American Adventures Part 8

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 Cas.e.m.e.nt'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 n.o.ble 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 ma.s.sacre, 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 a.s.sumed 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 a.r.s.enal at this place, capturing the watchmen and taking possession of the buildings. It was his idea to get the weapons the a.r.s.enal 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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.

CHAPTER XI

THE VIRGINIAS AND THE WASHINGTONS

In colonial times, and long thereafter, the present State of West Virginia was a part of Virginia. Virginia, in the old days, used to have no western borders to her most westerly counties, which, in theory, ran out to infinity. As the western part of the State became settled, county lines were drawn, and new counties were started farther back from the coast. For this reason, towns which are now in Jefferson County, West Virginia, used to be in that county of Virginia which lies to the east of Jefferson County, and some towns have been in several different counties in the course of their history.

The people in the eastern part of West Virginia are, so far as I am capable of judging, precisely like Virginians. The old houses, when built, were in Virginia, the names of the people are Virginian names, and customs and points of view are Virginian. Until I went there I was not aware how very much this means.

I do not know who wrote the school history I studied as a boy, but I do know now that it was written by a lopsided historian, and that his "lop," like that of many another of his kind, led him to enlarge upon American naval and military victories, to minimize American defeats, to give an impression that the all-important early colonies were those of New England, and that the all-important one of them was Ma.s.sachusetts.

From this bias I judge that the historian was a Boston man. It takes a Bostonian to think in that way. They do it still.

From my school history I gathered the idea that although Sir Walter Raleigh and Captain John Smith were so foolish as to dally more or less in the remote fastnesses of Virginia, and although there was a little ineffectual settlement at Jamestown, all the important colonizing of this country occurred in New England. I read about Peregrine White, but not about Virginia Dare; I read much of Miles Standish, but nothing of Christopher Newport; I read a great deal of the _Mayflower_, but not a word of the _Susan Constant_.

Yet Virginia Dare, if she lived, must have been nearing young ladyhood when Peregrine White was born; Captain Christopher Newport pa.s.sed the Virginia capes when Miles Standish was hardly more than a youth, in Lancashire; and the _Susan Constant_ landed the Jamestown settlers more than a dozen years before the _Mayflower_ landed her shipload of eminent furniture owners at Plymouth. Even Plymouth itself had been visited years before by John Smith, and it was he, not the Pilgrims, who named the place.

I find that some boys, to-day, know these things. But though that fact is encouraging, I am not writing for boys, but for their comparatively ignorant parents.

Not only did the first English colony establish itself in Virginia, and the first known tobacco come from there--a point the importance of which cannot be overstated--but the history of the Old Dominion is in every way more romantic and heroic than that of any other State. The first popular government existed there long before the Revolution, and at the time of the break with the mother country Virginia was the most wealthy and populous of the Colonies. Some historians say that slavery was first introduced there when some Dutchmen sold to the colonists a shipload of negroes, but I believe this point is disputed. The Declaration of Independence was, of course, written by a Virginian, and made good by the sword of one. The first President of the United States was a Virginian, and so is the present Chief Executive. The whole of New England has produced but four presidents; Ohio has produced six; but Virginia has given us eight. The first British army to land on this continent (Braddock's) landed in Virginia, and in that State our two greatest wars were terminated by the surrenders of Cornwallis and of Lee. And, last, the gallant Lee himself was a Virginian of the Virginians--a son of the distinguished Henry Lee who said of Washington that he was "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen."

On the pleasant drive of perhaps a dozen miles, from Harper's Ferry to Charles Town, I noticed here and there, at the roadside, pyramidal stones, suggesting monuments, but bearing no inscription save that each had a number. On inquiry I learned that these were indeed Confederate monuments, but that to find out what they marked it was necessary to go to the county courthouse at Charles Town and look up the numbers in a book, of which there is but one copy. These monuments were set out three or four years ago. They appeared suddenly, almost as though they had grown overnight, and many people wondered, as I had, what they meant.

"Eloise," one Charles Town young lady asked another, "what's that monument out in front of your house with the number twenty-one on it?"

"Oh," replied Eloise, "that's where all my suitors are buried."

One of the things which gives Jefferson County, West Virginia, its Virginian flavor is the collection of fine old houses which adorn it.

Many of these houses are the homes of families bearing the name of Washington, or having in their veins the blood of the Washingtons. It is said that there is more Washington blood in Charles Town (which, by the way, should not be confused with Charleston, capital of the same State), than in any other place, if not in all the rest of the world together.

The nearest compet.i.tors to Charles Town in this respect are Westmoreland County, Virginia, and the town of Kankakee, Illinois, where resides the Spottswood Augustine Washington family, said to be the only Washington group to have taken the Union side in the Civil War. It is rumored also that all the Washingtons are Democrats, although that fact is hard to reconcile, at the present time, with the statement that, among the five thousand of them, there is but a single Federal officeholder.

The settling of the Washingtons in Jefferson County, West Virginia, came about through the fact that George Washington, when a youth of sixteen or seventeen, became acquainted with that part of what was then Virginia, through having gone to survey for Lord Fairfax, who had acquired an enormous tract of land in the neighboring county of Clarke, which is still in the mother State. To this estate, called Greenaway Court, his lordship, it is recorded, came from England to isolate himself because a woman with whom he was in love refused to marry him.

