The Insurrectionist Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by Herb Karl

  All rights reserved

  Published by Academy Chicago Publishers

  An imprint of Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN 978-1-61373-636-4

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Karl, Herb, author.

  Title: The insurrectionist : a novel / Herb Karl.

  Description: Chicago, Illinois : Academy Chicago Publishers, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016037879 (print) | LCCN 2016042115 (ebook) | ISBN 9781613736333 (softcover) | ISBN 9781613736357 (PDF edition) | ISBN 9781613736364 (EPUB edition) | ISBN 9781613736340 (Kindle edition)

  Subjects: LCSH: Brown, John, 1800–1859—Fiction. | Abolitionists—United States—Fiction. | Kansas—History—1854–1861—Fiction. | Harpers Ferry (W. Va.)—History—John Brown’s Raid, 1859—Fiction. | Antislavery movements—United States—History—19th century—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3611.A78355 I57 2017 (print) | LCC PS3611.A78355 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016037879

  Cover design: John Yates at Stealworks

  Typesetting: Nord Compo

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  To Lucy

  insurrection: A rising against civil or political authority . . .

  —from Noah Webster’s Dictionary

  of the English Language (1849)

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  A Note to the Reader

  The Backstory

  1 - May 22, 1856 Washington, DC

  2 - Sixteen Hours Later May 23, 1856 Kansas Territory

  3 - Seven Hours Later May 24, 1856 Kansas Territory

  4 - Eight Days Later June 2, 1856 Kansas Territory

  5 - A Month Later July 2, 1856 Kansas Territory

  6 - Eight Weeks Later August 28, 1856 Kansas Territory

  7 - Five Months Later January 19, 1857 Boston, Massachusetts

  8 - Three Months Later April 30, 1857 North Elba, New York

  9 - One Year and Eight Months Later December 20, 1858 Vernon County, Missouri

  10 - Four Months Later April 29, 1859 North Elba, New York

  11 - Four Months Later Late August 1859 Southern Pennsylvania

  12 - Two Months Later October 15, 1859 Kennedy Farm, Western Maryland

  13 - Eight Hours Later October 16, 1859 Kennedy Farm, Western Maryland

  14 - Minutes Later October 16, 1859 Harpers Ferry, Virginia

  15 - One Hour Later October 17, 1859 Harpers Ferry, Virginia

  16 - One Hour Later October 17, 1859 Harpers Ferry, Virginia

  17 - Four Hours Later October 17, 1859 Harpers Ferry, Virginia

  18 - Minutes Later October 17, 1859 Harpers Ferry, Virginia

  19 - Eight Hours Later October 18, 1859 Harpers Ferry, Virginia

  20 - One Minute Later October 18, 1859 Harpers Ferry, Virginia

  21 - Nine Days Later October 27, 1859 Charles Town, Virginia

  22 - Minutes Later October 27, 1859 Charles Town, Virginia

  23 - Twenty-Nine Days Later December 1, 1859 Charles Town, Virginia

  24 - Minutes Later December 1, 1859 Charles Town, Virginia

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  A Note to the Reader

  What follows—an account of the militant abolitionist John Brown’s three-year war on slavery—is not entirely a work of fiction. Because I’ve drawn heavily from the historical record, most of the events depicted—as well as the characters—are real, and much of the dialogue has been taken, with some modifications, from reported speech and writings. When I’ve departed from the historical record, I’ve done so to preserve the drama of storytelling. My only other purpose has been to bring the characters to life by imagining what they may have thought and said.

  The Backstory

  The opening chapter of this narrative is about a real event that illustrates why the abolition of slavery was at the top of the political and social agendas of activists like John Brown. The event—which moved America closer than ever to civil war—was caused by circumstances that go back as far as 1619, when the first African slaves were brought to Jamestown in the English colony of Virginia. Over time that modest wave of slavery grew larger and rolled up the James River, spreading out to the low country from the Chesapeake to Georgia, finally settling in great tidal pools in the South’s interior before drifting as far west as Texas.

