American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'. Julian Street
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.
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 Massachusetts. 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