you don’t need me to agree with you, Shields.”
The next day, outside the sleeping car on the train platform, I told Douglass: “I believe I’ll go with the man.”
He pursed his mouth for a moment, then shook my hand and covered it with his other as he had Brown. “Then this is where our paths diverge. Godspeed.”
He boarded the train as it began to move, its smokestack billowing ash into the air, its pistons and cylinders churning out the sounds of gasping breath.
Five other men of color joined me at the Kennedy farmhouse J.B. rented in Maryland, four weeks before the raid. I only remember a handful by name, Newby in particular, because like me he had enslaved family with whom he hoped to reunite.
But I didn’t spend much time with him. He gravitated to J.B. while I found myself in the constant company of Oliver and Watson. Once the elder brother became impressed with my marksmanship, he determined to keep me at his side at Harper’s and every hour leading up to it.
J.B. may have been a zealot but Watson and Oliver were eccentric in a more singular way. They drank earlier in the day than I could stomach. Watson would spike my lemonade with rotgut from his flask when I wasn’t looking, then laugh when I grimaced at the taste.
The first time I glimpsed the unique outlook of these brothers, we were cleaning trout on the four iron tables behind the cabin. Crusted scales and a scent of fish had baked into each cutting surface long before we arrived, and the trapezoid canopy overhead, tangled with ivy that hung over our heads like sweaty strands of hair over a bandana, blocked the sunlight.
Oliver and Watson gutted while I skinned filets, each of us at different tables. Bobwhite quails chittered in red cedar trees behind the house but couldn’t compete with Watson. He rambled on, per his usual, about J.B.’s overconfidence – the old man wasn’t doing enough to get the news of insurrection to Virginia’s field hands. Watson never ceased criticizing his father’s plans and J.B. never ceased reminding him how little he valued Watson’s insight.
“Keeps talking about how the ‘bees are gonna swarm’ as soon as we draw first blood at Harper’s. Like he’s got Paul Revere standing by to take a victory ride through the South with the first gunshot. Christ, most people aren’t gonna remember what day he’s planned it for, let alone the hour. ‘Swarm of bees.’ Maybe he thinks the enslaved can communicate like bees, but the only swarm comin’ out of a hive is gonna be the mob-rule sent by Buchanan and his plump, pudgy-fingered, lickspittle Democrats to surround us in a half-circle.”
“Then we should do something extra, right?” I threw over one shoulder. “While we have time.”
“Don’t worry, friend, I already have. Got my own whispering campaign spread out from Norfolk to Russell. Around the time we seize the armory at Harper’s, take that rich and diverse cache, every field hand within a thousand miles of Richmond will apply their scythe and shovel to the face of the flowery, smooth-bellied, pampered aristocracy.”
“Poetic justice,” Oliver muttered in his low base and took a nip from his flask.
“Did your message reach as far south as the Carolinas?”
Watson stopped cutting and looked up for the first time since we started preparing dinner. He knew how important South Carolina was to me. We talked about you several times, son. Sometimes he’d watch over my shoulder as I drew sketches of you and your mother.
“Not yet. But if Virginia rises, the Carolinas will follow. Every mansion on every plantation burned, fallin’ just like dominoes.”
“What is that?” I flicked my chin at his upper arm. A long tattoo I hadn’t noticed before because I’d never seen him in a sleeveless shirt.
“Hope-Fear Paradox.”
He resumed cleaning trout as I dropped my knife, wiped my hands and approached him, squinting at the image. It formed a wavy U shape. What first appeared to be a two-headed snake tapered upward into two women who looked like sisters. They held their clawed hands and crying faces skyward. Expressions of agony that reminded me of your grandmother’s stories about banshees, and a book of myths owned by Douglass which introduced me to gorgons. On the abdomen of one reptile woman an H, on the other an F.
“What paradox?”
Watson lost his lighthearted, cynical charm but didn’t look up. “Hope and fear are two sides of the same coin. That makes them both a waste of time.”
“I never heard of hope being a bad thing.”
“Then you heard wrong because it is. Hope weakens you as much as fear.”
“I heard since birth that faith and hope are what gives people strength.”
“Do they really? How has sittin’ around hoping for something ever helped a single person in this life?”
“What’s left without it? Leave everything in God’s hands?”
This made both men chuckle, though Oliver’s amounted to no more than a movement in his shoulders.
“You want to just roll the dice, sure,” Watson smirked. “If you believe in that variety of God as J.B. does. For my part, when I leave a problem in God’s hands, I usually find out too late we don’t want the same thing.”
“So you have a different ‘variety’ than J.B., is that it?”
“I don’t think about it much. We respect his beliefs in his company. In our own, we answer to a higher calling.”
I smiled. “Really. I didn’t know I joined up with the Crusade.”
“Yes you did.” He stopped cutting. “When those Democrat-puppet Pro-slavers back in Lawrence strung up my brother Frederick... when I found Freddie as they’d left him, hangin’ from a high Birch limb like their discarded laundry...they put their lives in my hands, not God’s. Their righteous punishment is an instrument of the divine and it is mine to avenge... not God’s. In due time their foot will slip. Their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them.”
“Deuteronomy 32:35,” Oliver droned around a mouthful of tobacco. Though a head taller than us both, I often felt that he served as Watson’s footnote.
“What do you hope for?”
At the time, everything Watson said that day felt like a blasphemy. A slap in the face to how I’d been raised. But I also found his conviction infectious. “I think you know, friend.”
He pointed at me with the knife tip. “And what’s that hope done for you, all these years you’ve been away from your son?”
“Kept me patient. Kept me sane.”
