HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

VARIOUS PERSONAGES INVOLVED

IN THE

FOMENTING OF RACE WAR (RATHER THAN CIVIL WAR)

IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Thaddeus Hyatt was a businessman and financier involved in the preparation of “Bleeding Kansas” as a “free soil” or “Aryan Nation” enclave. Summoned to give testimony before the congressional committee investigating the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, he would refuse to appear and would be imprisoned for a period —but ultimately would get away with this refusal. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

THOSE INVOLVED, ARRANGED ALPHABETICALLY

SECRET “SIX”

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. No No No Finance white

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. subscribed to the racist agenda of Eli Thayer’s and Amos Lawrence’s New England Emigrant Aid Company, for the creation of an Aryan Nation in the territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas,” to the tune of $25,000.

Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson Yes Yes Captain or Lt. 26 white

Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson, one of Captain Brown’s lieutenants, was born April 17, 1833, in Indiana, the son of John Anderson. His maternal grandfather, Colonel Jacob Westfall of Tygert Valley, Virginia, had been a soldier in the revolution and a slaveholder. He went to school at Galesburg, Illinois and Kossuth, Iowa and worked as a peddler, farmer, and sawmill laborer before settling a mile from Fort Bain on the Little Osage in Bourbon County in “Bleeding Kansas” in August 1857. He was twice arrested by the proslavery activists, and for 10 weeks was held at Fort Scott. He then became a lieutenant of Captain Montgomery and was with him in the attack on Captain Anderson’s troop of the 1st US Cavalry. He witnessed a murder on his own doorstep by border ruffians, of a Mr. Denton. He went with John Brown on the slave raid into Missouri and remained with him thereafter. On July 5, 1859 he wrote of his determination to continue to fight for freedom: “Millions of fellow-beings require it of us; their cries for help go out to the universe daily and hourly. Whose duty is it to help them? Is it yours? Is it mine? It is every man’s, but how few there are to help. But there are a few who dare to answer this call and dare to answer it in a manner that will make this land of liberty and equality shake to the centre.” He was “J. Anderson” among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. He was thrust through with a bayonet by one of the Marines, and pinned against the wall. A white man, he was taken by the attackers to be a light mulatto and tortured: “One of the prisoners described Anderson as turning completely over against the wall [to which he was pinned by the bayonet] in his dying agony. He lived a short time, stretched on the brick walk without, where he was subjected to savage brutalities, being kicked in body and face, while one brute of an armed farmer spat a huge quid of tobacco from his vile jaws into the mouth of the dying man, which he first forced open.” The corpse would be sent for the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia along with that of Watson Brown (a corpse found on the banks of the Shenandoah River was more likely that of a local slave).

John Anderson ? ? Private < 30 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

John Anderson, a free black youth from Boston allegedly killed at Harpers Ferry. Nothing is known as to who he was, other than that he was young, or where he came from, other than from Boston — and it is even possible that actually there had been no such person as this in John Brown’s company. (The John Anderson we do know about had an entirely different life trajectory, in Canada.)

Osborn Perry Anderson Yes No No Private 29 of color

Osborn Perry Anderson, “O.P. Anderson, or as we used to call him Chatham Anderson,” the only participant of color to survive Harpers Ferry and elude capture, had been born free on July 27, 1830 in West Fallowfield, Pennsylvania. He had learned the printing trade in Canada, where he had met John Brown in 1858. He was a member of Congress of John Brown’s Provisional Government in Chatham, Ontario in May 1858 and was “Osborn Anderson” on the list of signatories of the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States”; a member of the Vigilance Committee in Chatham and Windsor in September 1858. He would write later of the fight at Harpers Ferry and his escape in A VOICE FROM HARPER’S FERRY: “We were together eight days before [John Edwin Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated….” Anderson, Coppoc, and Meriam had journeyed separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Anderson enlisted in the US Army in 1864, becoming a recruiter and/or noncommissioned officer for a unit as yet undetermined, and mustered out in Washington DC at the close of the war (he would be identified by his father Vincent Anderson in 1872 as having been a recruiter for the “western regiments”). He was a member of the Equal Rights League in 1865, and represented Michigan at the National Convention of Colored Men in 1869. He died a pauper of TB and lack of care in Washington on December 13, 1872.

John Albion Andrew No white

Despite the fact that John Albion Andrew was a prominent Massachusetts politician, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” would indicate long after the raid on Harpers Ferry, John Brown’s “general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9” to Governor Andrew.

Henry Ward Beecher No No No Propaganda white

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher induced the congregation of his Plymouth Church to procure a crate of 25 rifles to ship illegally to “Bleeding Kansas” and to stamp upon that crate the term of art BIBLES. The Reverend’s personal attitude toward American blacks was that although those like Frederick Douglass whose blood had become partly mingled with the blood of whites were worthy of consideration as human beings, those who yet remained of pure African stock were still in such a “low animal condition” (his category, his words) of pure blackness that such consideration as human beings would be inappropriate. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Charles Blair No No No Armament white

Charles Blair supplied the pikes.

