Cloudsplitter (94 page)
In morning light, a few personal weapons, mostly antiquated muskets and squirrel guns, have been located by the townspeople, and five or six of the more adventurous men among them have taken up firing positions on the hillside above the armory yard. It is not long, however, before they are spotted by the raiders, most of them Kansas veterans and much more experienced than the locals at this sort of action and possessing weapons of surpassing accuracy, so that the townsmen are barely able to open fire, when one of them, a grocer named Boerly, is shot dead by a bullet from a raider rifle, which causes a quick retreat amongst the others. It is mid-morning. The militias from Shepherdstown and Charles Town have not yet arrived, and in Washington, fifty miles to the east, federal troops are only now being mustered for railroad transport to Harpers Ferry. Here in town, their feeble efforts at defense effectively curtailed by the raiders’ deadly accurate Sharps rifles, by their fear of endangering the hostages, and by their growing certainty that there are many more than Father’s seventeen raiders occupying the town and hundreds more escaped slaves than seven, the citizens are limited to taking occasional, erratic potshots in the general direction of the armory, causing more danger and havoc to themselves than to the raiders.
Even so, over at the rifle works on Hall’s Island, Kagi has grown increasingly anxious about the passage of so much time, for he and his two men, Copeland and Leary, though they have so far held the factory uncontested, are situated far from the hostages in the firehouse, and thus, of Father’s force, they are the most vulnerable to attack from the townsmen. Kagi dispatches Leary to town on foot to request Father to send back a wagon and additional men, so that they can quickly load the seized weapons from the factory and begin their escape into the mountains. It is time. None of the raiders has been killed or even wounded. According to the plan, they should all be departing from Harpers Ferry by now.
And I, up on the Maryland Heights, should also have left by now. That is the plan, Father’s plan, his vision of how it would go at Harpers Ferry on the night of October 16 and the morning of October 17, and everything up to now has gone accordingly. Except for the one thing: that the hundreds of escaping slaves whom we expected to come rushing to our side have not yet appeared, and the few who have are turning fearful and hesitant and may themselves have to be put under guard and made into hostages.
But that does not matter, I decide, as I watch from my perch above the town. Father’s plan can accommodate that, too. We have seized at least three wagonloads of weapons, we have terrorized the entire South into believing that an insurrection has begun, and in the North we have raised fresh huzzahs and enthusiastic promises of material support and a coming flood of volunteer fighters—we have, indeed, begun an insurrection, which surely, thanks to the presence of Frederick Douglass, will catch and burst into flame in a matter of mere days, and if Father leads his men out of Harpers Ferry now and makes his appointed
rendez-vous
in the Alleghenies with Mr. Douglass, we will still be able to feed those flames and follow them into the deeper South, just as Father wished. It is not too late.
The slaves will come in, Father insists. They will soon start to arrive. We must give them every moment up to the last possible moment to learn of our raid and our intentions and to overcome their natural fears and flee their masters’ farms and plantations for the town, which is still under our control. The second we abandon the town, the escaping slaves will have no place to go where they are not in terrible danger. For their sake, we shall continue to hold the town, he declares. Even as the Jefferson Guards ride in on the Charles Town Pike from the west and the Shepherdstown militia comes in along the Potomac road from the north and the troop train from Washington slowly approaches from the east.
We wake in darkness and long for light, and when the light comes, we wait for darkness to return, so that we can descend the rickety ladder from our crowded, windowless attic and warm our hands at the kitchen fire and walk about the yard awhile. We go out of the house either in pairs or alone, so as not to draw the attention of some errant nighttime traveler unexpectedly making his late way past the old Kennedy farm, someone who from the road would surely note, even in darkness, the presence of a crowd often or more men milling about the stone-and-white-clapboard house and wonder why they were there. The house is surrounded by woods, however, and is fairly remote, with the public road in front leading only and indirectly to the country village of Boonesborough, so that a pair of men or a man alone, if he remain silent, can walk back and forth before the house unseen for a spell, can stretch his cramped limbs and breathe the cool, fresh air of outdoors for the first time in twenty-four hours, and from the road no one not warned of a stranger’s presence would see him. Even if by accident the traveler did catch a glimpse of a stranger or two standing in the yard, he would think nothing amiss, for Dr. Kennedy’s family, now removed to Baltimore, has often rented its old, abandoned family farm to landless seasonal farmers, which was how John Kagi, when he contracted to rent the place for us, represented Father and his several sons—a Mr. Isaac Smith and his boys, from up near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, looking for good Virginia farmland to buy and perhaps at the same time to graze and fatten a few head of livestock to butcher and sell in the fall to the citizens and armory workers of Harpers Ferry. Kagi, who seems almost to believe his lies himself, has a gift for storytelling.
