Читать книгу American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' - Julian Street - Страница 18

Mad Old Brown,

Osawatomie Brown,

With his eighteen other crazy men, went in and took the town.

—Edmund Clarence Stedman.

Three States meet at Harper's Ferry, and the line dividing two of them is indicated where it crosses the station platform. If you alight at the rear end of the train, you are in Maryland; at the front, you are in West Virginia. This I like. I have always liked important but invisible boundaries—boundaries of states or, better yet, of countries. When I cross them I am disposed to step high, as though not to trip upon them, and then to pause with one foot in one land and one in another, trying to imagine that I feel the division running through my body.

Harper's Ferry is an entrancing old town; a drowsy place, piled up beautifully, yet carelessly, upon terraced roads clinging to steep hills, which slope on one side to the Potomac, on the other to the Shenandoah, and come to a point, like the prow of a great ship, at the confluence of the two.

Harpers Ferry is an entrancing old town; a drowsy place piled up beautifully yet carelessly upon terraced roads clinging to steep hillsides

There is something foreign in the appearance of the place. Many times, as I looked at old stone houses, a story or two high on one side, three or four stories on the other, seeming to set their claws into the cliffs and cling there for dear life, I thought of houses in Capri and Amalfi, and in some towns in France; and again there were low cottages built of blocks of shale covered with a thin veneer of white plaster showing the outlines of the stones beneath, which, squatting down amid their trees and flowers, resembled peasant cottages in Normandy or Brittany, or in Ireland.

It is a town in which to ramble for an hour, uphill, down and around; stopping now to delight in a crumbling stone wall, tied together with Kenilworth ivy; now to watch a woman making apple butter in a great iron pot; now to see an old negro clamber slowly into his rickety wagon, take up the rope reins, and start his skinny horse with the surprising words: "Come hither!"; now to look at an old tangled garden, terraced rudely up a hillside; now to read the sign, on a telegraph pole in the village, bearing the frank threat: "If you Hitch your Horses Here they will be Turned Loose." Now you will come upon a terraced road, at one side of which stands an old house draped over the rocks in such a way as to provide entrance from the ground level, on any one of three stories; or an unexpected view down a steep roadway, or over ancient moss-grown housetops to where, as an old book I found there puts it, "between two ramparts, in a gorge of savage grandeur, the lordly Potomac takes to his embrace the beautiful Shenandoah."

The liaison between the rivers, described in this Rabelaisian manner by the author of "The Annals of Harper's Ferry," has been going on for a long time with all the brazen publicity of a love scene on a park bench. I recommend the matter to the attention of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, which once took action to prohibit a novel by Mr. Theodore Dreiser. A great many people wish to read Mr. Dreiser's books yet no one has to read them if he does not want to. But it is a different matter with these rivers. Sensitive citizens of Harper's Ferry and pure-minded passengers on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad are obliged daily to witness what is going on.

Before the days of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and of the late Anthony Comstock, when we had no one to make it clear to us exactly what was shocking, little was thought of the public scandal between the Potomac and the Shenandoah. Thomas Jefferson seems to have rather liked it; there is a point above the town, known as Jefferson's Rock, at which, it is said, the author of the Declaration of Independence stood and uttered a sentiment about the spectacle. Everybody in Harper's Ferry agrees that Jefferson stood at Jefferson's Rock and said something appropriate, and any one of them will try to tell you what he said, but each version will be different.

A young lady told me that he said: "This view is worth a trip across the Atlantic Ocean."

A young man in a blue felt hat of the fried-egg variety said that Jefferson declared, with his well-known simplicity: "This is the grandest view I ever seen."

An old man who had to go through the tobacco chewer's pre-conversational rite before replying to my question gave it as: "Pfst!—They ain't nothin' in Europe ner Switzerland ner nowheres else, I reckon', to beat this-here scenery."

The man at the drug store quoted differently alleging the saying to have been: "Europe has nothing on this": whereas the livery stable man's version was: "This has that famous German river—the Rhine River don't they call it?—skinned to death."

Whatever Jefferson's remark was, there has been added to the spectacle at Harper's Ferry, since his day, a new feature, which, could he have but seen it, must have struck him forcibly, and might perhaps have caused him to say more.

