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| Image courtesy of the Civil War Trust |
Excerpt
from “John Brown’s Body (1928) an epic poem by Stephen Vincent Benet, which won
a Pulitzer Prize for literature. It
appears courtesy of Project Gutenberg of Australia: http://gutenberg.net.au
They reached the
Maryland bridge of Harper's Ferry
That Sunday
night. There were twenty-two in all,
Nineteen were under
thirty, three not twenty-one,
Kagi, the
self-taught scholar, quiet and cool,
Stevens, the
cashiered soldier, Puritan-fathered,
A singing giant,
gunpowder-tempered and rash.
Dauphin Thompson,
the pippin-cheeked country-boy,
More like a girl
than a warrior; Oliver Brown,
Married last year
when he was barely nineteen;
Dangerfield Newby,
colored and born a slave,
Freeman now, but
married to one not free
Who, with their
seven children, waited him South,
The youngest baby
just beginning to crawl;
Watson Brown, the
steady lieutenant, who wrote
Back to his wife,
"Oh, Bell, I want to see
you
And the little
fellow very much but must wait.
There was a slave
near here whose wife was sold South.
They found him
hanging in Kennedy's orchard next morning.
I cannot come home
as long as such things are done here.
I sometimes think
that we shall not meet again."
................................................................
John
Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry
October
16-18, 1859
Text:
Civil War Trust: http://www.civilwar.org/150th-anniversary/john-browns-harpers-ferry.html
On
the evening of October 16, 1859 John Brown, a staunch abolitionist, and a group
of his supporters left their farmhouse hide-out en route to Harpers Ferry.
Descending upon the town in the early hours of October 17th, Brown and his men
captured prominent citizens and seized the federal armory and arsenal. Brown had hopes that the local slave
population would join the raid and through the raid’s success weapons would be
supplied to slaves and freedom fighters throughout the country; this was not to
be. First held down by the local militia in the late morning of the 17th, Brown
took refuge in the arsenal’s engine house. However, this sanctuary from the
fire storm did not last long, when in the late afternoon US Marines under
Colonel Robert E. Lee arrived and stormed the engine house, killing many of the
raiders and capturing Brown. Brown was quickly placed on trial and charged with
treason against the state of Virginia, murder, and slave insurrection. Brown
was sentenced to death for his crimes and hanged on December 2, 1859.
.....................................................................
These were some of
the band. For better or worse
They were all
strong men.
The bearded faces look
strange
In the old
daguerreotypes: they should be the faces
Of prosperous,
small-town people, good sons and fathers,
Good horse-shoe
pitchers, good at plowing a field,
Good at swapping
stories and good at praying,
American wheat,
firm-rooted, good in the ear.
There is only one
whose air seems out of the common,
Oliver Brown. That face has a masculine beauty
Somewhat like the
face of Keats.
They were all strong men.
They tied up the
watchmen and took the rifle-works.
Then John Brown
sent a raiding party away
To fetch in Colonel
Washington from his farm.
The Colonel was
George Washington's great-grand-nephew,
Slave-owner,
gentleman-farmer, but, more than these,
Possessor of a
certain fabulous sword
Given to Washington
by Frederick the Great.
They captured him
and his sword and brought them along
Processionally.
The act has a touch of drama,
Half
costume-romance, half unmerited farce.
On the way, they
told the Washington slaves they were free,
Or free to fight
for their freedom.
The slaves
heard the news
With the dazed,
scared eyes of cattle before a storm.
A few came back
with the band and were given pikes,
And, when John
Brown was watching, pretended to mount
A slipshod guard
over the prisoners.
But, when he had
walked away, they put down their pikes
And huddled
together, talking in mourning voices.
It didn't seem
right to play at guarding the Colonel
But they were
afraid of the bearded patriarch
With the Old
Testament eyes.
A little later
It was Patrick
Higgins' turn. He was the night-watchman
Of the Maryland
bridge, a tough little Irishman
With a canny,
humorous face, and a twist in his speech.
He came humming his
way to his job.
"Halt!" ordered a voice.
He stopped a
minute, perplexed. As he told men later,
"Now I didn't
know what 'Halt!' mint, any more
Than a hog knows
about a holiday."
There was a
scuffle.
He got away with a
bullet-crease in his scalp
And warned the
incoming train. It was half-past-one.
A moment later, a
man named Shepherd Heyward,
Free negro,
baggage-master of the small station,
Well-known in the
town, hardworking, thrifty and fated,
Came looking for
Higgins.
"Halt!"
called the voice again,
But he kept on, not
hearing or understanding,
Whichever it may
have been.
A rifle cracked.