The town of Harpers Ferry and the rifle and musket manufactories and the federal arsenal are situated in a deep, narrow gorge three miles south of here, on a spit of terraced, flat-rock land, where the Shenandoah cuts between two high, wooded ridges and empties into the Potomac. At first sight, it seems an unlikely place to make and store an army’s weapons, vulnerable to attack and siege from the high bluffs on both sides of both rivers. But Father has explained that none of our nation’s enemies could attack the town, so far from sea, without first having captured Washington, fifty miles downriver, or Richmond and Baltimore. The last place from which the federal government would expect Harpers Ferry to be attacked is by land, he says, smiling, and only our fellow Americans could manage that. Which is, of course, precisely where and who we are: ensconced northwest of the town up here in the Kennedy farmhouse, fellow Americans coming in under cover of darkness one by one from all over the continent—well-armed young men with anti-slavery principles in their minds and bloody murder in their hearts.
We have said our somber final goodbyes to our families and homes in the North and have joined the Old Man here—fifteen white men and five Negro, when we have all assembled—to wait out the days and weeks and, if necessary, months until he tells us finally that the moment we have been waiting for, some of us for a lifetime, has come. The plan, his meticulously detailed schedule and breakdown of operations, he has rehearsed for us over and over again, night after night, in the chilled, candlelit room above the one big room of the house, our prison, as we have come jokingly to call it. On the basement level, there is a kitchen, where sister Annie and Oliver’s new wife, Martha, have settled in to cook and launder for us—they arrived back in mid-July, after Father, having determined that our disguise as land speculators and provenders of meat required the presence of womenfolk, summoned them down from North Elba. A short ways from the house is a locked shed, where we have stored our weapons, which we periodically clean and maintain to break the monotony of our confinement-some two hundred Sharps rifles and that many more pistols and a thousand sharpened steel-tipped pikes, all paid for by Father’s secret supporters and shipped to Isaac Smith & Sons piecemeal over the summer months from Ohio and Hartford by way of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in wooden cases marked “Hardware and Castings.” John Kagi, who once taught school in the area and knows it well, has functioned as our main advance agent here and has facilitated these delicate operations. Also, John Cook has been here for nearly a year already, sent down from Iowa by Father as a spy, because of his intelligence and Yale education and his much-admired social skills, and he has managed without arousing suspicion to gain employment as a canal-lock tender and last spring even married a local girl, whom he had got with child, which naturally did not particularly please Father, but it helped Cook settle into the daily life of the town, and that has proved useful.
We ourselves have arrived in a trickle, a few at a time. First, on July 3, Father and I and our old Kansas cohort Jeremiah Anderson came in by wagon from North Elba, and then soon after came Oliver and Watson and the Thompson boys, William, who earlier wished to be in Kansas with us and his brother Henry but never made it off the Thompson farm, and his younger brother Dauphin, only twenty years old, by nature a sweet and gentle boy, but who over the years has come practically to worship Father. From Maine comes Charlie Tidd and with him Aaron Stevens, both hardened veterans of the Kansas campaign, and shortly after them, Albert Hazlett rides a wagon in, followed by the Canadian Stewart Taylor, the spiritualist, who is convinced that he alone will die at Harpers Ferry and seems almost to welcome it, as if his death is a small price to pay for the survival of the rest of us. A week later, the Coppoc brothers, Edwin and Barclay, will arrive at the farmhouse, lapsed Quakers who trained with us in Iowa. Then, late in the summer, Willie Leeman will walk all the way in from Maine, and shortly after him come the first of the Negroes, Osborn Anderson and Dangerfield Newby, which pleases Father immensely, for he has begun to grow fearful that his army will be made up only of white men. In the end, there will be four more men to join us at the Kennedy farm: the Bostonian Francis Meriam, unstable and inspired to join us by his recent visit with the journalist Redpath to the black republic of Haiti; and John Copeland, Lewis Leary, and Shields Green, the last three of them Ohio Negroes, which, not counting our commander-in-chief, rounds out our number at twenty.
