Katherine Mayo and the 1909 Altstadt Interview

Katherine Mayo ca. 1918
(Philadelphia Inquirer)

Interestingly, Katherine Mayo (1868-1940) may be most famously remembered as a character in Cloudsplitter (1998), the Russell Banks historical fiction that put John Brown back into the spotlight for a new century of readers.  Banks modeled his fiction upon the role of the real Mayo, who served as the field researcher for Oswald Garrison Villard, author of a 1910 biography of the martyred abolitionist.  Apart from her role as Villard’s better biographical half, Mayo gained far more notoriety for her own controversial book, Mother India (1927), which still is considered an offensive work of pro-colonialist and racist sentiment. Gandhi himself described Mayo’s portrayal of India and Hindu society as “abominable and patently wrong.”  A graduate of Wellesley College, Mayo admittedly was a gifted author who wrote several books in her career.  However, it is Mother India that seems to have kept her memory alive in contemporary political discussions.  For instance, in the London Daily Mail of June 7, 2013, Sandipan Deb summed up Mayo’s legacy as an author, concluding that she was “something beyond a white supremacist” who believed nonwhites were inferior. “Hers was an Anglo-Saxon Protestant racism,” Deb concluded.   This is an unfortunate profile for the most formidable John Brown researcher prior to the rise of Boyd B.  Stutler in the 1920s.         

            Furthermore, without Mayo, it is doubtful that Villard could have produced such a weighty and substantially researched effort—an aspect of his privilege that allowed him to denigrate the good effort of the less privileged W.E.B. DuBois, who lacked the resources that Villard employed as an heir to wealth.  Yet Mayo’s research was almost an embarrassment of riches for Villard, who did not utilize all of the materials that Mayo gathered in 1908-09.  Indeed, Villard’s papers are still an important resource for historians and biographers, thanks to the rigor of Mayo’s efforts. It should be added that despite Villard’s resources, Mayo’s research, and his use of the press to downgrade others and uplift his own work, Villard (with Mayo’s assistance) bent the facts somewhat to suit his thesis, especially his problematic conclusion that Brown had murdered men without warrant at Pottawatomie in 1856.  Boyd Stutler would rightly say in retrospect that Villard “slipped at times, mostly, I think, in evaluation and conclusion.”[i]

Villard’s Assistant

 Notice of Katherine Mayo in Kansas as Villard's research assistant;
Villard is mistakenly referred to as "O.J." instead of "O.G."
(Lawrence Daily Journal, July 29, 1908)

            I am not clear how Mayo came to know Villard, or when he determined to offer her a position as his researcher.  Katherine Frick, writing for the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, writes that Mayo had lived in Dutch Guyana for eight years with her father, and afterward worked as a journalist, having some articles published under a pseudonym.[ii]  It may be that their association took place through some journalistic association with the New York Evening Post, which was owned by Villard.  Regardless, as Frick points out, Villard became Mayo’s mentor as well as employer—although she actually seems to have been his senior by a few years.  However, Villard’s influence upon her is undoubted, particularly in introducing her to activist-oriented writing. 

            On the other hand, Mayo seems to have brought a developed journalistic skill set to the John Brown effort, and according to Villard her contributions were invaluable.  Although he acknowledged her great work in the pages of his John Brown, Villard wrote to Mayo early on that she could very well have written the book herself.[iii]  Indeed, Villard was not exaggerating when he wrote in the preface of his John Brown biography, that Mayo’s efforts in search of material had taken more than two years and brought her along thousands of miles.  “But for her judgment, her tact and skill, and her enthusiasm for the work, it could hardly have approached its present comprehensiveness,” he concluded.[iv]

Oswald G. Villard 

            Anyone who has worked extensively in the Villard papers will have observed the extent to which Villard’s John Brown was all but co-authored by Katherine Mayo.   She was the first and only researcher to scour the continental United States (especially the regions associated with Brown and his circles of influence) fifty years after Brown’s death.  This not only meant that she tracked down documents of all kinds for her boss, but that she had access to Brown’s family and associates still living at the time.  Mayo brought her journalistic skills to bear in interviewing a wide range of people (including the Thomas Allstadt transcript featured below).  She also proved a formidable researcher with an expansive success in collecting documents, which was a monumental achievement in and of itself.  Another aspect of her research and documentation was in providing the book a chronology of events, covering Brown’s life from when he went to Kansas in 1855 until his death in Virginia in 1859.  As can be seen in the Villard papers, Mayo recycled a number of pocket calendar books, which she reconfigured as a chronological record of Brown’s last four years, adding dates and events as she inspected new sources and reconstructed Brown’s story. As unusual as it may be, I agree with Blake Gilpin’s conclusion that without Mayo’s “judgment. . .tact and skill, and her enthusiasm for the work,” Villard’s biography would have lacked comprehensiveness.[v]  Indeed, it is the comprehensive nature of the work has proven to be the greatest value of his contribution, since the book itself is not particularly well written. Ultimately, the Villard biography pales in comparison to his archived papers—a high tribute to Katherine Mayo.

And the Raid--the Rest is History?

               The rest, as they say, is history—although unfortunately much of what is considered history about the raid is open to question.   I have endeavored to remedy some of these ensconced errors in my book, Freedom’s Dawn, including the widespread notion that Brown raided the armory to seize the weapons—something which he expressly denied and for which there is not the slightest evidence.  The raid was a political demonstration, most likely aimed at the Democratic administration because of its failure to prosecute Southerners involved in raiding a federal arsenal in Missouri in 1856.  Unfortunately, Brown belabored and delayed in Harper’s Ferry and became hopelessly bogged down.  Allstadt’s reminiscence thus involves the last hours, when Brown, some of his men, some of the liberated black community, and his hostages were holed up in the engine house near the entrance of the armory works.   As I have pointed out, it is often overlooked that Brown was beaten and brutally stabbed with a bayonet (or bayonets) by marines after falling under the blunt attack of Israel Green, who could not seem to kill the Old Man despite his worst intentions.  Of course, Brown lived, stood trial, and lived another month after being found guilty and sentenced to death by a jury of slaveholders.  His wounds were barely healed when he was hanged on December 2, 1859.