  In 1854—two and a half centuries after the introduction of slavery into colonial America—the US Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a piece of legislation that created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska out of the vast chunk of land north of Texas, east of the Rockies, and westward along the Missouri River. Though it opened these territories to settlement and eventual statehood, the bill was bitterly contested. In it was a provision that violated the substance and spirit of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, an agreement prohibiting the extension of slavery within the boundaries of the two new territories. In essence, the disputed provision—known as popular sovereignty—effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by allowing the settlers of each territory to decide at the ballot box whether they wanted to enter the Union as a free or slave state.

  To the abolitionists—the vocal reformers in the North who were determined to root out slavery wherever it existed—and to the antislavery members of Congress, popular sovereignty represented one more concession to slaveholders, one more effort to appease Southerners fearful of losing congressional power and influence.

  While it was politically beneficial to slaveholding interests that a balance of free and slave states emerge from the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, many questioned whether slavery would ever take permanent hold in a climate not suited to the South’s labor-intensive cash crops of cotton, tobacco, sugar cane, and rice. Still, any act of Congress that appeared to validate slavery was an acknowledgment of what slaveholders claimed was among their constitutional rights. Popular sovereignty, in appearance if not reality, seemed to level the playing field for the slaveholding South.

  If there were any doubts that the nation was divided into two sections—each with its own agenda, each following a path leading to permanent and irreconcilable differences—those doubts were erased on May 30, 1854, with the adoption of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Its effects were immediate and demonstrable. Kansas Territory felt them first.

  Northern industrialists, manufacturers, businessmen, railroad investors—and of course the abolitionists—all had a stake in Kansas. Their motives were economic, political, or purely moral. Through immigrant aid organizations, they offered incentives that created a steady stream of Northern settlers. It was hoped these settlers would one day gain the votes necessary to convert the territory into the free state of Kansas.

  Since the Northern immigrants seemed to have an advantage, Southerners would have to respond quickly. On the eastern border of the territory lay Missouri—a slave state. Many Missourians simply crossed the border and laid claim to lands in Kansas before it was legally permissible to do so. Others—aptly called border ruffians—descended on towns and villages at election time, voted illegally for the proslavery agenda, chased Northern settlers from the polls, then headed back by nightfall to their homes in western Missouri. But by far the Southerners’ biggest asset was President Franklin Pierce. Pierce was elected largely because he favored compromises with the slaveholding South. It was he
who permitted the territorial government to have a proslavery identity. A proslavery Kansas seemed a real possibility.

  Thus, in the summer of 1854 began the struggle over whether Kansas would be free or slave. It started relatively quietly. But eventually the stream of Northern immigrants turned into a river, swift and relentless, leaving behind not only settlements but thriving little towns—like Topeka and Lawrence—with hotels, stores, sawmills, brickyards, newspapers.

  And when the proslavery territorial legislature ignored the Northern settlers, the Northerners called it “bogus” and formed their own government. Tempers grew short. Intimidation reigned. A shooting. Retribution. Skirmishes crackled along the Kansas-Missouri border like dry kindling. Two factions—one proslavery, the other pledged to a free state—were engaged in a little civil war of their own. It would come to be known as “Bleeding Kansas.”

  By the spring of 1856, violence and lawlessness in the territory had escalated. In Washington, DC, the Thirty-Fourth Congress was in session. Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner sat at his desk in the Senate chamber writing notes on printed copies of a speech he’d delivered earlier on the Senate floor. He intended to mail copies to his friends and constituents and to newspapers across the nation. The speech was entitled “The Crime Against Kansas,” and it was an indictment of everything being done to force Kansas Territory into the embrace of slavery. As he was writing, Sumner was unaware that a thousand miles to the west, men led by a notorious proslavery sheriff had ravaged the free town of Lawrence—looting its stores and homes, burning its most prominent hotel, and throwing the presses of the town’s two newspapers into the Kansas River.