But do not fear, this number will be sufficient unto our present needs, Father has declared. We have pared away from our side all those men who would defeat us through their cowardice and faithlessness. We now have only the enemy to fight. July has turned into August and is moving rapidly towards autumn, and as each new recruit joins us, Father begins his narrative anew, an old jeremiad against slavery that lapses into fresh prophecy of its demise, as weekly he adjusts his plan for the taking of Harpers Ferry, so that it reflects the skills and personalities of the new arrivals, his increased belief in his recruits’ commitment to the raid, and his growing awareness that in the end there will be far fewer of us than he anticipated. The arrival of Mr. Douglass will, of course, alter things considerably, even if he comes alone, but it’s mainly afterwards that his presence will revise our circumstances and operations, Father points out, after we have seized the town and the cry has gone out across the Virginia countryside that Osawatomie Brown and Frederick Douglass have begun their long-awaited war to liberate the slaves. That’s when our sharpened pikes, with their six-foot ash handles and eight-inch knife blades bolted to the top, will go into action. Father believes that most of the slaves who join up with us will not be much experienced in the use of firearms, but until they can be trained and properly armed, these weapons will do them fine. Besides, the very sight of razor-sharp spears in the hands of vengeful liberated Negroes will help terrorize the slaveholders. Terror is one of our weapons, he says. Perhaps our strongest weapon. Until then, however, and for now, this is the plan.
From our blanket rolls scattered over the rough plank floor, we prop our heads in our hands and listen to our commander-in-chief, and each of us sees himself playing his role flawlessly, not missing a cue or a line, as if he were an actor in a perfectly executed play. Father sits on a stool in the center of the attic, and as usual, he first hectors and inspires us with his rhetoric and then runs through his plan yet again. He is the author of the play and its stage-manager and master of costumes and scenery and all our properties, and he is the lead actor as well—along with Mr. Douglass, of course, we mustn’t forget him, for without Frederick Douglass, no matter how successful the first act is played, the second and third will surely fail. There may not even be a second or third. Everyone knows that. Father will reveal more about those acts later, he says, but for now we need be mindful only that it is overall a work, a performance, whose second and continuing acts will require not one hero but two.
The rest of us are important players, too, we know, but compared to the Old Man and Mr. Douglass, minor. Father insists that no, each one of us is as crucial to the success of this operation as every other: from top to bottom, we are a chain, and if one link breaks, the entire chain comes undone. But still, we know better. And so does he. Each of us twenty is replaceable, and until Mr. Douglass arrives, this will be the Old Man’s show, and then it will belong to the two of them. It will never belong to us. Meanwhile, however, we listen to the Old Man’s directions and memorize our lines and positions, so that when at last Osawatomie Brown steps onto the stage and begins the action, we will be able to follow his lead and efficiently prepare the way for the entry of the famous Frederick Douglass and his thousands of Negro actors, all of whom are as yet unrehearsed and have been cast as players only in our imaginations.
Even so, the time to act is fast approaching, Father tells us. Already there have appeared numerous signs from the Lord—such as the sudden recent arrival of the pikes from Chambersburg, where they had been oddly delayed for weeks, despite Kagi’s best attempts to get them released and sent on to us. And soon from the Lord there will come additional signs, emblems and omens dressed as incidental events and information, to encourage us and make us the more eager to risk our lives in battle rather than continue with this suffocating waiting game at the farm on the Maryland Heights. For instance, Father will dispatch Cook down along the Charles Town Turnpike to determine the numbers and disposition of the slaves there, his only attempt to reconnoiter the region beyond the town of Harpers Ferry itself, and Cook will return aflame with news that the moon is right for insurrection, for it is nearly a dog-tooth moon, the type that makes Africans particularly discontented, he has learned. This, too, is a sign from the Lord, Father tells us. Cook has also been told of a young male slave at a farm nearby who just yesterday hung himself because his owner sold the man’s wife down South. A shipment of spears suddenly released, a dog-tooth moon, and a hanging man: on the strength of these and other similarly propitious portents, Father has sent sister Annie and Martha back home to North Elba. We are now awaiting only the arrival of Mr. Douglass, who we hope will bring with him a phalanx of well-armed Negro fighters from the North, although Father warns us that lately letters from his black cohorts back there are suggesting otherwise.