At a lofty point upon the steep wall of Maryland Heights, across the Potomac from the town, far, far up upon the side of the cliff, commanding a view not only of both rivers, but of their meeting place and their joint course below, and of the lovely contours of the Blue Ridge Mountains, fading to smoky coloring in the remote distance, there has, of late years, appeared the outline of a gigantic face, which looks out from its emplacement like some Teutonic god in vast effigy, its huge luxuriant mustaches pointing East and West as though in symbolism of the conquest of a continent. A blue and yellow background, tempered somewhat by the elements, serves to attract attention to the face and to the legend which accompanies it, but the thing one sees above all else, the thing one recognizes, is the face itself, with its look half tragic, half resigned, yet always so inscrutable: for it is none other than the beautiful brooding countenance of Gerhard Mennen, the talcum-powder gentleman.

The great story of Harper's Ferry is of course the John Brown story. Joseph I. C. Clarke, writing in the New York "Sun" of Sir Roger Casement's execution for treason in connection with the Irish rebellion, compared him with John Brown and also with Don Quixote. The spiritual likeness between these three bearded figures is striking enough. All were idealists; all were fanatics. Brown's ideal was a noble one—that of freedom—but his manner of attempting to translate it into actuality was that of a madman. He believed not only that the slaves should be freed, but that the blood of slaveholders should be shed in atonement. In "bleeding Kansas" he led the Ossawatomie massacre, and committed cold-blooded murders under the delusion that the sword of the Lord was in his hand.

In October, 1859, Brown, who had for some time been living under an assumed name in the neighborhood of Harper's Ferry, led a score of his followers, some of them negroes, in a surprise attack upon the Government arsenal at this place, capturing the watchmen and taking possession of the buildings. It was his idea to get the weapons the arsenal contained and give them to the slaves that they might rise and free themselves. Before this plan could be executed, however, Brown and his men were besieged in the armory, and here, after a day or two of bloody fighting, with a number of deaths on both sides, he was captured with his few surviving men, by Colonel (later General) Robert E. Lee, whose aide, upon this occasion, was J. E. B. Stuart, later the Confederate cavalry leader. Stuart had been in Kansas, and it was he who recognized the leader of the raid as Brown of Ossawatomie.

It is said that Brown's violent anti-slavery feeling was engendered by his having seen, in his youth, a colored boy of about his own age cruelly misused. He brooded over the wrongs of the blacks until, as some students of his life believe, he became insane on this subject. His utterances show that he was willing to give up his life and those of his sons and other followers, if by such action he could merely draw attention to the cause which had taken possession of his soul. In the course of the fighting he saw his two sons mortally wounded, and was himself stabbed and cut. Throughout the fight and his subsequent trial at Charles Town he remained imperturbable; when taken to the gallows he sat upon his coffin, in a wagon, and he not only mounted the scaffold without a tremor, but actually stood there, apparently unmoved, for ten or fifteen minutes, with the noose around his neck, while the troops which had formed his escort were marched to their positions.

A large number of troops were present at the execution, for it was then believed in the South that the Brown raid was not the mere suicidal stroke of an individual fanatic, but an organized movement on the part of the Republican party; an effort to rescue Brown was therefore apprehended. This idea was later shown to be a fallacy, Brown having made his own plans, and been financed by a few northern friends, headed by Gerrit Smith of New York.

There has been a tendency in the North to make a saint of John Brown, and in the South to make a devil of him. As a matter of fact he was a poor, misguided zealot, with a wild light in his eye, who had set out to do a frightful thing; for, bad though slavery was, its evils were not comparable with the horrors which would have resulted from a slave rebellion.

It must be conceded, however, that those who would canonize John Brown have upon their side a strange and impressive piece of evidence. The jail where he was lodged in Charles Town and the courthouse where he was tried, still stand, and it is the actual fact that, when the snow falls, it always miraculously melts in a path which leads diagonally across the street from the one to the other. That this is true I have unimpeachable testimony. Snow will not stand on the path by which John Brown crossed back and forth from the jail to the court-house. There will be snow over all the rest of the street, but not on that path; there you can see it melting.

But, as with certain other "miracles," this one is not so difficult to understand if you know how it is brought about. The courthouse is heated from the jail, and the hot pipes run under the pavement.