“No, it’s kept you waiting. For someone else to do the work. But now it’s your chance – it’s in your hands.” Tossing his arched blade aside, Watson wiped his hands, then pulled out his kit and started rolling a cigarette. “You joined up because you’re done hoping and I thank God for it because I need your steady aim at my side. Every time you hoped to see Benjamin again, it was nothing but the fear that you’d never see him again. Take what’s yours and hope for nothing. Because hope and fear are one and the same. Nothin’ but worry and hot air.”
He released me and resumed cleaning trout for the militia’s dinner. I returned to my own station, covering the filets with lemon juice and cracked pepper. We had far more fish than the men could eat, and most of it would go to the hogs and goats.
“Duality,” Oliver said, and spat tobacco juice through his teeth, as if to punctuate our awkward silence.
We arrived with the false dawn at 4am, twenty-two men standing on a ridge permeated by mist and overlooking Harper’s Ferry, its buildings woven together in tightly-knit clusters, descending until you reached the river and its encased bridge, giving the impression that the train traveled under one long dog kennel as it crossed the Potomac.
Watson and I stood with Sharps carbines in both hands, surveying a town so crowded with Pignut Hickory and Butternut trees you could barely tell where one shop became another.
He handed me five slabs of dried pork. “God knows when we’ll be eatin’ again.”
I tried to chew it but heavy breathing made it difficult. I didn’t notice my chest heaving until I followed his eyes.
“You all right?”
I nodded. “Is this what Kansas felt like?”
“No, there I had no chance of losing. No reason to be scared.”
“You’re scared now?”
Gravel and winterberry crunched underfoot as J.B. approached, one Colt pistol in hand, the other holstered.
“Change of plans, son. Secure the Fed’s armory first, then Hall’s rifle works.”
“That’s a mistake,” Watson returned. “Fed’s have got quantity but Hall’s got your 1841 rifles.”
“You can leave the strategy to me.”
“We’ll need longer range for the attack that’s coming. If the enslaved do show up –“
“There’s no ‘if’ in that statement.”
“We can supply them once we’ve secured the bridge and B&O’s railroad.”
“We don’t have time for your doubt – for you to play ‘what about this’ on the mouth organ.”
“Is that what I do?”
“You have orders. Repeat it.”
Watson shook his head. “Fed armory, then Hall’s, seize the railroad. We all meet up at musket manufacture. Male hostages only.”
J.B. had planned Harper’s for three years. Far more than a ferry, the town had the most advanced and diverse arsenal east of the Mississippi. Enough to mobilize an army, if it showed up.
J.B.’s hard eyes shifted from Watson to me and narrowed with gratitude. “Shields?” He grabbed my hand and closed his other on top of it. “You’re ready?”
“I am.”
“Loaded for bear?”
I tapped the ammunition satchel slung over my shoulder. “Hundred and sixty shells.”
Watson extended his own hand to his father. “God willing, by eight o’ clock we’ll be setting up hotels as barracks. Annuit Coeptis.”
“I assure you he does,” J.B. muttered as he turned away.
“It’s lucky for you I’ve never had a good idea, J.B. Because you never would’ve heard it.”
Brown ignored him, walking past Oliver’s detachment with his stooped gait, holding the hip that ached him in cold weather. He pointed over the ridge to direct Newby and Copeland.
Looking after him with a sour, indignant countenance, Watson subconsciously scratched the scaly pink patches on his forearm. I’d watched him contradict Brown for a year. For every one of J.B.’s ideas, he had a revision. I don’t know if he antagonized his father because he yearned for recognition or to get a rise out of him, but he earned neither. Your mother used to say a child ignored misbehaves because angry attention is better than none.
J.B never made physical contact with either of his sons – neither a handshake nor pat on the back. I believe he thought it protected them. They were born into his service and any informality; any favoritism would render them weak. Make them feel too safe. In his eyes, I’d enlisted of my own free will and Watson didn’t have any.
Everything at Harper’s went according to plan the first two hours. Telegraph wires cut. Armory secured with five hostages. Captives taken quietly without resistance. Watson detached two groups of four men each to take the rifle works and the mill, then we led the remaining four towards the train-car junction.
That’s when six gunshots cracked the air, two slugs kicking up dust before me. A third injured Dauphin, the man behind me, in the calf and he grabbed both my shoulders to keep from falling. Dauphin had worked the first oil drilling rig in Titusville before joining Brown, but the limp from that bullet sealed his fate that night.
Harper’s woke at seven in the morning too quickly to not know we were coming. Shouts and calls echoed from high windows and balconies. The Drake Hotel, Grant Seeds. But no one visible yet.
As the firing started, we ran north alongside a parked passenger train of fifteen cars, heading for the engine to sabotage it.
“Inside!” Watson yelled as we reached the arched doorway of the next car. He grabbed my collar and shoved me through. Two small windows above the poker tables shattered as I hunched down between the seats and set the carbine to my shoulder. Hunkered down behind a wide pane of the cabin’s warped glass, I slid upward against the wall to peek out just as the window cracked in a spider web from another shot.
Watson grabbed my arm and tugged me down. “Don’t. We won’t take anyone from this position.”
“There’s too many too soon. They knew we were coming.”
Watson shrugged. “Yes and no. If they knew it would be this morning, they would’ve stopped us on the ridge. How many would you estimate?”
"From the shouts and the shots, I’d say thirty.”
Watson cursed under his breath and mopped his brow with his gun hand.
“So we head to the engine house.”
“Didn’t want to end up there so soon. We still have to take care of the train – the noisy way.”
J.B. had mapped out the engine house as our only sanctuary if the mob surrounded us. All brick and mortar save for its wooden double-doors, with high windows that offered a superior firing position.
With telegraph wires cut, Harper’s could only connect to the outside world through the B&O railroad. Watson planned to sabotage the front engine silently, filling the boiler up with earth. Now we’d have to blow apart or deform the coupling rods with gunpowder and nitroglycerin.