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Katherine Mayo, ca. 1920
(Muncie Evening Press)

The Altstadt Interview

            Among the many interviews that Mayo conducted for Villard was a 1909 meeting with Thomas Altstadt, the son of John Altstadt, one of the slaveholders; both father and son were taken by John Brown’s men as hostages during the Harper’s Ferry raid of 1859. Although Brown originally intended to keep his hostages outdoors, he had eventually retreated to the watchman’s office adjoining the fire engine house of the Harper’s Ferry armory works.  He later said that he did so because of the cold, and it was by these kinds of humanitarian concessions that Brown ultimately undermined himself and his men, tactically losing a strategic advantage by a number of kindly measures that added up to tactical loss.  When opposition from drunken townsmen mounted, Brown selected the Altstadts among a smaller number of hostages that were moved into the fire engine house. A local newspaper at the time listed the hostages in the engine house, omitting the younger Altstadt but mentioning Altstadt senior.  Also transferred into the engine house were Lewis Washington, Benjamin Mills, A. M. Ball, J. E. P. Dangerfield, Terrance Byrne, George Shope, Joseph Brua, Israel Russell, and John Donohoe.[vi]  Of the names listed, Washington held ten people in slavery, Alstadt held eleven people in slavery, Dangerfield held five people in slavery (including a teenage girl), and Russell held a young male "mulatto."  The rest either held no people in slavery or somehow are not listed as slaveholders in the 1860 Slave Schedule for Jefferson County, Virginia.  The younger Altstadt was the only surviving captive of John Brown's in 1909.

              Mayo conducted her interview of Thomas Altstadt on April 15, 1909 and an original transcription in her handwriting is found in the Villard Papers at Columbia University.  This original transcription includes some handwritten notes at the end by Altstadt Junior, and a sketch of the engine house interior showing the positioning of Brown, his men, and his captives at the time of the raid. Mayo afterward prepared an edited version, the transcription of which is also found in the Villard Papers.  This also became the basis of an article that appeared in Villard's New York Evening Post on October 16, 1909, which was part of a series by Mayo about John Brown that ran weekly from October to December, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Harper's Ferry raid.[vii]  The transcription provided here is that raw, unedited version. 

          How reliable is this interview?  One must remember that not only was Altstadt recalling the 1859 incident fifty years later, but even at the time he could not have had a comprehensive view of what happened that day.  For instance, Altstadt was clearly incorrect that the marines did not use their bayonets.  It is generally believed by historians that two of Brown's men were killed by bayonet; Brown was also wounded by bayonet.  At the same time, much of the reminiscences of this interview are still highly valuable, both for what occurred when Brown's men seized the Alstadts and liberated their enslaved men, and also the details from the engine house.  What is most interesting, again, is Altstadt's strong contention that no one was killed by bayonet, and his self-assurance that he would have known it had such killing taken place.  It may be that he simply did not see these killings with the rush of the final moments of the marine breakthrough.  But it may also mean that, like Brown's beating and stabbing on the engine house floor, Altstadt did not see the bayonet violence because it did not happen until afterward--after he and the prisoners were removed.  If this interview is substantive, then it is possible that Brown's two men allegedly killed at the breakthrough were actually murdered after being taken prisoner.   One must wonder why the younger Altstadt did not at least remember the wounded and dying raiders in the wake of the marine assault.

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Katherine Mayo’s Transcription and Notes of the interview with Thomas Altstadt, April 15, 1909

“I had gone to the ‘protracted meeting’ that night, and had been not more than an hour at home and abed when the raiders reached our house.  This was, I think, between 1 and 2 o’clock.  I slept upstairs, my father and mother below.  The crash of the fence rail against the door awoke me with a jump.  My sister, Ludie Allstadt, and my second cousin (whom we always called aunt,) Miss Hannah Hall, both of whom also slept above, sprang to their windows and leaned out crying ‘Murder.’ ‘Take in your heads or I’ll blow out your brains!’ shouted a colored man below, levelling his gun at them as he spoke.

 I—I was a lad of eighteen at the time—having hustled on my clothes, seized my old country gun and ran for the stairs.  Aunt Hannah, clinging to me, stooped and peered down the stairway, under my arm.  “The men all have guns.  Leave that behind or they will surely kill you!” she begged—so I dropped the gun and ran down unarmed.  My mother lay in her bed.  The room was full of armed men.  “What are you going to do?” I asked.  “To carry you and your father to Harper’s Ferry.  John Brown has taken possession of the Government works.”  “Taken possession of the Government works!  That isn’t much!” said I.  “Only one watchman there!”  “You shut your damned mouth or I’ll blow your brains out!” Stevens exclaimed, and ordered a negro to keep me quiet with a revolver at my breast.  The negro, collaring me, obeyed.

Presently they led my father and me outside.  There we saw Colonel Washington, sitting in his own team.  They put us, my father and me, on the seat of Col. Washington’s four horse wagon.  In the body, behind us, our six negroes and Col. Washington’s quota stood close packed.  As we drove inside the Armory yard, there stood an old man.  “This,” said Stevens, by way of introduction, “is John Brown.” “Osawatomie Brown of Kansas,” added Brown.  Then he handed out pikes to our negroes, telling them to guard us carefully, to prevent our escape.  “Keep these white men inside,” said he.  “There were no other local negroes within the enclosure, save Colonel Washington’s and ours.”