  In this gathering excitement, Old John Brown was spoiling for a fight. He’d been in Kansas almost eight months and he was getting impatient. He had big ideas. He saw not only Kansas without slavery; he saw a nation without slavery.

  And he claimed divine guidance. He said he was called by his God to make war on slavery.

  1

  May 22, 1856

  Washington, DC

  Shortly before one o’clock in the afternoon, Preston Smith Brooks—a slender, thirty-six-year-old congressman from South Carolina—entered the chamber of the United States Senate. Because of a hip injury suffered as a younger man, he walked with a slight limp and carried a cane. The cane—along with his superbly tailored three-piece suit, neatly trimmed goatee, and genteel manner—made Brooks one of the more recognizable members of Congress. Since the previous morning he’d been stalking Senator Charles Sumner, the antislavery crusader from Massachusetts. To Brooks’s relief, their paths finally converged. His damaged hip throbbed, and he welcomed the opportunity to sit down. First, though, he took a moment to remind himself to control his emotions.

  After all, he was about to commit an act of extraordinary violence.

  The chamber was practically empty—the Senate having adjourned early—but some members still lingered, conversing in hushed voices in the lobby that hugged the semicircular walls. A few men were gathered in the columned loggia behind the Senate president’s high-backed chair, above which hung a canopy of crimson drapery held in the talons of an ornately carved, gilded eagle. Brooks took a seat in the top tier of desks, across the aisle and three rows behind Sumner, who was absorbed in writing, the nib of his pen darting between an inkwell and the bundles of pages stacked before him.

  In the lobby, not far from Sumner’s desk, a young lady had snared a senator attempting to exit the chamber. Her voice, though barely audible, annoyed Brooks. He couldn’t complete his mission in the presence of a lady. To do so would be inappropriate, a breach in the conduct of a gentleman. He felt his hand tighten around the cane he had selected for the occasion. It was one of many he’d collected since sustaining his hip injury, an injury that over the years had gradually worsened.

  Now, poised to execute the plan he’d conceived only days earlier, he felt a rush of nervous energy work its way through his viscera. He was well aware that Sumner, even at forty-five, was an imposing adversary—six feet two, almost two hundred pounds, barrel-chested, his legs so thick they barely fit into the space under his desk. And while friends and family insisted that Brooks, a veteran of the Mexican War, hadn’t lost his vigor and military bearing, the physically impaired congressman was no match for the robust Sumner.

  The lady and the senator were still chatting in the lobby. So Brooks waited. His thoughts turned to the events that had brought him to this moment.

  It was on Monday—three days earlier—that Brooks and a fellow South Carolina representative, the burly and mercurial Laurence Keitt, left their seats in the House and walked across the floor of the rotunda, avoiding the scaffolding of a hulking steam-driven crane. Renovations to the Capitol were in progress, and the crane was being used to remove the old copper-covered wooden dome, a legacy of Boston architect Charles Bulfinch. Viewed from Pennsylvania Avenue, the crane’s mast and boom rose eighty feet above the rotunda and brought to mind the mast and boom of a great sailing ship—bereft of sails. The crane would remain in place until the eventual erection of a cast iron dome.

  As the two men approached the main door to the Senate chamber, they were met by a throng of visitors searching for vacant seats in the already crowded galleries and lobbies. They had come to hear Sumner, an unflinching enemy of slaveholders and an eloquent speaker, a student of classical rhetoric fond of sprinkling his speeches with Latin phrases.

  Sumner was slated to reenter the debate on slavery. It had been almost two years since he formally spoke on the issue in the Senate. That he waited so long was a disappointment to Massachusetts abolitionists. On this day, however, Sumner was ready to take the floor. Rumors had circulated for weeks. This was to be no ordinary tirade by a Northerner against the evils of chattel slavery. Brooks had a bad feeling about the speech and was eager to learn if his suspicions would be confirmed. He and Keitt found standing room in a lower doorway of the chamber.

  It was an exceptionally warm day. The air was heavy with the odors of tobacco and perspiration; they commingled into a noxious mixture, prompting those in the Ladies’ Gallery overhead to break out their fans. Brooks looked up at the ladies. He likened their fluttering fans to a covey of flushed quail.