“Taylor, Kagi.” Watson beckoned two men over with his pistol as three more shots thudded against the passenger car. Hunched over, they shuffled down the carpet runner. Only then did I stop to breathe: a ground-in scent of pickled eggs and laudanum.
Watson pulled a parcel sack from his ammo satchel and tossed it to Kagi. “Spread it thick over one side, above the sand pipes. Don’t light it before I get there. I’ll cover your exit.”
He motioned me to follow and we crouched out the train car’s opposite door, slugs puncturing seat cushions behind us. Outside, we fired over the arch of the roof as a distraction, morning sunlight stinging my eyes, and Taylor and Kagi ran off. Reloading the carbine, I heard grit beside the train crunching underfoot and looked up in enough time to see a man-shape behind Watson with something bronze held overhead.
Pulling my Colt, I cocked and fired at the figure in a single motion. Not until he fell and we stood over him did I see he was a colored man, holding one of the steam engine’s iron spades.
"Good eyes, Shields,” Watson said.
My heart throbbed in my chest. A baggage-handler with a button-down uniform. A stitched insignia that read B&O Railroads. Harper’s, I’d read, had been a mixed bag of slave and free for decades, but I’d pushed the possibility of meeting either out of my mind.
Couldn’t have been a day over eighteen. A tiny wisp of smoke curled up from his red jacket and he held up a forbidding hand at me, his teeth clenched tight.
Watson un-cocked his pistol. “He’s sufferin’, friend. Give him his Last Rites and meet me up front at the engine.”
But I couldn’t. The boy had his hand up, begging me not to shoot again, and the Colt’s barrel wavered before me. Up before sunrise, I thought. Preparing baggage carts. A job he’s so loyal to, so grateful for, he protects the company’s property with an iron spade.
That moment brought me a striking revelation. Douglass was right. Their cause was larger than us. J.B. and his boys loved coloreds as equals, no doubt. Called us their brothers and they meant it. But when Watson spoke of a higher calling... his father’s insurrection wasn’t about race nor slaves in the south, but eradicating human bondage, for the world to see, whatever the cost.
I couldn’t fire again, not with him pleading to me for mercy. He seemed to believe he’d live if I let him struggle through this wound on his own. But from his wheezing I knew I’d hit his lungs. I could only give him a few extra minutes and I’m ashamed to say I left him that way.
Our downfall unraveled quickly from there. The rising sun burned away all shadows, all cover, as I rushed along the south side of the passenger train cars, opposite the Drake hotel. I stayed close to the tracks as I could hear bullets crushing through the roof of each car.
As I reached the front engine I saw Watson kneeling below the power reserve, striking matches. Taylor and Kagi crouched behind a palette loaded with fertilizer sacks nearby, their Sharps raised to cover. The train protected our left, but shots rang out to my right, the first striking Kagi in the temple. I followed the sound to three men poised on the balcony of Sibley Mixed Paints, their 1841 rifle barrels resting on the railing.
Watson met my eyes, then pointed behind me. “I need thirty seconds.”
Looking back over one shoulder, I saw three riders with Derby hats tugging horses into position in front of Hadley’s Stationary, a bit too far to make out their faces. I took up Kagi’s position beside his body, laid covering fire on the balcony and managed to hit the closest man as he fumbled with his shells. Watson cursed the sweat dampening his gunpowder.
Cries now beyond the train. A man barking unintelligible orders. A woman answering with a scream. From the west, three riders approached in a full gallop and five men, some wearing B&O uniforms, gathered in front of Gridley Lodging, loading up satchels.
“Watson...”
“I see it. Ten seconds.”
I took down the second rifleman on the balcony, then so many shots rang out I couldn’t fathom their direction. Taylor gasped, slumped over and fell beside me. The gunpowder flared up and Watson drew in a hiss of pain as a slug tore through his left hand.
He winced and gripped the wrist with his right as I pulled him to his feet, then clenched his wounded fist against his chest. “Wait! I have to make sure it catches!”
“There’s no time.”
I pulled him by his good arm towards the Potomac as slugs pinged against the black steel of the train. Behind us, a small explosion like a handful of firecrackers. It sounded like the fuse exploded the gunpowder, but not the nitroglycerine. Despite his injury, Watson kept pace with me as we sprinted to the engine house.
Two left turns gave us a moment’s cover and gunshots chipped the overhanging façade of a crinoline storefront. J.B. and Oliver’s detachment appeared at our left, headed for our same destination and herding five men, one still in his nightclothes, before them like scared cattle.
(Please contact me if you'd like to see the rest...)
October 20th, 1859
Charles Town, Virginia
My Dear Benjamin,
Post Hoc, Ergo Proctor Hoc. Latin, son. Mr. Douglass taught me the first day I met him. A phrase lawyers use meaning ‘after this, therefore because of this.’ Douglass said it’s often a mistake. People see causal relationships where none exist. One event following another doesn’t mean they’re related, but it applies now. I didn’t end up in this cell, awaiting the hangman, because of bad luck.
Last they told me – the Harper’s mob – before I lost the time, was that they’d leave one eye to see my master clapped in irons. J.B. called them mob-rule when we watched them through bullet holes in the door of the engine house. I recall dust mites hanging in tube-shafts of light through the holes and the sweat trickling through creases on the old man’s face, like tiny rivers, as he held his Colt pistol tight.
“How many soldiers now, J.B.?” I asked.
“They’re not soldiers no matter what they wear, Shields. They’re nothin’ but mob-rule.”
Mobs, J.B. once said, are capable of violence individuals don’t commit on their own, so that name stuck for me. Every slaveholder and every uniform that protects them. And it certainly applies to whoever’s holding your chains, son. Mobrules.
Their boots sealed my left eye, but they were right about seeing J.B. again. This morning, standing on my bunk opposite the iron bars, he exited the jailhouse with its three Roman columns, shackled at wrist and ankle. He squinted at a cold two-o’-clock Virginia sun and grimaced at the inability to shield his eyes.
