Cozzens - Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Volume 5

Alexander R. Boteler, Colonel, C.S.A.

STORER COLLEGE, at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, a flourishing institution for the education of colored youth of both sexes, owes its existence to the philanthropic gentleman of New England whose name it has taken. At its fourteenth annual commencement on May 30, 1881, Frederick Douglass, who is undoubtedly the most gifted orator of his race, delivered a eulogistic address on old John Brown, in which he claimed for him the honor of having originated the war between the Northern and Southern sections of our Union, summing up his conclusions on this point in the following expressive language: If, said he, John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did, at least, begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places, and men for which this honor is claimed, we shall find that not Carolina, but Virginianot Fort Sumter, but Harper's Ferry and the arsenalnot Major [Robert] Anderson, but John Brown began the war that ended American slavery, and made this a free republic. Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy, and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes, and compromises. When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was clearedthe time for compromises was gonethe armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union, and the clash of arms was at hand.

These words, uttered with an emphasis belonging to a strong conviction of their truth, will be accepted by the public as an authentic but somewhat tardy confession of one who, as a confidential coadjutor of Brown in his conspiracy against the South, is understood to have been fully acquainted with his plans and purposes; and the avowal thus frankly made by him is sufficiently confirmed by the contemporaneous facts to which it refers. For, when a complete and impartial history of our late civil war shall be written, it will be seen that the John Brown Raid, at Harper's Ferry, in the latter part of 1859, was indeed the beginning of actual hostilities in the Southern States; that then and there the first shot was fired and the first blood was shedthe blood of an unoffending free Negro, foully murdered while in the faithful discharge of his duty! It will be further seen that there and then occurred the first forcible seizure of public property; the first attempt to hold, occupy, and possess a military post of the government; the first outrage perpetrated on the old flag; the first armed resistance to national troops; the first organized effort to establish a provisional government at the South, in opposition to that of the United States; the first overt movements to subvert the authority of the constitution and to destroy the integrity of the Union.

Looked at in the light of subsequent events these facts, with their antecedent and attendant circumstances, are so significant that few now can fail to see and none need hesitate to say that the abolition affair at Harper's Ferry, in the fall of 1859, was an appropriate prelude to that gigantic war which was so soon to follow it, and which, conducted on a scale commensurate with the magnitude of the work to be accomplished, effectually completed what old John Brown so fatally begana work concerning which friends of Brown now boast that Lincoln with his proclamations, Grant and Sherman with their armies, and Sumner with his constitutional amendments, did little more than follow in the path which Brown had pointed out. (F. B. Sanborn, in Atlantic Monthly, April, 1875.) But whatever difference of opinion yet exists as to who fired the first hostile gun in the SouthJohn Brown or General [Pierre G. T.] Beauregardone thing is certain: If it had not been for a comparatively small class of factious and implacable politicians in both sectionsthe active abolitionists of the North and the secessionists per se of the Souththere would have been no fratricidal civil war, especially if it had depended on the aforesaid extremists to go to the front and do the fighting. But it is enough for us to know what was actually done during a maddened and misguided epoch and what our obvious duty is in these improving times of reestablished peace, and, it is to be hoped, restored fraternity.

Passing by the question, then, as to whether the Harper's Ferry outbreak was a legitimate consequence of the teachings of the Republican Party, as was claimed at the time of its occurrence by some of the prominent leaders of that party; disregarding also the kindred inquiry as to whether the forcible extinction of slavery in the South was the logical consummation of a foregone conclusion in the North, where it had long been labored for by a constantly increasing faction who, professing to be governed in their political action by a higher law than the Constitution, were willing to let the Union slide for the sake of abolition, and who, likewise, on that account, opposing all compromises, persistently urged war at a time when many patriots, North and South, were nobly striving to avert that calamityI will confine myself here to outlining some of the scenes and incidents that occurred, partly under my personal observation, at the time of Brown's hostile incursion, for which he and his deluded followers paid the forfeit of their lives, and from which the people of the unfortunate town selected for his midnight raid may date the beginning of the end of their former prosperity.

On the morning of the raid, Monday, October 17, 1859, I was at my home near Shepherdstown (ten miles west of Harper's Ferry), and had hardly finished breakfast when a carriage came to the door with one of my daughters, who told me that a messenger had arrived at Shepherdstown, a few minutes before, with the startling intelligence of a Negro insurrection at Harper's Ferry!