“We arrived at the Armory just about daybreak.  We were not taken inside the building until several men had fallen.  In the interval we were permitted to walk up and down before the engine house, east and west, but not on the East side, on which were the gates.  The citizens began shooting—and first at the Hall Rifle works—about nine or ten o’clock.   Prisoners who were brought into the yard conveyed the news of the death of Boerley and of Turner.  Turner was sitting on his horse when shot.  I was told that Dangerfield Newby and Shields Green were out in the street firing, when Turner fell, and that one or the other shot him.  But that, of course, I did not see myself.  Later these two negroes went into the arsenal, across the road from the armory yard.

When the fire of the citizens was directed upon that point, they [Newby and Green] grew frightened.  But they very much feared to cross the street.  At last they ran for it.  One succeeded in making the armory enclosure.  The other was killed in the road, and that man it was who at Stevens’s command, had held the pistol to my breast.  Then, the fire having become hot, Brown’s men began to gather into the yard.  Coppoc and one of Brown’s sons coming in, among the numbers.  And now, for protection, the prisoners were herded into the watch-house, which was the western division of the engine-house building (see plan).  The watch-house door stood open and Coppoc sat down in the door-way.  About the door and overhead was much glass.

It was at this time that Stevens fell.  One of my father’s colored boys, peering out, spied the men who were aiming at him and called my attention.  I saw Captain George Chambers and Mr. Percival standing in an upper window of the Galt House, watching Stevens until he should come well within range.  As the moment arrived, they broke the glass in order to fire true.  Stevens fell.  “Stevens is shot!” cried one of Brown’s men.  “I am sorry for that,” said Brown, “is he dead?”  “No, he is moving.”  Stevens pulled himself up upon one knee.  “Look” exclaimed our boy,” Look, Marse Tom, they’re going to fire again!”  At the second volley Stevens dropped.  He lay for perhaps half an hour, there in the road.  Then he was carried to the Wager House.

Our open watch-house door commanded a view of the trestle.  Fontaine Beckham walked back and forth on the trestle twice, or several times, but as he was unarmed no one fired upon him.  Now he went behind the water tank and began peering around its corner, as it might be to take aim.  “If he keeps on peaking I’m going to shoot,” said Coppoc, from his seat in the doorway.  I stood close by him.  Mr. Beckham peeked again and Coppoc fired, but missed.  “Don’t fire,’ man, for God’s sake!  They’ll shoot in here and kill us all,” shrieked the prisoners behind.  Some were laughing, others overwhelmed with fear.  But Coppoc was already firing again, this time six inches or so within the corner, calculating on the position of Beckham’s heart in that altitude and also of the cornerpost.  This shot killed Beckham.  Undoubtedly he would not have been fired upon but for his equivocal appearance.  Coppoc fired no more from the watch-house; in fact, no one remained in sight.  But Brown’s son, Oliver, sitting in the partly open engine house door, spied someone peeping over the stone wall of the trestle in the act of sighting a gun.  Young Brown instantly took aim; but even as he was in the act of firing the other’s shot struck him—a mortal wound that gave horrible pain.

A very few moments after this they selected fifteen of twenty of us from the prisoners in the watch-house and brought us into the engine-house—and an uneasy little trip we thought it, in the open between door and door.  John Brown now ordered one of my father’s old negroes, Phil Lucker, to pick some openings in the engine house walls, to use as port holes.  But no sooner was it done than the fact became evident that the citizens outside only awaited the fall of the bricks, to fire in.  So the port holes were after all but little used.

Shortly after our transference it began to grow dark, too dark to see to shoot accurately; but the citizens’ fire continued very heavy.  Darkness fell; and then they shut fast the engine-house door.  We had no light.  Everything grew still, except that the citizens outside shouted and whooped all night long.  Captain Rowan’s company, it was said, lay at the gate.  In the quiet of the night young Brown died.  He had begged again and again to be shot, in the agony of his wound, but his father had replied to him, “O you will get over it,” and “If you must die, die like a man.”  Now John Brown talked, from time to time, with my father and with Col. Washington, but I did not hear what was said.  Young Brown lay quietly over in a corner.  His father called to him, after a time.  No answer.  “I guess he is dead,” said Brown.

In the morning, after the colloquy of surrender and the refusal, came the breaking of the door by the marines.  It is absolutely untrue that Brown had at any time proposed to put his prisoners to the fore in case of attack.  At this moment most of us were back in the East (left as you enter) corner, crouched down.  The single engine in the room was pushed up toward the front, not quite square before the door.  It afforded but little protection to us.  Brown himself, at the moment of the breaking of the door, was just back of the engine.  I could not tell who shot Quinn, but I did see that Coppoc fired.  As Green rushed upon him, Brown lifted his gun to shoot.  Green knocked the gun up and it went off in the air.  Green instantly slashed at Brown, at his head—with his sword, and the same sweeping stroke that cut Brown’s head, in its finish knicked my father’s hat-band.  I well remember Green’s apology to my father, as we got outside, and his asking to be allowed to get my father a new hat.  Brown fell as Green struck him and did not rise again.

The Marines had bayonets but did not use them.  Of course, in such an excitement, in such an excitement, no one person was likely to see all that happened.  I did not see any man pinned to the wall with a bayonet as is said to have happened to Anderson, nor can I believe that it did occur; for I think I should have seen or known of it otherwise.