The society men in top hats and layered suits, ladies with flowery bonnets, buttoned gowns and bustles – they all glowered at the abolitionist in rags who killed their kin, on his way to the judge that will surely find him guilty of treason.
J.B. stepped through the gates of the jail’s wrought-iron fencing, into the dusty street and its clipping horses. A colored woman with babe in arms, kerchief tied round her brow, leaned her infant out to him. To his long beard, tangled with wood chips from the floor of his cell, where Mobrules must’ve beaten him as well.
My cage just a stone’s throw away, the young woman’s hands reminded me of your mother’s. Gnarled and scarred, fingertips cracked like raisins from decades of field labor.
That babe curled her own little hand into J.B.’s beard and he smirked, leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. Just like I saw President Buchanan do once.
Mobrules freed my hands. Gave me this paper pad for confessions. But I’d rather write to you, keep your face in mind before they call my name for the gallows, and hope by some grace of God this letter reaches you, son.
A man of wild contradictions, John Brown went by “Captain” to most of the militia. But those of us in his inner circle called him J.B., and Watson corrected me the first time I called him “sir.” That’s the only informality he insisted on.
I first heard about the insurrection at Harper’s in the company of Frederick Douglass. Escaping my bonds in Carolina four years ago, fortune smiled on my travels and Douglass took me in, taught me my letters, my elocution, how to carry myself with dignity. For three years he kept my hope alive that I might see you again, and I’m grateful because I sometimes felt so guilty for abandoning you I couldn’t rise from bed.
Douglass spoke often of J.B. while we prepared dinner in his kitchen with its huge butcher block – one longer than most dining tables. This was at his home in Rochester. He said he admired the old man, that J.B. had innovative ideas about extending Tubman’s Underground Railroad, but Douglass also said Brown had an “impulsive grudge” which rendered him dangerous to the abolitionist cause.
I didn’t know he’d been talking to J.B. about me until Douglass took me to a tailor, bought me the only suit I’d ever own and told me I’d accompany him to Chambersburg, to meet the man and hear about an insurrection that would spread like wildfire throughout the South.
“I’m honored, sir,” I told Douglass, buttoning the cuff links on my dark blue suit. We stood alone in the tailor’s measuring room, an octagon with a platform and six mirrors. “But I don’t see how I’d contribute in your decision to join him.”
“He wants to speak to you. He’s assembling a militia and wants you in. I told him what kind of man you are. The strength I see in you – in body and mind. And of your desire to see your son again.”
His mention of you sent a rush of blood to my limbs. A tingle in my fingertips as I pictured my newborn son. Your mother passing you from her arms to mine in a tan horse blanket. The first time your eyes met mine I saw myself there and my heart soared.
Douglass offered a smirk in response to my expression, but I saw his hesitation to believe it would work – that J.B. could bring me back to you. “That would be a glorious reunion, wouldn’t it?”
“Will it work – his insurrection?”
He glanced back at the door where the tailor had exited. “Don’t know yet. I have to hear him out. He plans to liberate first Virginia then the Carolinas. When he said that, I thought of you. An ambitious man, no doubt. He anticipates a massive uprising will serve as his catalyst.”
“You think I should join him? That’s what you want?”
Douglass clasped his hands behind his back, spread his feet and raised his chin in deep thought; a position I saw him take before he said anything crucial. “Part of me feels J.B. is right. We’ve prayed for freedom half a century and our progress moved at a snail’s pace. Perhaps it’s time to pray with my legs and not my voice. But we follow Brown we’re giving up praying in favor of gunfire. The other part of me looks at a young man like you – so full of potential and courage. I’d hate to see a mind cultivated like the grapes of a fine wine wasted in an action that might get you killed. It’s a decision you must make yourself. A man must be true to himself, Shields, even if it incurs the wrath or ridicule of others, rather than be false and incur his own abhorrence. We’ll meet with J.B. and I’ll honor your decision.”
We met with Brown and two of his sons, Oliver and Watson (who’d soon become close friends before Harper’s), on woolen blankets across slabs of rock within a mountain of boulders. It was dusk, J.B.’s stone quarry stood deserted and a mist hung in the air, so warm and thick I felt droplets of moisture on my cheeks. We passed around rotgut whiskey as we talked, Douglass refusing the flask each time around with his familiar smirk.
J.B.’s imposing, intimidating presence struck me at once. Well over six feet tall with broad shoulders. And when he set his steely grey eyes on you, one found it difficult to look away.
“I need to know what your intentions are by ways of support, old friend,” J.B. said as he stoked the cinders of our campfire. A sweet and dark scent of cherry tobacco as Watson rolled himself a cigarette and J.B. lit his pipe.
Douglass stroked his beard. “I honor your intentions. But I fear for your life and that of your boys. What you’re talking about is far more dangerous than running off slaves.”
“My boys are equal to the task, and when this insurrection succeeds General Tubman won’t have to run anyone off their fields anymore. We won’t have to smuggle anybody because the oppressed will break their own chains, en masse.”
“Even if they do, you’re taking a fight to the Federal government. Buchanan’s front door. You sack Harper’s, you’re stepping into a steel trap from which there will be no release.”
“Every enslaved man and woman from Tallahassee to Little Rock will flock to my staging point at Harper’s. That will be the release.” J.B. sighed and tapped out his pipe. “Sir, how long have we been friends? You know I wouldn’t ask except I see you as indispensable. Your very presence will lend this action a vital gravity and strength which it will not carry otherwise. Consider how many of our friends, free and enslaved, are on the fence about me. With you as my right hand, no one will hesitate to take up arms with us.”