Ann Brown No No No Supporter white

Ann Brown, a daughter of Captain John Brown, was with the conspirators at the Kennedy farm until shortly before the attack upon Harpers Ferry. In the aftermath she would move to the West Coast.

Frederick Brown No No No Supporter white

Frederick Brown was fanatically religious to the extent that he attempted to sever his sexual organs when he was attracted to a young lady. He would have been 28 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, but in 1856 had been killed in the fighting in “Bleeding Kansas.”

Jason Brown No No No Supporter 38 white

Jason Brown, one of the elder sons of Captain John Brown, was a gentle sort of person who actually was trying to become an inventor. He took part in the battle at Black Jack in “Bleeding Kansas,” and in the killings on the Osawatomie Creek, but was not at Harpers Ferry. He and his brother Owen Brown would become grape growers in the mountains above Pasadena, California.

John Brown Yes Multiple Yes Commander white wounds

John Brown, “Captain” John “Shubel Morgan” “Isaac Smith” Brown.

John Brown, Jr. No No No Supporter 38 white

John Brown, Jr., 38 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid and Captain John Brown’s eldest son, had trained as a phrenologist. After the raid he would go into hiding in Ohio and, when summoned to appear before the investigatory committee of the US Senate, would refuse to appear. During the Civil War he served as Captain of Company K of the 7th Kansas Cavalry. He and his family would then find permanent safe haven on South Bass Island in Lake Erie.

Martha Brewster Brown No No No Supporter white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Martha Brewster Brown, wife of Oliver Brown and daughter-in-law of Captain John Brown, was with the conspirators at the Kennedy farm until shortly before the attack upon Harpers Ferry.

Oliver Brown Yes Yes Captain 20 white

Oliver Brown, the youngest of John Brown’s sons to reach adulthood, was born in Franklin, Ohio on March 9, 1839. He was a bookish lad. He went to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1855, with his father, and returned to North Elba in October 1856, where he married Martha E. Brewster (Martha Brewster Brown) in 1858. She was sent back north just before the raid on Harpers Ferry and he was shot dead at the age of 20 while serving as a sentinel at the river bridge.

Owen Brown Yes No No Captain 35 white

Owen Brown, 3d of John Brown’s sons and his stalwart aid both in “Bleeding Kansas” and at Harper’s Ferry, was born November 4, 1824 at Hudson, Ohio. With a withered arm, he had been attempting to make a career of writing humor articles for newspapers. His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. He was 35 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid. He escaped on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. It was due largely to his psychological grit and his endurance that the little group of survivors of which he was the leader managed to make it out. He and Charles Plummer Tidd found work and safety under assumed names on an oil-well crew in Crawford County, Pennsylvania. He was the only one of the 5 escaped raiders not to participate in the civil war. He would never marry. He would grow grapes for some time in Ohio in association with 2 of his brothers, and then migrate west, and would be the final survivor of the raiders when he would die on January 9, 1891 at his mountain home “Brown’s Peak” near Pasadena, California. A marble monument marked the mountain grave, until during July 2002 it mysteriously disappeared — since the grave was not a registered historical landmark, and not in a cemetery, there would be no investigation.

Salmon Brown No 23 white

Salmon Brown, 23 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, was said to have been exactly like his father, Captain John Brown, in every particular. He would once comment to a newspaper reporter that “The tannery business, farming, wool buying and the raising of blooded stock were my father’s life occupations, though all of them were subordinated to his one consuming passion — freeing the slaves.” Salmon would die in Portland, Oregon in 1919.

Watson Brown Yes Yes Captain 24 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Watson Brown, born at Franklin, Ohio on October 7, 1835, got married with Isabella M. Thompson during September 1856. His son by this union would live only to his 5th year but would nevertheless survive him, because he was sent out by his father John Brown to negotiate at the federal arsenal and was shot down by the citizens of Harpers Ferry. He managed to crawl back to the shelter of the engine house and lived on, groaning, his head cradled in Edwin Coppoc’s lap, for a considerable period, expiring on October 18th. The corpse would be sent for the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. Recovering the skeleton from this college during the Civil War, his mother Mary Ann Day Brown eventually would be able to rebury it in the Adirondacks, before heading off to her retirement in California.

John E. Cook Yes No Yes Captain 29 white

John Edwin Cook, a well-connected 5'7" gentleman with blue eyes and long, curly blond hair, born in Summer 1830 to a well-to-do family in Haddam, Connecticut, had been a law clerk in Brooklyn and Manhattan after being expelled from Yale College on account of some student indiscretion, and had in 1855 become a member of the guerrilla force operated out of Lawrence in “Bleeding Kansas” by Charles Lenhart and had made himself an excellent shot. The name “John E. Cook” was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. He had been dispatched by John Brown to Harpers Ferry more than a year before the raid to work out the details on the ground and had secured employment as a lock tender on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, as a schoolteacher, and as a bookseller. He had gotten married with a Chambersburg, Pennsylvania woman, Mary V. Kennedy, on April 18th, 1859. After being sent out by Captain Brown to collect weapons, and having escaped by climbing into a tree and watching the events transpire, and after having evaded capture for some months, against the advice of his comrades he became reckless in his search for food and was captured on October 25th, 8 miles from Chambersburg. As an incessant and compulsive communicator he had always been considered by the Brown operatives to be indiscreet. In a confession which would be published as a pamphlet at Charles Town in the middle of November 1859 for the benefit of Samuel C. Young, a man who had been crippled for life in the fighting, Cook would detail for his captors all his movements from the point of his 1st meeting with Brown after the battle of Black Jack in June 1856 until after his capture. At the last moment he would seek to save himself by representing that he had been deceived through false promises. For this revelation Cook would be severely censured at the time, being termed “Judas.” Despite his confession, and despite his brother-in-law A.P. Willard being the governor of Indiana, he would in the end, one of the last, be also hanged for the treason and murder at Harpers Ferry, on December 16th.