           

As the Marines swarmed in, and the call for surrender came, Coppoc and the rest threw down their guns.  But while the parley for surrender had been going on earlier at the door, no one of Brown’s men spoke of surrender.  After we were taken outside they asked me to go over to the Wager House to see if I could identify the prisoner.  It was Stevens.  A heavy guard stood at his door; to prevent a repeateing of the Thompson affair, which was disapproved.  Mrs. Foulk had come out, with her servants and carried Stevens into the Wager House, from the Street.  She was the most kind hearted woman alive.

Reproduction of Mayo's sketched layout of the Harper's Ferry engine house at the time of Brown's defeat

[Miscellaneous information added based upon post-interview questions and comments]

The dog in the engine house, who belonged to Brown’s party, was a big, back, mongrel fellow with white feet, and a white stripe down his face.  He was not cross.

The men of Brown’s party did not fire from the hip, but dropped to one knee, aimed and shot.

Shields Green, during the confinement of the prisoners was very insolent and rough to them.  Toward the end he shot no more at all, but dodged and hid about, and at least tried to pass himself off for a captured slave.

When the breakfast came in from the Wager House, my father and Col. Washington remarked to each other that it might be poisoned, and refused it.  But I and a good many others ate.

Fontaine Beckham had no slaves.

I heard nothing of the Baylor matter.  But it is indisputably true that the militia were afraid to storm the engine house.

A very few minutes after we chosen prisoners were removed from the watch-house, the Martinsburg Company came and kicked open the window and let the other prisoners out.  “Are there any of Brown’s men in here?” they called. (I heard them).  “No they are all in the other part,” the prisoners called back.  When we were taken away, no guard was left over the remaineder, and there was no door between engine-house and watch-house.  They could therefore have walked out or climbed out themselves.  But they did not know what might be outside.  And Rowan’s men did not come around in front, where there was any chance for the engine-house garrison to get a shot at them.

Be careful not to mix the terms “Arsenal” and “Armory.”  The engine-house was in the Armory enclosure.  The Arsenal was across the street.

They did not close the engine house door until dark.

The window of the watch-house was on the West side.

[In Altstadt’s handwriting]

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This is all correct.  Some things I left of[f].  The first marine was killed in entering the engine house and [also] Cook and Brown sun [sic] and one of our Colerd [sic] man with them got acros [sic] in to the mar[y]land mountain our man got awy [sic] from them the way he got away they laid down to sleep and they let him watch a while and he slip of[f].  Cook was captured at the locks where the Arsenels [sic] boats pass through.  There was a store he was geting [sic] some thin to eate [sic] Brown son [Owen] never was heard of

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            [i] Boyd B. Stutler to Louis Filler, Nov. 21, 1957, RP04-0198B, John Brown – Boyd B. Stutler Papers, West Virginia State Archives.

            [ii] Katherine Frick, “Katherine Mayo,” Pennsylvania Center for the Book (University Park, Pa.: Penn State University).  Retrieved from https://goo.gl/oLgNhr.

            [iii]Oswald G. Villard to Katherine Mayo, 31 Aug. 1908, Box 9, Oswald G. Villard – John Brown Papers, Columbia University Collection.  

            [iv] Oswald G. Villard, John Brown 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (New York: Houghton & Mifflin Co., 1910), p. ix.   

            [v] R. Blakeslee Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives! America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), p. 96.

            [vi] See “A Matter for Reflection,” Virginia Free Press, 27 Oct. 1859, p. 2.

            [vii] Evidently, Villard either encouraged or permitted Mayo to publish this series based upon her extensive field research done in preparation for his biography, published the following year.  The series ran in a supplementary section of the New York Evening Post as follows: “John Brown’s Raid 50 Years Ago,” Oct. 16, 1909, p. 1; “Brown in Hiding and in Jail,” Oct. 23, 1909; “In An Angry City to Visit Brown,” Oct. 30, 2009, p. 2; “Sturdy Children of John Brown,” Nov. 6, 1909, p. 3; “Sculptor’s Visit to John Brown,” Nov. 13, 1909, p. 2; “A Lieutenant of John Brown,” Nov. 20, 1909, p. 3; “Author of John Brown Song,” Nov. 27, 1909, p. 1; and “Execution of Old John Brown,” Dec. 4, 2009, p. 3.

Mr. Quigley, We Will Not “Move On” Without John Brown

The Observer, an online publication that purports to bring an “irreverent” but “original take on the latest in news, culture, politics and luxury,” published a piece by Bernie Quigley (Aug. 22) entitled, “Civil War Tensions Brew as Vermont Celebrates Awkward Yankee History.”

Quigley’s piece was spawned by President Trump’s recent, ham-handed question about the Civil War, in which he audaciously inquired why the conflict between the Union and the slave states could not have “been worked out” without civil conflict.  In what likely will be counted as one of the most stupid presidential remarks to be made about U.S. history, Trump opined that Andrew Jackson might have prevented the war had he “been around to stop it.”  Quigley concludes that Trump was really “asking a question that needed to be asked, especially today.”

Quigley suggests that Trump (but more likely Steve Bannon, who at least reads, albeit probably only right-wing interpretations of history) was informed by author David Goldfield, who called the Civil War “America’s greatest failure.”  Then, quoting Goldfield quoting Tony Horowitz, Quigley concludes that since emancipation and reunion were “badly compromised,” the outcome of the Civil War—an “immense toll in blood and treasure”—-proved the war was not “worth it.”

Of course, Quigley is merely quoting an opinion that suits his politics, which is the real reason for this “cosmopolitan” tripe.  As to the opinion itself, including the views of Goldfield and Horwitz, we find an unfortunate and privileged revisionism in which white scholars reevaluate the cost of the Civil War and conclude that anyone, including Trump, are correct in contending that any compromise would have been better than the war.