Douglass barely smiled, then shook his head. “I truly admire your courage. Always have. But look what we’re doing now. Look at Kansas. We’re answering the crack of the whip with violence of our own. We can’t call the slaveholder barbaric if we’re resorting to barbarism ourselves. It won’t win any converts to abolition, and those fence-riders you speak of, with luke-warm commitment to us, will flee from this controversy and call us butchers.”
“Have we not tried everything but this? The battle for converts is over. This fight can’t be won with a vote count. You said yourself if there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
“The struggle is to turn the sympathizer to the cause of active abolition – that is progress. Though noble in intention, the message you’ll be sending to that undecided man is: we cannot achieve abolition without an attack on our own government. How will those we seek to persuade view us then?”
J.B. pursed his mouth. “Diplomacy is dead. You told me a year ago we need now no gentle storm but thunder, earthquake, whirlwind!”
“True, but one of mind, not murder. Your clock is fast. Killing men to change their mind is always the last resort.” Douglass offered his giant hand.
J.B. took it with a look of respectful resignation, then covered the two of them with his own. “My offer still stands. When we are triumphant in Virginia, you become President of the provisional government.”
“When that time comes, I shall give the honor studious consideration.” Douglass kept his eyes fixed on Brown for a moment, as if trying to memorize his face. “I’ve known you too long to believe I can dissuade you. So I wish you Godspeed.”
Watson spoke after a long inhale that transformed his caterpillar cigarette into a bead of shrinking ash. “What about you, Shields? J.B. says you’ve a sharp eye for a mark.”
I started to speak but Douglass answered with more eloquence than I could muster. “True. But Green’s talents of mind far exceed his gun hand.”
Watson grinned through a gate of white teeth and a couple silver fillings. What I remember most about that first meeting is how dissimilar the brothers were. Four years apart but inseparable, they were polar opposites. Outside J.B.’s company, Watson almost never stopped talking while Oliver hardly spoke. As if to compensate for his reticence, the younger brother tapped on everything rhythmically and picked at his stubble with his opposite hand.
Watson had patches of scaly, flaking and irritated pink skin on his neck (and presumably his whole body) which made it impossible for him to shave. A razor would bite his skin with its first pass. He scratched his chin as he spoke. “That’s perfect. Just the kind of marksman strategist I’m looking for.”
The four men questioned me with their eyes.
“Can I take an hour to consider?”
“Take two,” J.B. frowned. “And I’d be honored if you and Mr. Douglass would dine on my dollar.”
That night, as if to symbolize my indecision, the train back to Rochester docked at the station for engine difficulties. Barring that, we would’ve returned North.
Douglass could’ve afforded lodgings far better, but he sensed my frenzied consternation and chose to sleep across from me in the train’s overnight car – the only distance between us a plaid carpet tread by the ticket-taker. His tired eyes, peppered with freckles, remained closed as I spoke to him.
“How many sons does J.B. have?”
“Oh, man’s got twenty children, mostly boys. Many died being born or soon after”
“Oliver and Watson seem steadfast to him.”
“They follow because that’s all they know. Whole family’s thick as thieves since I met him.”
“What do you remember about your father, sir?”
Douglass gave a little huff of a laugh through his nose. “I haven’t talked about him in decades. Bits and pieces, now. He had dimples so deep when he smiled it formed a little canyon in his cheek. When he laughed, which was seldom, he’d pinch the bridge of his nose, as if humor left him vulnerable. When I’d come in for dinner from the fields, he’d lay his palm on the back of my head and steer me toward the washing basin. His hands felt as rough as the bark of a sugar maple.”
“I’m still not sure what you want me to do.”
“And I told you it’s not my place. Besides, do you want me to choose for you or agree with your decision?”
“My mind is too restless for it. You approach every decision reasonably. And that’s what I need.”
“Not every decision can be reached through the Philosophes’ logic and reason. Were I in your place, with one of my precious boys destined for a life of servitude, even if my chance to save him were the roll of a hundred-sided die... I would not be able to divorce myself from emotion. Nor should you.”
“You say that but you don’t believe Brown will succeed.”
“I never said that. And my record for predicting the future is dismal. I believe Brown’s militia will be trapped. That doesn’t mean he will fail to inspire an insurrection. That is to be contemplated.”
“What is?”
“Your actions could bring your Benjamin north and you may never know it. You could wind up surrounded, with J.B., by Southern cavalry, while field hands throw down their tools and march North with your son in their arms.”
“Then by that rationale, if I say no to Brown’s rebellion and it succeeds, someday Benjamin will ask me what part I played. And I’ll have to tell him: when I had the chance to fight for his freedom, I chose safety.”
“That’s how you see this? A fight for freedom?”
“What else?”
Douglass took a moment, one long enough for me to appreciate how the vibrating thrum of the engine under repair covered the snores in the train cabin. “You should know that while you’re trying to save somebody, Brown is not.”
“He’s not saving somebody. He’s trying to save all of us.”
“To his mind. In the abstract. Maybe.”
“Meaning what?”
“He sees you and I as brothers, as equals. He’s a champion for our cause. But Brown’s love of God long ago evolved into zealotry. That means he’s not driven by logic and reason but only by the fury in his heart.”
“Maybe that’s what this cause needs now.”
“His cause is larger than us. He’s fighting the institution of slavery, not just our chains, and when men fight against an idea – an abstract – they’ll grind whatever grist the mill requires. Whatever sacrifice deemed necessary will be sacrificed.”
“You’re talking about Kansas.”
Three years ago, arguments over whether Kansas would be slave or free had turned bloody. Abolitionist Republican Charles Sumner beaten on the floor of the Senate. Douglass talked of politics constantly that year – to me and to our every visitor. “Democrats,” I overheard him scoff to Will Garrison. “Untethered, they will spread the chains of human bondage from here to the Pacific.”