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. Yes No Yes Private < 30 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. was an Oberlin, Ohio carpenter and freeborn black American who was the son of a slave. He was active in the Oberlin Anti-Slavery Society. It was rumored that he escorted John Price to Canada after the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. Copeland later participated in the raid on the Harpers Ferry armory with John Brown. He got trapped in “Hall’s Rifle Works” along with his uncle Lewis Sheridan Leary and John Henry Kagi. When the 3 made a run for the Shenandoah River they got caught in a crossfire, but after Kagi had been killed and Leary had been shot several times and placed under arrest, Copeland was able to surrender without having been wounded. He refused to speak during his trial and was hanged with too short a drop and thus strangled slowly. On December 29, when a crowd of 3,000 would attend his funeral in his hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, there would be no body to bury, for after his cadaver had been temporarily interred in Charles Town it had been dug up and was in service in the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three fallen free citizens of color, Copeland, Leary, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971). Judge Parker would assert in his story of the trials (St. Louis Globe Democrat, April 8, 1888) that Copeland had been “the prisoner who impressed me best. He was a free negro. He had been educated, and there was a dignity about him that I could not help liking. He was always manly.” Andrew Hunter at the same time was quoted as saying– “Copeland was the cleverest of all the prisoners ... and behaved better than any of them. If I had had the power and could have concluded to pardon any man among them, he was the man I would have picked out.” On the day that he died Copeland declared, “If I am dying for freedom, I could not die for a better cause — I had rather die than be a slave!” (Paul Finkelman avers on page 49 of HIS SOUL GOES MARCHING ON: RESPONSES TO JOHN BROWN AND THE HARPERS FERRY RAID that his middle name was “Anthony” rather than “Anderson.”)

Barclay Coppoc Yes No No Private < 21 white

Barclay Coppoc, from the Quaker settlement of Springdale, Iowa, was born in Salem, Ohio on January 4, 1839, and had not attained his majority at the time of the raid on Harpers Ferry. This Quaker escaped, although his adopted brother Edwin Coppoc surrendered and was tried and hanged. “We were together eight days before [John Edwin Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [John Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated and I went on through with the box to Ohio on the cars.” Osborn Perry Anderson, Barclay Coppoc, and Francis Jackson Meriam would travel separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Barclay then went to his family home in Iowa, with Virginia agents in close pursuit. There a band of young men armed themselves to defend him, and the Religious Society of Friends disowned him for bearing arms. He was back in “Bleeding Kansas” in 1860, helping to run off some Missouri slaves, and nearly lost his life in a second undertaking of this kind. He became a 1st Lieutenant in Colonel Montgomery’s regiment, the 3d Kansas Infantry. Soon he was killed by the fall of a train into the Platte river from a trestle 40 feet high, the supports of which had been burned away by Confederates.

Edwin Coppoc Yes Unwounded Yes Lieutenant < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Edwin Coppoc, who had been born on June 30, 1835 and orphaned and adopted at the age of 6 into a nonresistant- abolitionist Quaker farm family first of Salem, Ohio and then of Springdale IA. On March 6, 1857 he was disowned by the Religious Society of Friends and in the spring of 1858 went to “Bleeding Kansas” as a settler — but did not take part in the fighting. It was during a visit to Springdale in the fall of 1858 that he met John Brown. He would surrender with Captain Brown in the engine house at Harpers Ferry, and would be tried by a jury of his white male peers immediately after the conclusion of the trial of Captain Brown while his still-Quaker brother Barclay Coppoc was eluding capture. He was sentenced on November 2. From prison before his hanging, he wrote his adoptive mother that he was

“sorry to say that I was ever induced to raise a gun.”

He was hung with John Edwin Cook on December 16, 1859 and a day later his brother turned up at home in Iowa (he also would soon be disowned). The body of Edwin Coppoc was buried in Winona, Iowa after a funeral attended by the entire town (later the body would be reburied in Salem, Ohio).

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. No No No Enabler white

Treason being punished as what it is, why would the downtown Boston lawyer Richard Henry Dana, Jr. allow himself to become legal counsel to a “Secret Six” committee that was funding the activities of Captain John Brown, as that loose cannon prepared to raid the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia? He was going to be implicated as having obviously had guilty prior knowledge, and was obviously making himself of necessity a prime candidate for the noose. As the going got hot he would make himself unavailable for prosecution –by venturing on a luxury trip around the globe– but the issue is not how he might extricate himself from this, but why he would have so endangered himself.