  On the floor, Senate president pro tem Jesse Bright of Indiana called on the senator from Massachusetts. Sumner strode to the speaker’s rostrum and opened a leather binder containing his speech—a speech that was to take two consecutive afternoons to deliver.

  The territory of Kansas, he began, his words rippling through the multileveled chamber with a steady and insistent force, was being raped by factions from both the South and the North, and if the present course of events was allowed to continue, Kansas soon would become a new state locked in the hateful embrace of slavery. Then, just minutes into his speech, he lashed out at Brooks’s fifty-nine-year-old cousin, Andrew Pickens Butler, the South Carolina senator who was one of the most vocal supporters of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. And Sumner’s speech, if nothing else, was an unbridled attack on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill—and its supporters.

  “The senator from South Carolina,” Sumner declared of Butler, “has read many books of chivalry and believes himself a chivalrous knight with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course, he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made vows and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him.” A pause. “Though polluted in the sight of the world, she is chaste in his sight.” Another pause. “That mistress is the harlot Slavery.”

  First a chorus of murmurs, then a palpable stillness fell on the chamber. Even Sumner’s critics, who earlier pretended to be uninterested—shuffling papers and talking over his words—came to attention.

  It was worse than Brooks anticipated. Sumner had leveled a slanderous insult at an elderly relative in front of the Senate and a sea of spectators. And he’d done so when his cousin wasn’t present to defend himself. The absent Butler had chosen to spend a few extra days of rest—away from the stress of Washington politics—at
his beloved Stoneland, a sprawling cotton plantation in Brooks’s district of Edgefield in the South Carolina upcountry.

  Sumner wasn’t finished. He soon expounded on the irony of Butler’s use of the words sectional and fanatical to describe Northerners who favored a free Kansas. It wasn’t the opponents of slavery who were sectional and fanatical, Sumner proclaimed; it was men like Butler, with their fanatical defense of slavery, who cleaved the nation in half, creating two sections—one North, the other South. After calling Butler one of sectionalism’s maddest zealots, Sumner drew his attack to a close—for the moment, anyway. “If the senator wishes to see fanatics, let him look around among his own associates. Let him look in a mirror.”

  Keitt hissed through his beard. He was one of the fire-eaters, men prepared to lead the South out of the Union in order to preserve a unique way of life. “You abolitionist bastard,” he muttered.

  Brooks had heard enough. He turned, leaving Keitt behind, and snaked his way through the people gathered outside the chamber straining to hear Sumner’s words. When Brooks reached the landing of the east portico he stopped and took a deep breath. It was good to be in the open air, away from the packed chamber. His anger subsided, but as he descended the steps he felt a sharp pain in his hip. The pain was familiar and made him wince, and he cursed aloud.

  At the foot of the steps he paused. To his left and right the prodigious, newly constructed House and Senate wings, virtually completed, jutted into the plaza. The marble facades were burnished to a glaring white by the afternoon sun. Shading his eyes, he hailed one of the hackney coaches that lined the curb and directed the driver to his lodgings at a hotel on West Sixth.

  Inside the cab Brooks rubbed his hip. The clip-clop of hooves and the clattering of steel-treaded wheels rolling over the broken cobbles of Pennsylvania Avenue gradually faded from his consciousness as he struggled to bring order to the jumble of thoughts swirling through his head. His cousin Andrew Butler had been publicly insulted, and for that there would have to be consequences. Because Butler was old—much older than Sumner—the task of righting the matter now fell to Brooks. The situation wasn’t new to him. He understood the burden of being born a gentleman and a South Carolinian. His father, a slaveholding planter, had infused Brooks and his siblings with a sense of obligation to family, to South Carolina, and to those who were their equals: those who possessed slaves and large tracts of land—land that yielded rice and Sea Island cotton in the low country and short-staple cotton in the upcountry. For these landowners and their progeny there were duties, rules of conduct. It had to be so.