Avenging Sumter, and abolitionists in Kansas who’d been burned out of their homes and even lynched, J.B. took Oliver, Watson and three other sons to Pottawattamie Creek, dragged five Pro-slavery settlers out of their cabins at night and hacked them apart with sabers. Watson said they used blades, not guns, to keep the action silent. Douglass didn’t agree with J.B.’s methods, but he had no intention of holding Brown back. Now he seemed to be suggesting that the action at Harper’s would be like Pottawattamie, on a much grander scale.
“Could be like that again, I suppose. They’ve no scruples against it.”
“I’m not terribly concerned with their victims right now. I’m worried about the consequences for you as a perpetrator. One year ago, over dinner, Brown told me ‘I’ve a short time to live. I plan to die fighting for this cause.’”
“So you think J.B. would sacrifice me... to give a man like me freedom.”
“Now you see. You are a symbol to him. John and his boys know they’ll die at Harper’s and they’re going anyway. You follow him in his insurrection and you will follow him in that sacrifice. You have to decide what your life is worth: if the risk is worth the reward.”
“What reward?”
“Is the certainty of your death worth the slightest chance of your son’s freedom?”
I studied his eyes for a moment, unable to answer. Then Douglass turned over, adjusting his pillow, as if this discussion had taken no more out of him than deciding on breakfast. The man could’ve orchestrated the Congress of Vienna while peeling potatoes.
“Whatever your decision, you don’t need me to agree with you, Shields.”
The next day, outside the sleeping car on the train platform, I told Douglass: “I believe I’ll go with the man.”
He pursed his mouth for a moment, then shook my hand and covered it with his other as he had Brown. “Then this is where our paths diverge. Godspeed.”
He boarded the train as it began to move, its smokestack billowing ash into the air, its pistons and cylinders churning out the sounds of gasping breath.
Five other men of color joined me at the Kennedy farmhouse J.B. rented in Maryland, four weeks before the raid. I only remember a handful by name, Newby in particular, because like me he had enslaved family with whom he hoped to reunite.
But I didn’t spend much time with him. He gravitated to J.B. while I found myself in the constant company of Oliver and Watson. Once the elder brother became impressed with my marksmanship, he determined to keep me at his side at Harper’s and every hour leading up to it.
J.B. may have been a zealot but Watson and Oliver were eccentric in a more singular way. They drank earlier in the day than I could stomach. Watson would spike my lemonade with rotgut from his flask when I wasn’t looking, then laugh when I grimaced at the taste.
The first time I glimpsed the unique outlook of these brothers, we were cleaning trout on the four iron tables behind the cabin. Crusted scales and a scent of fish had baked into each cutting surface long before we arrived, and the trapezoid canopy overhead, tangled with ivy that hung over our heads like sweaty strands of hair over a bandana, blocked the sunlight.
Oliver and Watson gutted while I skinned filets, each of us at different tables. Bobwhite quails chittered in red cedar trees behind the house but couldn’t compete with Watson. He rambled on, per his usual, about J.B.’s overconfidence – the old man wasn’t doing enough to get the news of insurrection to Virginia’s field hands. Watson never ceased criticizing his father’s plans and J.B. never ceased reminding him how little he valued Watson’s insight.
“Keeps talking about how the ‘bees are gonna swarm’ as soon as we draw first blood at Harper’s. Like he’s got Paul Revere standing by to take a victory ride through the South with the first gunshot. Christ, most people aren’t gonna remember what day he’s planned it for, let alone the hour. ‘Swarm of bees.’ Maybe he thinks the enslaved can communicate like bees, but the only swarm comin’ out of a hive is gonna be the mob-rule sent by Buchanan and his plump, pudgy-fingered, lickspittle Democrats to surround us in a half-circle.”
“Then we should do something extra, right?” I threw over one shoulder. “While we have time.”
“Don’t worry, friend, I already have. Got my own whispering campaign spread out from Norfolk to Russell. Around the time we seize the armory at Harper’s, take that rich and diverse cache, every field hand within a thousand miles of Richmond will apply their scythe and shovel to the face of the flowery, smooth-bellied, pampered aristocracy.”
“Poetic justice,” Oliver muttered in his low base and took a nip from his flask.
“Did your message reach as far south as the Carolinas?”
Watson stopped cutting and looked up for the first time since we started preparing dinner. He knew how important South Carolina was to me. We talked about you several times, son. Sometimes he’d watch over my shoulder as I drew sketches of you and your mother.
“Not yet. But if Virginia rises, the Carolinas will follow. Every mansion on every plantation burned, fallin’ just like dominoes.”
“What is that?” I flicked my chin at his upper arm. A long tattoo I hadn’t noticed before because I’d never seen him in a sleeveless shirt.
“Hope-Fear Paradox.”
He resumed cleaning trout as I dropped my knife, wiped my hands and approached him, squinting at the image. It formed a wavy U shape. What first appeared to be a two-headed snake tapered upward into two women who looked like sisters. They held their clawed hands and crying faces skyward. Expressions of agony that reminded me of your grandmother’s stories about banshees, and a book of myths owned by Douglass which introduced me to gorgons. On the abdomen of one reptile woman an H, on the other an F.
“What paradox?”
Watson lost his lighthearted, cynical charm but didn’t look up. “Hope and fear are two sides of the same coin. That makes them both a waste of time.”
“I never heard of hope being a bad thing.”
“Then you heard wrong because it is. Hope weakens you as much as fear.”
“I heard since birth that faith and hope are what gives people strength.”
“Do they really? How has sittin’ around hoping for something ever helped a single person in this life?”
“What’s left without it? Leave everything in God’s hands?”
This made both men chuckle, though Oliver’s amounted to no more than a movement in his shoulders.
“You want to just roll the dice, sure,” Watson smirked. “If you believe in that variety of God as J.B. does. For my part, when I leave a problem in God’s hands, I usually find out too late we don’t want the same thing.”