He fell by the
station-platform, gripping his belly,
And lay for twelve
hours of torment, asking for water
Until he was able
to die.
There is no stone,
No image of bronze
or marble green with the rain
To Shepherd
Heyward, free negro of Harper's Ferry,
And even the books,
the careful, ponderous histories,
That turn live men
into dummies with smiles of wax
...........................................................
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR:
Stephen
Vincent Benét was an American author, poet, short story writer, and novelist.
Benét is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil
War, John Brown's Body, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929.
................................
Thoughtfully posed
against a photographer's background
In the act of
signing a treaty or drawing a sword,
Tell little of what
he was.
And yet his face
Grey with pain and
puzzled at sudden death
Stares out at us
through the bookworm-dust of the years
With an
uncomprehending wonder, a blind surprise.
"I was getting
along," it says, "I was doing well.
I had six thousand
dollars saved in the bank.
It was a good town,
a nice town, I liked the folks
And they liked
me. I had a good job there, too.
On Sundays I used
to dress myself up slick enough
To pass the plate
in church, but I wasn't proud
Not even when
trashy niggers called me Mister,
Though I could hear
the old grannies over their snuff
Mumbling along,
'Look, chile, there goes Shepherd Heyward.
Ain't him fine in
he Sunday clo'es--ain't him sassy and fine?
You grow up decent
and don't play ball in the street,
And maybe you'll
get like him, with a gold watch and chain.'
And then,
suddenly--and what was it all about?
Why should anyone
want to kill me? Why was it done?"
So the grey lips. And so the hurt in the eyes.
A hurt like a
child's, at punishment unexplained
That makes the
whole child-universe fall to pieces.
At the time of
death, most men turn back toward the child.
Brown did not know
at first that the first man dead
By the sword he
thought of so often as Gideon's sword
Was one of the race
he had drawn that sword to free.
It had been dark on
the bridge. A man had come
And had not halted
when ordered. Then the shot
And the scrape of
the hurt man dragging himself away.
That was all. The next man ordered to halt would halt.
His mind was too
full of the burning judgments of God
To wonder who it
had been. He was cool and at peace.
He dreamt of a
lamb, lying down by a rushing stream.
So the night wore
away, indecisive and strange.
The raiders stuck
by the arsenal, waiting perhaps
For a great bell of
jubilation to toll in the sky,
And the slaves to
rush from the hills with pikes in their hands,
A host redeemed,
black rescue-armies of God.
It did not happen.
Meanwhile, there was casual firing.
A townsman named
Boerley was killed. Meanwhile, the train
Passed over the
bridge to carry its wild news
Of abolition-devils
sprung from the ground
A hundred and
fifty, three hundred, a thousand strong
To pillage Harper's
Ferry, with fire and sword.
Meanwhile the whole
countryside was springing to arms.
The alarm-bell in
Charlestown clanged "Nat Turner has come.'
Nat Turner has come
again, all smoky from Hell,
Setting the slave
to murder and massacre!"
The Jefferson Guards
fell in. There were boys and men.
They had no
uniforms but they had weapons.
Old
squirrel-rifles, taken down from the wall,
Shot guns loaded
with spikes and scraps of iron.
A boy dragged a
blunderbuss as big as himself.
They started for
the Ferry.
In a dozen
A score of other
sleepy, neighboring towns
The same bell
clanged, the same militia assembled.
The Ferry itself
was roused and stirring with dawn.
And the firing
began again.
A queer, harsh sound
In the ordinary
streets of that clean, small town,
A desultory, vapid,
meaningless sound.
God knows why John
Brown lingered! Kagi, the scholar,
Who, with two
others, held the rifle-works,
All morning sent
him messages urging retreat.
They had the inexorable
weight of common sense
Behind them, but
John Brown neither replied
Nor heeded,
brooding in the patriarch-calm
Of a lean, solitary
pine that hangs
On the cliff's
edge, and sees the world below
A tiny pattern of
toy fields and trees,
And only feels its
roots gripping the rock
And the almighty
wind that shakes its boughs,
Blowing from
eagle-heaven to eagle-heaven.
Of course they were
cut off. The whole attempt
Was fated from the
first.
Just about noon
The Jefferson
Guards took the Potomac Bridge
And drove away the
men Brown posted there.
There were three
doors of possible escape
Open to Brown. With this the first slammed shut.
The second followed
it a little later
With the recapture
of the other bridge
That cut Brown off
from Kagi and the arsenal
And penned the
larger body of the raiders
In the armory.
Again the firing rolled,
And now the first
of the raiders fell and died,
Dangerfield Newby,
the freed Scotch-mulatto
Whose wife and
seven children, slaves in Virginia,
Waited for him to
bring them incredible freedom.