Martin Robison Delany No No No Supporter of color

Dr. Martin Robison Delany, Pennsylvania, 1843; attended the Colored National Convention of 1848; attended the Emigration Convention of 1854; a member of the Niger Valley Exploring Party in 1858; a member of the Vigilance Committee in Chatham and Windsor in September 1858. At a meeting of the conspirators in Chatham in Canada West in May 1858, “M.R. Delany,” the Reverend William Charles Munroe of Detroit, and several other leaders of the large black expatriate community approved something termed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the people of the United States,” as the charter for the pike-wielding fugitive society of raiders which was to be created in the remote fastness of the Allegheny Mountains by Captain John Brown subsequent to his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. That document would be discovered on Brown’s person when he was taken into custody. He would be a Major in the 104th Colored Infantry, and Sub-Assistant Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, in 1865. He was a Freemason.

Frederick Douglass No No No Supporter 41 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Waldo Emerson urged Frederick Douglass early on, to make himself into the General Toussaint Louverture of the North American continent. When Captain John Brown made a speech offering himself as the leader for the forces of freedom in “Bleeding Kansas”, Douglass stood in the audience and endorsed Brown and his mission despite the unpleasant fact that the plan of the abolitionists was to permanently exclude all persons of color, whether free or enslaved, from that new state. When the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry was raided, his role was intended to be the raising aloft of the sword of General George Washington and the generaling of the black forces. His involvement in this raid was acceptable to such personages as the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher only because his blood had been mixed with white it was removed to a degree from its original “low animal condition” (the Reverend’s category, the Reverend’s words) of blackness. At the very last moment Douglass perceived that the prospects of the raid were for either failure or betrayal, and fled by way of Canada to England.

Ralph Waldo Emerson No No No Supporter white

Waldo Emerson, acting as an agent provocateur of race war, recommended to Frederick Douglass in 1844 that he become the liberator of his people on the North American continent, modeling himself upon the leader of the successful Haitian revolution of the turn of the century, Toussaint Louverture. “Let me hold your coat while some white man kills you,” or something to that effect. We only know about this because Henry Thoreau rushed down to Boston right after the lecture, and had the lecture printed up as a pamphlet — after which there was no lying about the provocation that had been made and so all Emerson could do was pretend that Douglass hadn’t been present.

John Buchanan Floyd No No No Supporter white

Secretary of War John Buchanan Floyd was one of those who had been warned, months in advance, that Captain John Brown was planning to attack a federal arsenal to seize weapons with which to arm black slaves, in the creation of a servile insurrection (he didn’t know precisely when, and didn’t know it would be at Harpers Ferry, Virginia). Such a prospect did not alarm him in the slightest. The official story, if the official story is what you want to believe, is that our Secretary of War would pass this warning along to no-one. I myself find it difficult to regard this as anything more than a cover. I think the truth was that these folks were aware that such a servile insurrection could lead to nothing but a race genocide, with white Americans exterminating the black ones, and what I fear is that such a race genocide would have been considered to be just fine, an improvement in our national condition. Let’s not have ourselves a civil war of brother against brother, that would be so nasty — let’s prevent that by having ourselves a nice little race war!

Hugh Forbes No No No Lieutenant white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Captain John Brown’s scheme, which he referred to as the “Subterranean Pass Way,” was that the escaped, armed slaves were to “swarm” into and set up a center of resistance in the Alleghenies from which they could liberate Virginia and then invade Tennessee and northern Alabama. Such a scoping of the situation never met with much respect from other of the other schemers. In particular, the Scottish adventurer Hugh Forbes, Brown’s onetime principal lieutenant, regarding blacks as inherently childlike, credulous, and cowardly, believed such a scheme to be doomed to failure from its inception. The scenario preferred by Forbes would have involved the herding of the slaves together by armed bands of white men and the driving of such herds of humans up the mountain chain toward Canada, neatly disposing of America’s entire race problem — by simple relocation of it to another nation. Evidently the two planners parted company over issues such as this after Forbes had functioned in Tabor, Iowa as the leader of military training for the recruits (Forbes was a veteran of the Grenadier Guards, and had fought along with Garibaldi in defense of the Roman Republic of 1849), and then Forbes attempted blackmail. When not offered a payoff, he wrote long, detailed letters to congressmen and to others, and it is one of the unresolved issues, how anyone in high office in Washington DC could have avoided knowing in advance that Brown was plotting a strike of some sort against slavery (another of the unresolved issues is what happened to Forbes once his extortion had failed — he simply disappeared from the pages of history).