“So you have a different ‘variety’ than J.B., is that it?”
“I don’t think about it much. We respect his beliefs in his company. In our own, we answer to a higher calling.”
I smiled. “Really. I didn’t know I joined up with the Crusade.”
“Yes you did.” He stopped cutting. “When those Democrat-puppet Pro-slavers back in Lawrence strung up my brother Frederick... when I found Freddie as they’d left him, hangin’ from a high Birch limb like their discarded laundry...they put their lives in my hands, not God’s. Their righteous punishment is an instrument of the divine and it is mine to avenge... not God’s. In due time their foot will slip. Their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them.”
“Deuteronomy 32:35,” Oliver droned around a mouthful of tobacco. Though a head taller than us both, I often felt that he served as Watson’s footnote.
“What do you hope for?”
At the time, everything Watson said that day felt like a blasphemy. A slap in the face to how I’d been raised. But I also found his conviction infectious. “I think you know, friend.”
He pointed at me with the knife tip. “And what’s that hope done for you, all these years you’ve been away from your son?”
“Kept me patient. Kept me sane.”
“No, it’s kept you waiting. For someone else to do the work. But now it’s your chance – it’s in your hands.” Tossing his arched blade aside, Watson wiped his hands, then pulled out his kit and started rolling a cigarette. “You joined up because you’re done hoping and I thank God for it because I need your steady aim at my side. Every time you hoped to see Benjamin again, it was nothing but the fear that you’d never see him again. Take what’s yours and hope for nothing. Because hope and fear are one and the same. Nothin’ but worry and hot air.”
He released me and resumed cleaning trout for the militia’s dinner. I returned to my own station, covering the filets with lemon juice and cracked pepper. We had far more fish than the men could eat, and most of it would go to the hogs and goats.
“Duality,” Oliver said, and spat tobacco juice through his teeth, as if to punctuate our awkward silence.
We arrived with the false dawn at 4am, twenty-two men standing on a ridge permeated by mist and overlooking Harper’s Ferry, its buildings woven together in tightly-knit clusters, descending until you reached the river and its encased bridge, giving the impression that the train traveled under one long dog kennel as it crossed the Potomac.
Watson and I stood with Sharps carbines in both hands, surveying a town so crowded with Pignut Hickory and Butternut trees you could barely tell where one shop became another.
He handed me five slabs of dried pork. “God knows when we’ll be eatin’ again.”
I tried to chew it but heavy breathing made it difficult. I didn’t notice my chest heaving until I followed his eyes.
“You all right?”
I nodded. “Is this what Kansas felt like?”
“No, there I had no chance of losing. No reason to be scared.”
“You’re scared now?”
Gravel and winterberry crunched underfoot as J.B. approached, one Colt pistol in hand, the other holstered.
“Change of plans, son. Secure the Fed’s armory first, then Hall’s rifle works.”
“That’s a mistake,” Watson returned. “Fed’s have got quantity but Hall’s got your 1841 rifles.”
“You can leave the strategy to me.”
“We’ll need longer range for the attack that’s coming. If the enslaved do show up –“
“There’s no ‘if’ in that statement.”
“We can supply them once we’ve secured the bridge and B&O’s railroad.”
“We don’t have time for your doubt – for you to play ‘what about this’ on the mouth organ.”
“Is that what I do?”
“You have orders. Repeat it.”
Watson shook his head. “Fed armory, then Hall’s, seize the railroad. We all meet up at musket manufacture. Male hostages only.”
J.B. had planned Harper’s for three years. Far more than a ferry, the town had the most advanced and diverse arsenal east of the Mississippi. Enough to mobilize an army, if it showed up.
J.B.’s hard eyes shifted from Watson to me and narrowed with gratitude. “Shields?” He grabbed my hand and closed his other on top of it. “You’re ready?”
“I am.”
“Loaded for bear?”
I tapped the ammunition satchel slung over my shoulder. “Hundred and sixty shells.”
Watson extended his own hand to his father. “God willing, by eight o’ clock we’ll be setting up hotels as barracks. Annuit Coeptis.”
“I assure you he does,” J.B. muttered as he turned away.
“It’s lucky for you I’ve never had a good idea, J.B. Because you never would’ve heard it.”
Brown ignored him, walking past Oliver’s detachment with his stooped gait, holding the hip that ached him in cold weather. He pointed over the ridge to direct Newby and Copeland.
Looking after him with a sour, indignant countenance, Watson subconsciously scratched the scaly pink patches on his forearm. I’d watched him contradict Brown for a year. For every one of J.B.’s ideas, he had a revision. I don’t know if he antagonized his father because he yearned for recognition or to get a rise out of him, but he earned neither. Your mother used to say a child ignored misbehaves because angry attention is better than none.
J.B never made physical contact with either of his sons – neither a handshake nor pat on the back. I believe he thought it protected them. They were born into his service and any informality; any favoritism would render them weak. Make them feel too safe. In his eyes, I’d enlisted of my own free will and Watson didn’t have any.
Everything at Harper’s went according to plan the first two hours. Telegraph wires cut. Armory secured with five hostages. Captives taken quietly without resistance. Watson detached two groups of four men each to take the rifle works and the mill, then we led the remaining four towards the train-car junction.
That’s when six gunshots cracked the air, two slugs kicking up dust before me. A third injured Dauphin, the man behind me, in the calf and he grabbed both my shoulders to keep from falling. Dauphin had worked the first oil drilling rig in Titusville before joining Brown, but the limp from that bullet sealed his fate that night.
Harper’s woke at seven in the morning too quickly to not know we were coming. Shouts and calls echoed from high windows and balconies. The Drake Hotel, Grant Seeds. But no one visible yet.