They were sold
South instead, after the raid.
His body lay where
the townspeople could reach it.
They cut off his
ears for trophies.
If there are
souls,
As many think that
there are or wish that there might be,
Crystalline things
that rise on light wings exulting
Out of the spoilt
and broken cocoon of the body,
Knowing no sorrow
or pain but only deliverance,
And yet with the
flame of speech, the patterns of memory,
One wonders what
the soul of Dangerfield Newby
Said, in what
terms, to the soul of Shepherd Heyward,
Both born slave,
both freed, both dead the same day.
What do the souls
that bleed from the corpse of battle
Say to the tattered
night?
Perhaps it is better
We have no power to
visage what they might say.
The firing now was
constant, like the heavy
And drumming rains
of summer. Twice Brown sent
Asking a
truce. The second time there went
Stevens and Watson
Brown with a white flag.
But things had gone
beyond the symbol of flags.
Stevens, shot from
a window, fell in the gutter
Horribly
wounded. Watson Brown crawled back
To the engine house
that was the final fort
Of Brown's last
stand, torn through and through with slugs.
A Mr. Brua, one of
Brown's prisoners,
Strolled out from
the unguarded prison-room
Into the bullets,
lifted Stevens up,
Carried him over to
the old hotel
They called the
Wager House, got a doctor for him,
And then strolled back
to take his prisoner's place
With Colonel
Washington and the scared rest.
I know no more than
this of Mr. Brua
But he seems
curiously American,
And I imagine him a
tall, stooped man
A little yellow
with the Southern sun,
With slow, brown
eyes and a slow way of talking,
Shifting the quid
of tobacco in his cheek
Mechanically, as he
lifted up
The dirty, bloody
body of the man
Who stood for
everything he most detested
And slowly carrying
him through casual wasps
Of death to the
flyspecked but sunny room
In the old hotel,
wiping the blood and grime
Mechanically from
his Sunday coat,
Settling his black
string-tie with big, tanned hands,
And, then,
incredibly, going back to jail.
He did not think
much about what he'd done
But sat himself as
comfortably as might be
On the cold bricks
of that dejected guard-room
And slowly started
cutting another quid
With a worn knife
that had a brown bone-handle.
He lived all
through the war and died long after,
This Mr. Brua I
see. His last advice
To numerous nephews
was "Keep out of trouble,
But if you're in
it, chew and don't be hasty,
Just do whatever's
likeliest at hand."
I like your way of
talking, Mr. Brua,
And if there still
are people interested
In cutting literary
clothes for heroes
They might do worse
than mention your string-tie.
There were other
killings that day. On the one side,
this,
Leeman, a boy of
eighteen and the youngest raider,
Trying to flee from
the death-trap of the engine-house
And caught and
killed on an islet in the Potomac.
The body lay on a
tiny shelf of rock
For hours, a sack
of clothes still stung by bullets.
On the other
side--Fontaine Beckham, mayor of the town,
Went to look at
Heyward's body with Patrick Higgins.
The slow tears
crept to his eyes. He was getting old.
He had thought a
lot of Heyward. He had no gun
But he had been
mayor of the town for a dozen years,
A peaceful, orderly
place full of decent people,
And now they were
killing people, here in his town,
He had to do
something to stop it, somehow or other.
He wandered out on
the railroad, half-distraught
And peeped from
behind a water-tank at the raiders.
"Squire, don't
go any farther," said Higgins, "It ain't safe."
He hardly heard
him, he had to look out again.
Who were these
devils with horns who were shooting his people?
They didn't look
like devils. One was a boy
Smooth-cheeked,
with a bright half-dreamy face, a little
Like Sally's
eldest.
Suddenly, the air struck
him
A stiff,
breath-taking blow. "Oh," he
said, astonished.
Took a step and
fell on his face, shot through the heart.
Higgins watched him
for twenty minutes, wanting to lift him
But not quite
daring. Then he turned away
And went back to
the town.
The bars had been
open all day,
Never to better business.
When the news of
Beckham's death spread from bar to bar,
It was like putting
loco-weed in the whiskey,
The mob came
together at once, the American mob,
They mightn't be
able to take Brown's last little fort
But there were two
prisoners penned in the Wager House.
One was hurt
already, Stevens, no fun killing him.
But the other was
William Thompson, whole and unwounded,
Caught when Brown
tried to send his first flag of truce.
They stormed the
hotel and dragged him out to the bridge,
Where two men shot
him, unarmed, then threw the body
Over the
trestle. It splashed in the shallow
water,
But the slayers
kept on firing at the dead face.
The carcass was
there for days, a riven target,
Barbarously
misused.