“Justice Fatigue” Revisited

However, this top-down revisionism is deeply racist. Even superficially, it reflects the same spirit among white society that undermined Reconstruction in the later 19th century.  The prerogative of whites to revisit the cost and burden of liberation and maintenance of former slaves wore out the patience and interest of whites by the 1870s.  Even some who had lived through the Civil War eventually grew tired of worrying over the former slaves and wanted to get on with the business of nation-building.  This “justice fatigue” led to the selling out of blacks by the Republican party, the end of Reconstruction, and the beginning of Jim Crow oppression in the South.

Quigley and others are also exhibiting signs of “justice fatigue” in weighing the massive loss of millions of soldiers, most of them white, as having been too precious for the outcome of the Civil War.  The reasoning is that since black liberation and the reunion of the North and South were not well processed, it would have been better if the Civil War had never been fought in the first place. Apparently, Quigley would also prefer that enslaved Africans remain in bondage for another generation or two (or more) until white society could work out the best way for the issue of slavery to be resolved in a “win-win” manner.  All those white deaths just cannot be justified by the end of slavery in the United States.  This is quite a different view of things from what John Brown once opined, that it would “better for a whole generation to die a violent death” than for slavery to triumph in the nation.

Racist Wishful Thinking

The problem with the sort of wishful thinking expressed by Quigley and his ilk is that there is no basis to think that either emancipation or “reunion” could have been accomplished in any way better than it did, particularly given that white racism permeated the entire national context.  After all, the path to black liberation was fraught with many difficulties, and ultimately faced setback because of white society—-both the racism of former slaveholders as well as the racism of the prejudiced North.  Nor could “reunion” have been accomplished in any realistic manner since the whites of the South were both beaten and embittered and had no intention of yielding to black freedom and black equality.  In what historical scenario could Quigley possibly imagine that the South and the North would have been reconciled other than the way that it actually happened—by the selling out of emancipated blacks and the return of political and economic control to former slaveholders?

This argument is racist foolishness, the longing for an outcome that would have spared white lives and left black people to writhe in the chains of slavery for decades to come as the price of white satisfaction.

Practically, the idea that the North should not have prevented secession is ludicrous.  It was abundantly clear prior to the war that the South was expansionist and committed to an agenda of slavery’s advancement into new territory.  This was obvious in the terrorism that the South unleashed in undermining democracy in Kansas.  It was previously seen in the manner that the South was led into a war with Mexico, and the “filibustering” of some Southerner adventurers in Latin America.  Had the South been left to its own devices—if the North had chosen to spare its sons and let secession go unhindered, four millions of black people been permanently trapped in chattel slavery.  Furthermore, the South would have been free to invade the Caribbean and Central America to pursue its expansionist lusts. These were as clear as Belshazzar’s handwriting on the wall, and to say otherwise is simply to say that one’s commitments, even in the interpretation of history, are essentially racist.  Better to spare hundreds of thousands of white boys than to prevent the monstrosity of chattel slavery to devour millions of black lives.

Apparently to Quigley, black lives really do not matter, not even in retrospect.

As to John Brown, there is nothing “original” in the Observer’s presentation by Quigley.  Quigley goes on record as speaking of Brown as

* the “catalyst to the Civil War”

* “the trickster figure who brought the chaos moment that would turn the tide and reformulate history”; and

* the point of no return for the killing and maiming of “over a million Americans. . .on American soil.”

This is more or less old cracker mythology.

It was the habit of mind of “Lost Cause” and top-down historians to blame John Brown as either THE catalyst or at least one of the catalysts that brought a needless, avoidable war upon the nation.  Quigley shows the depths of his embedded racist rationale by attributing exclusive blame to Brown—as if nothing else happened that helped to foment the South’s desperate betrayal of the Union.  Even a reasonable conservative would have to admit that a number of issues acted as catalysts of the war, but not Quigley.

Second, that Brown is labeled a “trickster” is clearly a way of demonizing him.  In folklore, the trickster is an agent of evil whose literary DNA leads back to the story of Eden and the serpent.  Quigley here is appealing to some sort of religious white nationalist history, where God’s people are beguiled and led to a national fall by that devil John Brown.  But if Quigley thinks Brown a trickster, then it is clear that he also assumes that before Brown the nation was better off than it was after the Civil War.

Finally, it is simply not the case that after Harper’s Ferry the nation had reached a point of no return.  To the contrary, even a superficial reading of history shows that “the point of no return” was the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and this was to no fault of Lincoln.  The sixteenth president made it abundantly clear in his quest for the White House that he had no intention of ending slavery.  Lincoln’s only caveat in 1860 was that the South should not expand any further; unlike John Brown, Lincoln was a moderate when it came to black freedom.  He had no intention of emancipating blacks and would not have done so.  But the core political leaders of the South were determined to secede regardless.  Indeed, their sentiments in this regard dated back a decade, so that it is not incorrect to say that the most radical and influential leaders of the slave states were planning on secession as soon as circumstances allowed for it.  Those circumstances came when Lincoln was elected—-not when John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry.  Had a unified Democrat party put forth a candidate and won in 1860, there would have been no secession.  Indeed, there would have been no secession as long as the slave states maintained control of the White House.

To no surprise, Quigley’s article reveals that besides justifying Donald Trump’s revisionism and condemning John Brown, he is critical of the removal of Confederate statuary.  He asks not only if the Union followed the “right approach” by war in 1861, but if in 2017 it is the right approach to remove “monuments and memorials.”  Indeed, he asks, will “a new cycle of Yankee contempt” for the South also in the North?