As the firing started, we ran north alongside a parked passenger train of fifteen cars, heading for the engine to sabotage it.
“Inside!” Watson yelled as we reached the arched doorway of the next car. He grabbed my collar and shoved me through. Two small windows above the poker tables shattered as I hunched down between the seats and set the carbine to my shoulder. Hunkered down behind a wide pane of the cabin’s warped glass, I slid upward against the wall to peek out just as the window cracked in a spider web from another shot.
Watson grabbed my arm and tugged me down. “Don’t. We won’t take anyone from this position.”
“There’s too many too soon. They knew we were coming.”
Watson shrugged. “Yes and no. If they knew it would be this morning, they would’ve stopped us on the ridge. How many would you estimate?”
"From the shouts and the shots, I’d say thirty.”
Watson cursed under his breath and mopped his brow with his gun hand.
“So we head to the engine house.”
“Didn’t want to end up there so soon. We still have to take care of the train – the noisy way.”
J.B. had mapped out the engine house as our only sanctuary if the mob surrounded us. All brick and mortar save for its wooden double-doors, with high windows that offered a superior firing position.
With telegraph wires cut, Harper’s could only connect to the outside world through the B&O railroad. Watson planned to sabotage the front engine silently, filling the boiler up with earth. Now we’d have to blow apart or deform the coupling rods with gunpowder and nitroglycerin.
“Taylor, Kagi.” Watson beckoned two men over with his pistol as three more shots thudded against the passenger car. Hunched over, they shuffled down the carpet runner. Only then did I stop to breathe: a ground-in scent of pickled eggs and laudanum.
Watson pulled a parcel sack from his ammo satchel and tossed it to Kagi. “Spread it thick over one side, above the sand pipes. Don’t light it before I get there. I’ll cover your exit.”
He motioned me to follow and we crouched out the train car’s opposite door, slugs puncturing seat cushions behind us. Outside, we fired over the arch of the roof as a distraction, morning sunlight stinging my eyes, and Taylor and Kagi ran off. Reloading the carbine, I heard grit beside the train crunching underfoot and looked up in enough time to see a man-shape behind Watson with something bronze held overhead.
Pulling my Colt, I cocked and fired at the figure in a single motion. Not until he fell and we stood over him did I see he was a colored man, holding one of the steam engine’s iron spades.
"Good eyes, Shields,” Watson said.
My heart throbbed in my chest. A baggage-handler with a button-down uniform. A stitched insignia that read B&O Railroads. Harper’s, I’d read, had been a mixed bag of slave and free for decades, but I’d pushed the possibility of meeting either out of my mind.
Couldn’t have been a day over eighteen. A tiny wisp of smoke curled up from his red jacket and he held up a forbidding hand at me, his teeth clenched tight.
Watson un-cocked his pistol. “He’s sufferin’, friend. Give him his Last Rites and meet me up front at the engine.”
But I couldn’t. The boy had his hand up, begging me not to shoot again, and the Colt’s barrel wavered before me. Up before sunrise, I thought. Preparing baggage carts. A job he’s so loyal to, so grateful for, he protects the company’s property with an iron spade.
That moment brought me a striking revelation. Douglass was right. Their cause was larger than us. J.B. and his boys loved coloreds as equals, no doubt. Called us their brothers and they meant it. But when Watson spoke of a higher calling... his father’s insurrection wasn’t about race nor slaves in the south, but eradicating human bondage, for the world to see, whatever the cost.
I couldn’t fire again, not with him pleading to me for mercy. He seemed to believe he’d live if I let him struggle through this wound on his own. But from his wheezing I knew I’d hit his lungs. I could only give him a few extra minutes and I’m ashamed to say I left him that way.
Our downfall unraveled quickly from there. The rising sun burned away all shadows, all cover, as I rushed along the south side of the passenger train cars, opposite the Drake hotel. I stayed close to the tracks as I could hear bullets crushing through the roof of each car.
As I reached the front engine I saw Watson kneeling below the power reserve, striking matches. Taylor and Kagi crouched behind a palette loaded with fertilizer sacks nearby, their Sharps raised to cover. The train protected our left, but shots rang out to my right, the first striking Kagi in the temple. I followed the sound to three men poised on the balcony of Sibley Mixed Paints, their 1841 rifle barrels resting on the railing.
Watson met my eyes, then pointed behind me. “I need thirty seconds.”
Looking back over one shoulder, I saw three riders with Derby hats tugging horses into position in front of Hadley’s Stationary, a bit too far to make out their faces. I took up Kagi’s position beside his body, laid covering fire on the balcony and managed to hit the closest man as he fumbled with his shells. Watson cursed the sweat dampening his gunpowder.
Cries now beyond the train. A man barking unintelligible orders. A woman answering with a scream. From the west, three riders approached in a full gallop and five men, some wearing B&O uniforms, gathered in front of Gridley Lodging, loading up satchels.
“Watson...”
“I see it. Ten seconds.”
I took down the second rifleman on the balcony, then so many shots rang out I couldn’t fathom their direction. Taylor gasped, slumped over and fell beside me. The gunpowder flared up and Watson drew in a hiss of pain as a slug tore through his left hand.
He winced and gripped the wrist with his right as I pulled him to his feet, then clenched his wounded fist against his chest. “Wait! I have to make sure it catches!”
“There’s no time.”
I pulled him by his good arm towards the Potomac as slugs pinged against the black steel of the train. Behind us, a small explosion like a handful of firecrackers. It sounded like the fuse exploded the gunpowder, but not the nitroglycerine. Despite his injury, Watson kept pace with me as we sprinted to the engine house.
Two left turns gave us a moment’s cover and gunshots chipped the overhanging façade of a crinoline storefront. J.B. and Oliver’s detachment appeared at our left, headed for our same destination and herding five men, one still in his nightclothes, before them like scared cattle.
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