Meanwhile the armory yard
Was taken by a new
band of Beckham's avengers,
The most of Brown's
prisoners freed and his last escape cut off.
What need to tell
of the killing of Kagi the scholar,
The wounding of
Oliver Brown and the other deaths?
Only this remains
to be told. When the drunken day
Reeled into night,
there were left in the engine-house
Five men, alive and
unwounded, of all the raiders.
Watson and Oliver
Brown
Both of them hurt
to the death, were stretched on the floor
Beside the corpse
of Taylor, the young Canadian.
There was no light,
there. It was bitterly cold.
A cold chain of
lightless hours that slowly fell
In leaden beads
between two fingers of stone.
Outside, the fools
and the drunkards yelled in the streets,
And, now and then,
there were shots. The prisoners talked
And tried to sleep.
John Brown did not try to
sleep,
The live coals of
his eyes severed the darkness;
Now and then he
heard his young son Oliver calling
In the thirsty
agony of his wounds, "Oh, kill me!
Kill me and put me
out of this suffering!"
John Brown's jaw
tightened. "If you must die,"
he said,
"Die like a
man." Toward morning the crying
ceased.
John Brown called
out to the boy but he did not answer.
"I guess he's
dead," said John Brown.
If his
soul wept
They were the
incredible tears of the squeezed stone.
He had not slept
for two days, but he would not sleep.
The night was a
chained, black leopard that he stared down,
Erect, on his
feet. One wonders what sights he saw
In the cloudy
mirror of his most cloudy heart,
Perhaps God clothed
in a glory, perhaps himself
The little boy who
had stolen three brass pins
And been well
whipped for it.
When he was six years old
An Indian boy had
given him a great wonder,
A yellow marble,
the first he had ever seen.
He treasured it for
months but lost it at last,
Boylike. The hurt of the loss took years to heal.
He never quite
forgot.
He could see it now,
Smooth, hard and
lovely, a yellow, glistening ball,
But it kept rolling
away through cracks of darkness
Whenever he tried
to catch it and hold it fast.
If he could only
touch it, he would be safe,
But it trickled
away and away, just out of reach,
There by the wall .
. .
Outside the blackened
East
Began to tarnish
with a faint, grey stain
That caught on the
fixed bayonets of the marines.
Lee of Virginia,
Light Horse Harry's son,
Observed it
broaden, thinking of many things,
But chiefly wanting
to get his business done,
A curious, wry,
distasteful piece of work
For regular
soldiers.
Therefore to be finished
As swiftly and
summarily as possible
Before this yelling
mob of drunk civilians
And green militia
once got out of hand.
His mouth set. Once already he had offered
The honor of the
attack to the militia,
Such honor as it
was.
Their Colonel had
Declined with a
bright nervousness of haste.
"Your men are
paid for doing this kind of work.
Mine have their
wives and children." Lee smiled
briefly,
Remembering
that. The smile had a sharp edge.
Well, it was time.
The whooping crowd fell
silent
And scattered, as a
single man walked out
Toward the
engine-house, a letter in his hand.
Lee watched him
musingly. A good man, Stuart.
Now he was by the
door and calling out.
The door opened a
crack.
Brown's eyes were there
Over the cold
muzzle of a cocked carbine.
The parleying
began, went on and on,
While the crowd
shivered and Lee watched it all
With the strict
commonsense of a Greek sword
And with the same
sure readiness.
Unperceived,
The dawn ran down
the valleys of the wind,
Coral-footed dove,
tracking the sky with coral . . .
Then, sudden as
powder flashing in a pan,
The parleying was
done.
The door slammed shut.
The little figure
of Stuart jumped aside
Waving its cap.
And the marines came on.
Brown watched them
come. One hand was on his carbine.
The other felt the
pulse of his dying son.
"Sell your
lives dear," he said. The
rifle-shots
Rattled within the
bricked-in engine-room
Like firecrackers
set off in a stone jug,
And there was a
harsh stink of sweat and powder.
There was a moment
when the door held firm.
Then it was cracked
with sun.
Brown fired and
missed.
A shadow with a
sword leaped through the sun.
"That's Ossawattomie,"
said the tired voice
Of Colonel
Washington.
The shadow lunged
And Brown fell to
his knees.
The sword bent
double,
A light sword,
better for parades than fighting,
The shadow had to
take it in both hands
And fairly rain his
blows with it on Brown
Before he sank.
Now two marines were down,
The rest rushed in
over their comrades' bodies,
Pinning one man of
Brown's against the wall
With bayonets,
another to the floor.
Lee, on his rise of
ground, shut up his watch.
It had been just a
quarter of an hour
Since Stuart gave
the signal for the storm,
And now it was
over.
All but the long dying.
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