George B. Gill

George B. Gill had come to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1857 after whaling in the Pacific Ocean, and had there been recruited by John Brown. His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. During the year before the raid, Captain Brown sent Gill to visit a black con artist named Mr. Reynolds who persuaded Gill that he had gone through the South organizing and had brought into existence in areas of the South a militant organization of black men and women. Pointing out to Gill that Southern newspapers carried numerous references to the death of a favorite slave, he alleged that these were leaders of servile insurrection plots who were being discovered and offed. According to this “mumper” Southern blacks were ready and needed only to be given a cue. There is evidence that several slaves from the vicinity of the arsenal did participate in the raid itself, but returned hastily to their plantations when it became obvious that the raid was a failure. Several fires were set in the vicinity of Harpers Ferry in the week after the raid, probably by slaves and free black Americans (Richard Hinton estimates that $10,000,000 was lost in the sale of Virginia slaves in the year 1859; census figures show that between 1850 and 1860 there was almost a 10% decline in blacks in the three counties surrounding Harpers Ferry, a period during which the total number of blacks in Maryland and Virginia was increasing by about 4%).

The Rev. and Mrs. Gloucester No Financial support of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

The Reverend James Newton Gloucester and Elizabeth A. Parkhill Gloucester of Brooklyn, New York were wealthy financial supporters of the servile-insurrection plot of Captain John Brown, or “Shubel Morgan,” or “Isaac Smith” (depending on what alias he was using at the time), and had put him up for a week at their home while he was enroute to Harpers Ferry. According to a report in a local newspaper: Brown said, “Goodbye, Sister Gloucester. I’ve only sixteen men, but I’m to conquer.” Mrs. Gloucester said to him, “Perhaps you will lose your life.” “Well, my life,” he replied, “is not worth much. I’m an old man. In Kansas, the balls flew around my head as thick as hail. I’ll never be killed by a ball. If I fall, I’ll open a ball in this country that will never stop until every slave is free.”

Shields Green Yes No Yes Private < 30 of color

Shields Green was an escapee from South Carolina who had served as clothes cleaner in Rochester, New York (his business card there declared “I make no promise that I am unable to perform”) and acted as a bodyguard for Frederick Douglass. He was known as “Emperor,” although how he obtained this nickname is not now known. He decided to go with John Brown when Douglass turned back at the stone quarry prior to the Harpers Ferry raid, saying to his boss “I believe I’ll go with the old man.” He took part in the raid and then refused to speak during his trial. At the time of his hanging he was about 23 years of age. His cadaver would be dug up and used for the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. He, like John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary, had been a resident of Oberlin, Ohio. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their 3 fallen free citizens of color (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971).

James Henry Harris HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

No one associated with Captain John Brown, and no one associated with politics in North Carolina, has ever been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. “J.H. Harris” signed, as a member of a Vigilance Committee, on May 8th, 1858, the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Ontario West, Canada, a document which would be found on the person of John Brown when he was captured at Harpers Ferry on October 18th, 1859. Although another person of this name, James Henry Harris, had been born a slave in Granville County, North Carolina and had gained his freedom at the age of 18 in about 1848, he was not this “J.H. Harris.” Educated at Oberlin College, he would hold a teaching certificate from the New England Freedman’s Aid Society. He was of Cleveland in 1859, and a member of the 102d US Colored Infantry formed in Michigan by George DeBaptiste that included so many men from Chatham. He would attend the 1st Freedmen’s Convention in the South, held in what would become the St. Paul A.M.E. Church on Edenton Street in Raleigh during September 1865 as a representative of Wake County. He would become the 1st black alderman from Raleigh, and a delegate from Raleigh to the North Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1868; he got married with Bettie Miller, a daughter of Addison J. Smith and Mary Anderson, a cousin of Osborn Perry Anderson; he died in 1891 in Washington DC and the remains are at Mount Hope Cemetery in Raleigh. There is yet a 3d James H. Harris, who was not this “J.H. Harris” signatory, who was belatedly awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and is interred in the remote section of Arlington National Cemetery that was reserved for colored soldiers, and for contrabands.

Lewis Hayden

Lewis Hayden, a black leader in downtown Boston whose escape from Kentucky had been aided by Delia Webster in 1844. Eight years after escaping from slavery, he raised, as an act of gratitude and duty, a sum of $650, in order to ransom the Reverend Calvin Fairbanks out of the Kentucky State Prison at Frankfort, where the Reverend had been languishing under the accusation that he had assisted 47 slaves in their escape, and had served 14 years, and had been whipped and beaten. Just before the raid on Harpers Ferry, Hayden helped recruit Francis Jackson Meriam to carry a message and cash money to the hideout of John Brown, and take part in that struggle.

Albert Hazlett Yes No Yes Capt. or Lt. < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Albert Hazlett, born in Pennsylvania on September 21, 1837, did not take part in the fight at Harpers Ferry but, with John Edwin Cook who had escaped from that fight by climbing a tree and who later identified him to the prosecutors, would be belatedly hanged. Before the raid he had worked on his brother’s farm in western Pennsylvania, and he had joined the others at Kennedy Farm in the early part of September 1859. He was arrested on October 22d in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, near Chambersburg, where he was using the name “William Harrison,” was extradited to Virginia, was tried and sentenced at the spring term of the Court, and was hanged on March 16th, 1860. George B. Gill said that “I was acquainted with Hazlett well enough in Kansas, yet after all knew but little of him. He was with Montgomery considerably, and was with [Aaron D. Stevens] on the raid in which Cruise was killed. He was a good-sized, fine-looking fellow, overflowing with good nature and social feelings.... Brown got acquainted with him just before leaving “Bleeding Kansas.” To Mrs. Rebecca B. Spring he wrote on March 15th, 1860, the eve of his execution, “Your letter gave me great comfort to know that my body would be taken from this land of chains.... I am willing to die in the cause of liberty, if I had ten thousand lives I would willingly lay them all down for the same cause.”