With this as his burden, Quigley returns to Brown, to further slander and skew his story.  He writes that

* Brown failed to capture the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in the hope of “upstarting the Civil War”

* That Lincoln considered the raid was so absurd that even ignorant slaves saw it was ill-fated from the onset

* Brown was a mad man and insane (quoting the 20th century Southern historian C. Vann Woodward); and

* that a Google search of “John Brown” and “terrorist” will produce articles that suggest Brown was a terrorist.

Like so many other anti-Brown screeds, Quigley’s facts are skewed in ways great and small.  First, Brown captured the entire armory (which included the arsenal) and held it for two days.  Second, Brown had no intention of triggering a Civil War; to the contrary, he wanted to defuse a full-scale war by launching a campaign that would largely attract, defend, and sequester runaways so that slavery would be destabilized.

As to Lincoln, he was no more informed or competent to judge Brown’s plan in 1861 than most other people since he had only the skewed reportage of the proslavery press (the antislavery press was prohibited from coming into Virginia, and only the New York Tribune managed to sneak in a secret reporter—whose account of Brown differs significantly from the proslavery press).

As to the old, tired allegations of Brown’s “insanity,” there is nothing of substance to them.  This was a plaything of 20th century historians, especially the “Lost Cause” set. There is simply no substance or evidence that Brown was mentally ill.  If anyone would have found it, Tony Horwitz would have had he been able to do so.  As it stands, the best he could manufacture in his book, Midnight Rising, was Brown’s possible bipolar disorder—a notion that is wishfully knitted of scattered phrases and circumstances to suit Horwitz’s enthusiastic Civil War readership.

Finally, as to Googling Brown and terrorism, this means nothing other than it will dredge up some of the worst, ill-informed and biased writings about John Brown by contemporary authors—most of whom approach his story with decided opinions and designs.  This is but froth and bubbles from an overflow of Quigley’s bigotry.

Quigley concludes that we are living in “a precarious, teetering moment,” in which the Republican senator from Nebraska has expressed concerned that “violence is coming.” He finally targets Vermont for recognizing and celebrating John Brown.  Isn’t it better to look to a pacifist icon, isn’t it better to get past the Civil War?  It is “time to move on,” Quigley says.

The obvious answer to Quigley’s question is “No,” because it has always been the posture of a racist society to “move on” when it comes to racial justice.  It was the desire of people like Quigley to “move on” that left black people to the violence of segregation and the terrorism and economic destruction of the Ku Klux Klan and Citizen’s Councils of the 20th century.  It has been the desire of a racist majority to “move on” that turned its back on racist constabulary violence against blacks and Latinos for a century, and even now when the murder of black people by racist officers can be viewed on video and posted on Face Book.  It has been the desire of far too many white people in this nation to “move on” that has led to counter-freedom mottos like “All Lives Matter,” or has allowed conservatives to cloud the point that Colin Kaepernick has clearly made by his example in refusing to pledge allegiance to “Old Gory.”  It was the desire to “move on” that resulted in Vice President Pence from moving on and out of a football stadium in Indianapolis this past Sunday.

No, I submit, it is not the time to move on from John Brown.  It is, rather, the time for white America to face the real facts of John Brown, perhaps for the first time in 150 years.

John Brown was neither a trickster nor a terrorist.  John Brown was a citizen who so believed in the claims and possibilities of justice in the United States, that he gave the whole of his adult life to justice.  It was John Brown who proved that every means of peaceful effort had been exhausted when it came to the end of a racist system that relied upon terror and murder to steal the labor and bodies of men and women simply because they were black.

Brown was among only a small number of anti-racists in proportion to the larger white population of the United States—and among them he was the only one in 1859 who had a plan that could undermine and destabilize slavery. 

It is not time to “move on” to suit the priorities and preferences of the white center.  It is for people—inspired and informed by John Brown’s example—to move into the center, dismantling white privilege, opposing white supremacy, and contradicting the real “fake news” put forth by this racist status quo. 

John Brown will not go away.  His stubborn audacity and unapologetic devotion to human equality and justice makes his memory one of the vital organs of anti-racist memory, one of essential models for the anti-racist present, and one of the prophets of the anti-racist future.--LD

The link for the Quigley article is:

http://observer.com/2017/08/vermont-civil-war-statue-removal-tensions-john-brown/

BlogFriend Entry: Finding Mary Cook, the Wife of John Brown's Spy

Richard Smyth, BlogFriend Contributor 

           My hobby is researching and locating the final resting places of historic people. Standing at a grave you are six feet from history. For the last few years I have been looking for anyone connected with John Brown, from his days in Kansas to the raid on Harpers Ferry and beyond. This has been both challenging and rewarding and a whole lot of fun!  I have been successful in locating over four hundred graves, but there are some that have eluded me. On my hit list is Hayward Shepherd, the black baggage handler for the B&O Railroad, who was shot and killed by Brown’s men; Francis Jackson Merriam, one of the raiders who survived only to die in his hotel room in New York City after the Civil War; Jennie Dunbar Garcelone, the love interest of Raider Aaron Dwight Stevens; and lastly, John E. Cook’s wife, Mary Virginia Kennedy Cook, who was pregnant when she married him in Harper’s Ferry, prior to the raid.

