Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw

CHAPTER THREE: "John Brown's Prison"

C H A P T E R 3 'ohn Brown'sprison" For manyAmericansof Shaw's era and for some later historians , the Civil Warstarted not in Charleston Harbor on April 12,1861, but in the Virginia river town of Harper's Ferry on October 16,1859. At Harper's Ferry, an unremarkable place except for the U.S. Arsenallocated there, John Brown led an "army" of twenty-one liberators on a plan to seize the arsenal and distribute the weapons to black Virginians.This slave army would roar through the South killing slaveholders, freeing humans from bondage, and growing larger with new recruits from the plantations. Brown envisioned an atonement of the nation's sins as Jehovah used him, a new Joshua, to slay the sinners and free the innocent. Brown's plan failed, but his effort increased tensions between the sections as Southern fears of slave rebellions soared and Northern voices to end slavery grew to fever pitch. Shaw's circle of friends led those who supported Brown. Unitarian leader Theodore Parker christened Brown "a saint"; Lydia Maria Child's open letters to Brown and Virginia governor Henry Wise escalated the verbal war; Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed that Brown made "the gallows as glorious as the cross." In 1861, the Second Massachusetts Infantry camped at Harper's Ferry. Lieutenant Shaw visited the engine house where Brown made his last stand and ultimately surrendered to U.S. Army colonel Robert E. Lee. Shaw also toured the jail cell in Charlestown that confined Brown until the gallows J 111 swung his body into martyrdom. Obviously inspired by what he saw, Shaw wrote home that the government should "call on allthe blacks in the country to come and enlist in our army!" While Shawreckoned with the ghost ofJohn Brown and the reasons Northern soldiers marched upon Southern soils, the first major battle of the war was being fought at Manassas Junction on the banks of a stream called Bull Run. Forty miles south of Harper's Ferry, the armies of Joseph E. Johnston and Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard met those of Irvin McDowell in a fight that many thought would end the war.The Southern victory sent panic throughout Washington and brought the realization that the conflict would be a long one. Lincoln replacedMcDowell with George Brinton McClellan. Shaw wished that he had been in the battle but for the time being he suffered from a "wound" that for manysoldiers proved more fatal than bullets— dysentery. Martinsburg,Va. [HL] July 13,1861 My dear Mother, We arrived here last night some time before dark and we encamped just outside the town towards the South East. There are camps on every side of us and on every side of the city. About 25000 men in all, they say,but I don't know how near the truth the estimateis. We landed at Elizabethport Tuesdayevening after seeing you all on board the Flora passing Staten Island, and came on as far as Hagerstown by rail. I was very glad we saw each other as our boat passed you in the Kills. You saw me on the paddle-box didn't you?x I had a pretty comfortabletime the first night in the cars asI slept in a baggage caron some straw and didn't wakeup at all—but the next day& night I was on guard and had to keep awake to look out for the prisoners. It wasvery hard keeping myeyesopen asI couldn't walk about. If I hadn't been afraid of falling off the platform I should have gone to sleep in spite of myself. We got out of the cars just in front of the town & marched in at 5 A.M. There we were quartered in three churches and started off again for the Potomac at 31/2. P.M. The people in Hagerstown seem very loyal now because a Connecticut regiment is quartered there, but we were told that a little while ago there were a good many secessionists among them. All through Pennsylvania everyone wasglad to seeus & at the last place, near the border, we were furnished with bread at midnight bysome people who brought it to the cars. 112. B L U E - E Y E D C H I L D OF F O R T U N E From Hagerstown we marched 6 miles to Williamsport on the Potomac and pitched our tents close...