Reverend T. W. Higginson No White

The Reverend Thomas Wentworth “Charles P. Carter” Higginson of the Secret “Six” believed that “Never in history was there an oppressed people who were set free by others” (it was therefore up to American black people to demonstrate their courage, and their worthiness to be free — basically by getting themselves exterminated). After Harpers Ferry he would attempt to organize an expedition to raid the Charles Town lockup and rescue the accused — this was an expedition Henry Thoreau would oppose, asserting that to the contrary Captain Brown’s highest and best purpose was to be hung.

Richard J. Hinton

Richard J. Hinton, abolitionist journalist whose opposition to slavery led him to transform himself into a gunslinger. Refer to: Richard J. Hinton, JOHN BROWN AND HIS MEN (NY: Funk & Wagnalls, 1894; Reprint NY: The Arno Press, 1968).

WHAT TO TAKE: Let your trunk, if you have to buy one, be of moderate size and of the strongest make. Test it by throwing it from the top of a three-storied house; if you pick it up uninjured, it will do to go to Kansas. Not otherwise. — James Redpath and Richard J. Hinton, HAND-BOOK TO KANSAS TERRITORY, 1859, as quoted on page 3

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and others of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee raised $5,000 in one day, to buy enough Sharp’s rifles to arm 200 men to the teeth in “Bleeding Kansas.” He, as well as the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war (black Americans against white), would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces of servile insurrection. These 5 of the white conspirators of the Secret “Six” finance committee clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in order to foment sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans.

Julia Ward Howe No White

Julia Ward Howe was a racist and, because she carried out errands for her husband Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe who was on the Secret “Six” finance committee (such as having a surreptitious meeting in their home with Captain John Brown), must surely have been aware of and must surely have approved of that committee’s agendas.

Thaddeus Hyatt No white

Thaddeus Hyatt was a businessman and financier involved in the preparation of “Bleeding Kansas” as a “free soil” or “Aryan Nation” enclave. Summoned to give testimony before the congressional committee investigating the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, he would refuse to appear and would be imprisoned for a period —but ultimately would get away with this refusal.

John Jones No Support white

John Jones was a Chicago businessman of color (John Brown stayed at his home). He and his wife Mary Richardson Jones were active abolitionists, agitating for the repeal of the Illinois Black Laws. (Not only did these laws obligate black Americans to prove that they were free in order to enter the state, but once they were in state these laws barred them not only from visiting white homes, but from owning any property or merchandise, or entering into any contracts.)

John Henry Kagi Yes Yes Secretary of War, 24 white adjutant HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Although John Henry Kagi was largely self-taught, his letters to the New-York Tribune, the New-York Evening Post, and the National Era reveal him as the best educated of the raiders. A debater, public speaker, stenographer, wannabee writer, and total abstainer from alcohol, he was cold in manner and rough in appearance. A nonparticipant in organized religion, he was an able man of business. He had been born on March 15, 1835, a son of the blacksmith for Bristolville, Ohio in a family of Swiss descent (the name originally having been Kagy). During 1854/1855 he had taught school at Hawkinstown, Virginia but had indicated an objection to the system of slavery there and been compelled to return to Ohio with a pledge never to return. He had gone to Nebraska City in 1856 and been admitted to the bar. He then entered Kansas with one of General James H. Lane’s parties and enlisted in Aaron D. Stevens’s (“Colonel Whipple’s”) 2d Kansas Militia. In fighting in the town of Tecumseh in “Bleeding Kansas” he proved himself by killing at least one man, who had been coming after him with a club. After being captured by US troops he had been imprisoned at Lecompton and at Tecumseh, but was finally released. On January 31, 1857 he had been struck on the head with a gold-headed cane by a proslavery judge, drew his revolver and shot the judge in the groin, but Judge Elmore got off 3 shots and one struck Kagi over the heart, the bullet being stopped by a memorandum-book. He was long with his family in Ohio recovering from these wounds, but then returned to Kansas and joined John Brown. He bore the title of Secretary of War in the provisional government and was next in command to John Brown; he was also the adjutant. His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. When in Chambersburg as agent for the raiders, he boarded with Mrs. Mary Rittner. At Harpers Ferry he was trapped along with John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the 3 made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got ca in crossfire and Kagi was the first killed, his body being left to float in the river. [Eyal J. Naveh in CROWN OF THORNS: POLITICAL MARTYRDOM IN AMERICA FROM ABRAHAM LINCOLN TO MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. (NY: New York UP, 1990) described Kagi as black (Page 31: “Even though black followers of Brown, such as John Henry Kagi, were also executed in Virginia, for blacks, John Brown became the most famous martyr for their freedom.”), but this was just another of the long series of tendentious but uncontested errors which make such literature so unreliable.]