In this general neighborhood George Washington lived for three years, and local enthusiasts affirm that to his having drunk the lime-impregnated waters of this valley was due his great stature. The man who informed me of this theory had lived there aways. He was about five feet three inches tall, and had drunk the waters all his life--plain and otherwise.

Washington's accounts of the region so interested his brothers that they finally moved there, acquired large tracts of land, and built homes.

Charles Town, indeed, was laid out on the land of Charles Washington, and was named for him, and there is evidence that George Washington, who certainly gave the lines for the roads about the place, also laid out the town.

Another brother, John Augustine, left a large family, while Samuel, the oldest, described as "a rollicking country squire," was several years short of fifty when he died, but for all that had managed to marry five times and to find, nevertheless, spare moments in which to lay out the historic estate of Harewood, not far from Charles Town. It is said that George Washington was his brother's partner in this enterprise, but excepting in its interior, which is very beautiful, there is no sign, about the building, of his graceful architectural touch.

George Washington spent much time at Harewood, Lafayette and his son visited there, and there the sprightly widow, Dolly Todd, married James Madison. This wedding was attended by President Washington and his wife and by many other national figures; the bride made the journey to Harewood in Jefferson's coach, escorted by Madison and a group of his friends on horseback, and history makes mention of a very large and very gay company.

This is all very well until you see Harewood; for, substantial though the house is, with its two-foot stone walls, it has but five rooms: two downstairs and three up.

Where did they all sleep?

The question was put by the practical young lady whom I accompanied to Harewood, but the wife of the farmer to whom the place is rented could only smile and shake her head.

The bedroom now occupied by this farmer and his wife has doubtless been occupied also by the first President of the United States and his wife, the fourth President and his wife, by Lafayette, and by a King of France--for Louis-Philippe, and his brothers, the Duc de Montpensier and the Comte de Beaujolais, spent some time at Harewood during their period of exile.

Having read in an extract from the Baltimore "Sun" that Harewood, which is still owned in the Washington family, was a place in which all Washingtons took great and proper pride, that it was "the lodestone which draws the wandering Washingtons back to the old haunts," I was greatly shocked on visiting the house to see the shameful state of dilapidation into which it has been allowed to pa.s.s. The porches and steps have fallen down, the garden is a disreputable tangle, and the graves in the yard are heaped with tumble-down stones about which the cattle graze. The only parts of the building in good repair are those parts which time has not yet succeeded in destroying. The drawing-room, containing a mantelpiece given to Washington by Lafayette, and the finest wood paneling I have seen in any American house, has held its own fairly well, as has also the old stairway, imported by Washington from England. But that these things are not in ruins, like the porches, is no credit to the Washingtons who own the property to-day, and who, having rented the place, actually leave family portraits hanging on the walls to crack and rot through the cold winter.

If there are indeed five thousand Washingtons, and if they are proud of their descent, a good way for them to show it would be to contribute twenty-five cents each to be expended on putting Harewood in respectable condition.

The last member of the Washington family to own Mount Vernon was John Augustine Washington, of Charles Town, who sold the former home of his distinguished collateral ancestor. This Mr. Washington was a Confederate officer in the Civil War. He had a son named George, whose widow, if I mistake not, is the Mrs. George Washington of Charles Town, of whom I heard an amusing story.

With another Charles Town lady this Mrs. Washington went to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and the two attended the Fair together on Washington Day. On this occasion Mrs. Washington made a purchase in one of the buildings, and ordered it sent to her home in Charles Town.

"What name?" asked the clerk.

"Mrs. George Washington."

The clerk concluded that she was joking.

"I want your _real_ name," he insisted with a smile.

"But," plaintively protested the gentle Mrs. Washington, "that is the only name I _have_!"

One of the most charming of the old houses in the neighborhood of Charles Town, and one of the few which is still occupied by the descendants of its builder, is Piedmont, the residence of the Briscoe family. It is a brick house, nearly a century and a half old, with a lovely old portico, and it contains two of the most interesting relics I saw on my entire journey in the South. The first of these is the wall paper of the drawing-room, upon which is depicted, not in pattern, but in a series of pictures with landscape backgrounds, various scenes representing the adventures of Telemachus on his search for his father.

I remember having seen on the walls of the parlor of an old hotel at South Berwick, Maine, some early wall paper of this character, but the pictures on that paper were done in various shades of gray, whereas the Piedmont wall paper is in many colors. The other relic is a letter which Mrs. Briscoe drew from her desk quite as though it had been a note received that morning from a friend. It was written on tough buff-colored paper, and, though the ink was brown with age, the handwriting was clear and legible and the paper was not broken at the folds. It was dated "Odiham, Sept. 1st, 1633," and ran as follows:

To Dr. John Briscoe, _Greetings_.

Dear Sir: As the Privy Council have decided that I shall not be disturbed or dispossessed of the charter granted by his Majesty--the _Ark_ and Pinnace _Dove_ will sail from Gravesend about the 1st of October, and if you are of the same mind as when I conversed with you, I would be glad to have you join the colony.

With high esteem, Your most obedient servant, Cecilius Baltimore.