There is no extant image of John Cook's wife, Mary
(Cook image, West Va. State Archives)

            The search for Mary Cook’s resting place proved to be one of the most difficult and time consuming. What was known about her is that she had moved around quite a bit after the death of her husband, who was hanged in 1860. First, she stayed with Cook’s family in Haddam, Connecticut, and then moved in with her sister-in-law in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  Then she returned to Harpers Ferry to stay with her mother, but remained only a short time at the scene of the raid before spending the summer of 1861 with the Brown family in North Elba, N.Y.  Afterward, Mary moved to Boston where she obtained a job working for “Secret Six” member Dr. Samuel Howe. For a while she also worked for a weekly abolitionist newspaper edited by John Brown’s first biographer, James Redpath.1

            Mary had received her last touching, farewell letter from her husband on December 16, 1859, in which John wrote that he expected to be reunited with his young wife in the afterlife, writing that he was “going to meet my comrades, and wait and watch for You.” If he was successful in meeting his wife in the afterlife, Cook may have been surprised when she showed up with another husband and family tagging along.  In 1865, Mary had married a Union army veteran named George A. Johnson, who was of Scottish descent, born in New York, and two years older than her.

Cemetery record for Mary and her husband George.
Note children Minnie and Robert in the same plot
(R. Smyth)

    
        There was no further information about Mary until Katherine Mayo, who as an assistant was helping Oswald Garrison Villard prepare his book, John Brown 1800–1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (1910) interviewed Mary in Chicago in 1906. By that time she was a widow. One thing that created confusion for me was the variant spelling of her last name, as I searched for additional information about her life between the time she married George and the interview by Mayo. The 1900 census shows Mary as a widow, with her last name spelled as Johnston.  At this point she was living in Chicago with her daughter Grace, twenty-four-years old. The 1910 census contains the same information.

     
       After her death on May 8, 1916, Cook County issued a death certificate for Mary Johnston with the notation that her remains were sent to Bloomington, Illinois for burial. Mary was seventy-three-years-old.  Her death certificate identified her as “housewife” -- far different from her first husband John, whose occupation was listed as “Adventurer.”2

  
          I was aware of the problematic variant spelling of the last name, but thought that the death certificate ended the issue. I was wrong. Continuing to search for information on Mary, George, or Grace Johnston using census records and ancestry sites proved futile. I also contacted every cemetery in the Bloomington area that I could locate with similar results. For a while I thought that there just was not anything else to uncover and her final resting place may be lost to history.

    
        Moving on to other projects I finally revisited my Mary Cook file to take a second look. I decided to search for Johnson rather than Johnston, something I should have thought of earlier but neglected. This would prove very time consuming due to the commonality of the names, George, Mary and Johnson.  One day while searching the 1860 census, I lucked upon a George and Mary Johnson living in Virginia with two children; George M. Jr. (1866-?) and Minnie Eva (1867-1873)—although I was not yet confidant that I had located my Mary Cook.

  
          By 1870, the couple, still listed as Johnson, had relocated to Bloomington, Illinois, where Mary and her husband lived on Lincoln Street with George Jr. and Minnie, with two additional children, Grace (1874-?) and Robert (1876-1904). George was listed in various censuses as a clerk and a bookkeeper. Mary kept house. The Bloomington connection was exciting as the death certificate listed Mary remains as being sent there for burial, while the birth date of Grace coincided with later records.

Mary Virginia “Jennie” Kennedy Cook Johnson, grave,
Evergreen Memorial Cemetery – Bloomington, Ill.
The only writing on the marker is “Mother.” (R. Smyth)

            Now tracing this family through later census records, I found that by 1900, Mary was living on Oakwood Boulevard in Hyde Park, Chicago with daughter Grace, who was working as a hotel cashier.  By the time of her death on May 8, 1916, Mary had moved to 52 East 50th Street in the city.3

            Now that I had established a connection with this Mary and Bloomington, Illinois I again began once again checking that area. The census told me that the family lived on Lincoln Street. Checking Google Maps, I located the street and followed it west then reversed and followed it east where I discovered that a few blocks from their home was a cemetery, Evergreen Memorial. I called the cemetery office and spoke to Tina Crow, the manager. She said she would be back in the office in ten minutes and would call me. Exactly ten minutes later I received the call.  Yes, she told me, she did have a Mary V. Johnson buried there in section F, Lot 628. Needing to confirm that this was indeed Mary Cook, I asked if there was anyone else buried in the plot. Tina responded “Yes, a George A. Johnson, who had died on April 29,1876, along with Minnie Eva Johnson, listed as ‘child,’ and Robert Johnson.”4 This was it! There was now no doubt that I had located the final resting place of Mary Virginia Kennedy Cook Johnson or Johnston.5

Now, onto Hayward Shepherd, Francis Jackson Merriam, and Jennie Dunbar Garcelone!

Richard Smyth

==================

Notes

1 Steven Lubet, John Brown’s Spy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 259-60.

2 The 1870 census has the family listed as “Johnson” and in addition to George A. and Mary V. there were two children, George M. (age 4) and Minnie (age 2). The 1880 census has not corrected the spelling of the last name and lists two additional children; Grace (age 6) and Robert (age 4).

3 The 1900 census shows Mary V. with the spelling of her last name as Johnston and “widowed.” By this time she was living in Chicago with twenty-four-year-old Grace. The 1910 census contains the same information.

4 The address of the cemetery is 302 East Miller Street, Bloomington, Illinois. The cemetery sits along East Lincoln Street where Mary and husband George raised their family.

5  Jefferson County Register of Deaths as reported in Lubet, John Brown’s Spy, p. 245. The Cook County death certificate lists her as Johnston.

Take Two, an online news and culture program of Southern California Public Radio in Pasadena, Calif., currently has a news feature entitled, "The strange tale of a missing grave marker in the Altadena hills," along with an audio report about the recovery of the Owen Brown grave stone.  Owen Brown (1824-89) was the third son of John Brown the abolitionist, undoubtedly named for Brown's pious antislavery father, who died in 1856 while John and several of his sons, including the younger Owen, were in Kansas.