Amos Lawrence No White

Amos Lawrence provided the large bulk of the investment capital needed by Eli Thayer’s New England Emigrant Aid Company for the purchase land in the new territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas”, needed in order to encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there as “decent antislavery” homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior.

Lewis Sheridan Leary Yes Yes Private 25 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Lewis Sheridan “Shad” Leary was a mulatto citizen of Oberlin, Ohio, a saddler and harness maker whose father had been a freeborn black harness maker as well. He was descended from an Irishman, Jeremiah O’Leary, who had fought in the Revolution under General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, who had married a woman of mixed blood, partly African, partly of that Croatan Indian stock of North Carolina, which is believed by some to be lineally descended from the “lost colonists” left by John White on Roanoke Island in 1587. Leary was born at Fayetteville, North Carolina on March 17, 1835, and was therefore in his 25th year when killed during the raid upon the federal arsenal. In 1857 he had gone to Oberlin to live, marrying there and making the acquaintance of John Brown in Cleveland. To go to Harpers Ferry, he left his wife with a 6-month-old child at Oberlin, his wife being in ignorance of the purpose of his trip. He was given funds to go from Oberlin to Chambersburg in the company of his nephew John Anderson Copeland, Jr. He was isolated along with his nephew and John Henry Kagi in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the 3 made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got themselves caught in a crossfire, and after Kagi had been killed and Leary shot several times, he was taken, his wounds so severe that he would die the following morning. He was able to dictate messages to his family and is reported as saying “I am ready to die.” A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three fallen free men of color, Leary, Copeland, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971). The Leary child would subsequently be educated by James Redpath and Wendell Phillips.

William H. Leeman Yes Yes Captain < 21 white

William H. Leeman was born on March 20, 1839 and was recruited in Maine as a 17-year-old very impressed with John Brown. Being of a rather wild disposition, he had early left his home in Maine. Educated in the public schools of Saco and Hallowell ME, he was working in a shoe factory in Haverhill MA at the age of 14. In 1856 he entered “Bleeding Kansas” with the second Massachusetts colony of that year, and became a member of Captain Brown’s “Volunteer Regulars” on September 9, 1856. He fought well at Osawatomie when but 17 years old. Owen Brown found him hard to control at Springdale, Iowa. George B. Gill said of him that he had “a good intellect with great ingenuity.” His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” as “W.H. Leeman,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. By the raid upon Harpers Ferry he had reached the age of 20. On October 17, 1859, the youngest of the raiders, he made a mad dash out of the relative safety of the armory to swim down the Potomac River but two militiamen caught up with him and shot him down on an islet in the river. His body would be used for target practice for hours by the drunken citizenry, until the hail of bullets pushed it into the current and it was carried downstream. Mrs. Annie Brown Adams would write of him: “He was only a boy. He smoked a good deal and drank sometimes; but perhaps people would not think that so very wicked now. He was very handsome and very attractive.”

Francis Jackson Merriam Yes No No Private < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Francis Jackson Meriam, grandson and namesake of the Garrisonian abolitionist and Boston historian Francis Jackson, was a young manic-depressive with but one good eye. He helped James Redpath collect materials in Haiti and across the American South for use in a book dedicated to John Brown and Redpath arranged for Meriam to join Brown’s guerrillas. He was not captured or killed at Harpers Ferry because he had been left in one of his fits of despair at the Kennedy farmhouse during the raid. After escaping through Shippensburg, Philadelphia, Boston, Concord, and the area of St. Catharines, Canada he served as a captain in the 3rd South Carolina Colored Infantry. Erratic and unbalanced, he urged wild schemes upon his superiors and sometimes attempt them. In an engagement under General Grant he received a serious leg wound. He died suddenly on November 28, 1865 in New-York.

Charles W. Moffett Yes white

Charles W. Moffett, a white drifter from Iowa about whom little is known. His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” as “C.W. Moffit,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. Perhaps his middle name was “Wesley” (according to an 1882 article in the Topeka Capital, “John Brown: A Reunion of His Surviving Associates,” a meeting of raid survivors at the Kansas Historical Society was called by C.W. Moffett of Montour, and a tombstone in the Maple Hill cemetery in Montour, Iowa is for a Charles Wesley Moffett, Jun. 20, 1827-Aug. 19, 1904) and perhaps he did not attend the raid on the federal arsenal because he had cold feet, or because he was one of a number of people suspected by the others of having written (2 anonymous postings, one dated August 18th, 1859 from near Philadelphia and the other dated 2 days later from Cincinnati) to alert the federal government to the plan for a raid on some federal arsenal (Secretary of War John Buchanan Floyd received this while at Red Sweet Springs in Virginia and did not alert anyone in the federal government; he would offer later that as War Secretary he had been getting a whole lot of spurious warnings, and anyway there wasn’t a federal arsenal in Maryland).