Owen Brown's gravestone in its current, secret location

(Photo by R. H. Greene, Take Two image)

The audio report features some welcome sound bytes of an interview with our friend, Alice Keesey Mecoy, the great-great-great granddaughter of John Brown (through daughter Anne Brown Adams), but unfortunately the reporter makes the same tired reference to the killing of five proslavery people in Kansas--entirely without context, as usual.  The reporter also opines that Owen Brown ended up in California because he was fleeing the "violence" of his father's Harper's Ferry raid.  Of course, this is nonsense.  First, the Brown boys had their eyes on California from the 1840s.  Second, Owen fled nothing beyond his fortunate flight in escaping from Maryland after his father's failure at Harper's Ferry in 1859.  Owen managed to remain out of the reach of Virginia--a reach that was thereafter broken entirely with the coming of the Civil War and the defeat of the slave masters' rebellion.  In later years, Owen was not fleeing violence or anything else.  He lived with his older brother, John Brown Jr. for a time in Ohio, and finally settled on the west coast. 

A sketch of Owen Brown from
Hinton, John Brown and His Men

If anything from those dramatic years fighting slavery can be said to have impacted Owen in later life, it was in remembering hunger.  A reporter who interviewed him in California pointed out how he carefully gathered crumbs so that nothing of his food went to waste.   By all accounts, Owen was a kind and caring man, if not somewhat odd.  A bachelor all of his life, Owen suffered an injury to his arm as a child and lived out his days with little or no use in that limb. If the Take Two story provides lackluster background on John Brown, nevertheless its most important offering is to tell the story of the grave marker from Owen's burial site, which vanished but was located by an admiring neighbor.  The neighbor is now keeping the grave stone in a secret place where it will be safe from further abuse, and possibly returned to Owens grave someday.  Currently the land upon which Owen is buried is owned by a man with neither historical interests nor community sensibilities, and who preferred to keep people off his land, despite its historical significance.  Perhaps someday the land will come into the hands of someone who will want to replace the grave stone in its proper place.

=================

"Funeral of Owen Brown." Pasadena Standard, 12 January 1889

Died, at the residence of his brother-in-law, Henry Thompson, in this city, on January 8, 1889, Owen Brown, aged 64 years, 2 months and 4 days.

Owen Brown was born at Hudson, Ohio, November 4, 1824, and was the third son of John Brown's first family, there being twenty children in all.

Owen was with his father all through the struggle between the free state men and border ruffians in Kansas in 1836 and following years, and took part in the first pitched battle at Black jack on the Missouri and Kansas border, and also at Ossawatomie where his younger brother, an unarmed lad, was deliberately shot down in the street. Jason was also in these battles.

Owen was with his father at Harpers Ferry, a participant in that memorable raid which struck the death knell of slavery, not only in the United States but throughout the civilized world. He was one of seven who escaped from there through mountain fastnesses and swamps and forests and sassafras leaves, and such things as they could possibly devour without making a fire to cook. For they were pursued by soldiers and citizens with dogs and guns, and a price was set on their heads. The Atlantic Monthly some 15 or 20 years ago published a narrative of their escape, which excels in thrilling pathos, and in plain matter-of-fact incidents of hardship, endurance, and apparently supernatural deliverances from discovery and capture, the most vivid conceptions of fiction. Two of them made reckless ventures to get food and were captured and hung. The remaining five escaped, Owen finally reaching his brother John's home on an island in Lake Erie.

Owen Brown Defends Chinese Immigrants
Summit County Beacon [Akron, O], July 27, 1887

About five years ago Jason and Owen Brown took a homestead on a bench of mountain land five or six miles north of Pasadena, at the settlement now called Las Casitas. This they subsequently sold and took land higher up the mountain side, built a cabin, cleared and worked a few acres, and lied there-two feeble old men, alone. (Jason was with his father in the Kansas struggle, but was not at Harpers Ferry.) They were much visited by tourists and citizens, some from mere curiosity and others from a warm sympathy with the historic career of the family. They had made a good wagon trail up to their mountain hermitage, and were continuing it as a donkey path to the top of the mountain known as Brown's Peak, but it is not completed yet. Owen had a desire to be buried on the top of Brown's Peak; and if Jason ever succeeds in finishing the trail he will try to have his brother's grave up there as he desired. But meanwhile he is buried on a lesser peak on their mountain homestead. Owen Brown was never married.

Last Days.-December 30th the aged brothers came down to the city to attend Col. Woodford's gospel temperance meeting in the tabernacle. We met them there both Sunday and Monday nights. But Owen was taken sick and had a chill after going to his sister Ruth's home from the meeting, and in a week he died of typhoid pneumonia. He had been failing for some months; this had been noticed by his relatives and friends. Monday he had worked pretty hard, then lay down in the bright sunshine on the banks of the Arroyo and slept. In the evening he went to the great temperance meeting, and being very deeply and ardently interested in the cause, he put his last cent of money into the collection; had nothing to pay street car fare with, and so walked over two miles to his sister's house, after the meeting. These over-exertions were probably the immediate cause of his last sickness, although he was out some on several days after the first attack, but was not able to attend the meetings any more.

At the women's meting on Tuesday he and Jason were elected honorary members of the W. C. T. U. He was much pleased with this, and said there was no cause he would more gladly contribute his $1.00 membership fee to aid. So he was buried with the W. C. T. U. white ribbon on his breast.

The last words he uttered that could be distinguished were: "It is better-to be-in a place-and suffer wrong-than to do wrong."