Edwin Morton No White

The very tall Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s intimate college friend Edwin Morton of Plymouth, a descendant of one of the prominent Founding Fathers, was about as deeply involved in the Harpers Ferry raid as any member of the Secret “Six”. He was Gerrit Smith’s private secretary and resided with his family, and after the raid, while the congressional investigation was going on, he fled overseas and chummed around at Shrewsbury and Hodnet with Henry Thoreau’s very tall friend Thomas Cholmondeley.

Dangerfield Newby Yes Yes bridge sentinel 39 light mulatto HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Dangerfield Newby, a free light mulatto, very tall and with a splendid physique, was serving as a sentinel at the Harpers Ferry bridge and was shot to death as he and the two white men with him retreated before the charge of the Jefferson Guards of Charles Town VA, coming across the Potomac from the Maryland side. He was not brought down by ball or bullet, but by a 6-inch spike being used as a musket projectile, which caught him in the throat and ripped him severely. Since neither of the two white men were shot, it appears that as a mulatto he was targeted. The body was beaten savagely, and its ears snipped off as trophies, and then a herd of hogs was driven up to root on it.

Reverend Theodore Parker No White

The Reverend Theodore Parker, a stone racist, declared from his pulpit that while he ordinarily spent $1,500 a year on books, the equivalent of 4 or 5 men’s annual wages, for the time being he was going to restrict himself to spending less than one man’s annual wage on books per year, and devote the remaining moneys to the purchase of guns and ammunition for the white people going to the Kansas Territory. Sharps rifles, the very latest in deadliness, cost $25 apiece when had in sufficient quantity:

“I make all my pecuniary arrangements with the expectation of civil war.”

He would take to marking the boxes of new Sharps rifles he shipped illegally to “Bleeding Kansas” with the word BOOKS, and he would take to referring to these firearms as so many copies of RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE as in “The right of the people to keep and to bear arms shall not be infringed.” He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six”, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces of servile insurrection. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their allies among the Northern and Southern black Americans slave and free, in order to foment a rectification of the Southern white Americans.

Luke F. Parsons White

Luke F. Parsons, 22-year-old white man, already a mercenary fighter seasoned in “Bleeding Kansas,” a petty thief in need of a paycheck and a legitimating excuse. His name “L.F. Parsons” was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859.

Richard Realf White HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Richard Realf was a 23-year-old Englishman, the son of a blacksmith who had become a rural constable. In 1852 he had put out a collection of poetry, GUESSES AT THE BEAUTIFUL, and in 1854, after giving up being the lover of Lady Noell Byron, widow of George Gordon, Lord Byron, he was led to the United States of America by “instincts” which he characterized as “democratic and republican, or, at least, anti-monarchical.” He had been introduced by John Edwin Cook, whom he had met in Lawrence in “Bleeding Kansas” while working as a correspondent for the Illinois State Gazette, to John Brown in Mount Tabor, Iowa at the end of November or beginning of December 1857. He traveled through Chicago and Detroit to Chatham, Ontario West, Canada, and his name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. He returned to England to lecture, and visited France, before traveling from Havre on March 2, 1859 to New Orleans, arriving April 17, 1959 with the objective of becoming a Jesuit priest. He would testify before the US Senate Committee.

James Redpath

James Redpath, crusading journalist out to make a buck in the best way.

George J. Reynolds of color

George J. Reynolds, a light mulatto blacksmith or coppersmith of Sandusky, Ohio, from Virginia although saying he was from Vermont, with native American as well as black African heritage, age 35 at the time of the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and active in the Underground Railroad. He had attended the Convention of Colored Men in 1858, and signed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Ontario West, Canada per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859, as “J.G. Reynolds” (3 weeks after this convention, he would disclose some of John Brown’s agenda to a black secret paramilitary group in Sandusky, Ohio).

Richard Richardson No of color

Richard Richardson, a fugitive slave from Lexington, Missouri who had joined John Brown in southern Iowa, was going through that unfortunate but now-well-understood initial period of reaction to freedom in which a former slave, accustomed to servitude and unaccustomed to self-origination, attaches himself to some authoritative white man who is able with courtesy to make use of him. He was a member of the African Mysteries, a secret defense group in Michigan in 1858, and signed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859, but evidently did not get from Ontario to Virginia due to lack of travel money. He became a private in Company E of the 113th US Colored Infantry that was formed from the 13th US Colored Infantry that was recruited in and spent its entire service in Arkansas.

Judge Thomas Russell No White HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Mary Ellen Russell visited John Brown in jail a few weeks before his execution. She said that although she had never approved of his violent methods, she admired him as a man of vision and idealism. Brown had been friends with the Russells for years, and had stayed at their home on several occasions despite the fact that Thomas Russell was a prominent member of the Massachusetts judiciary. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” would allege long after the raid on Harpers Ferry that “Brown’s general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9” to Judge Russell.

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn No White

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of Concord, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These 5 of the white Secret “Six” conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies for servile insurrection in order to foment sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans. (John Brown, who had himself buried a wife and promptly recruited another one, once commented to Sanborn, in regard to the young man’s grief over the prompt death of his young bride Ariana Walker, that he was too young to be married to a gravestone.)

Gerrit Smith No White

The immensely wealthy “H. Ross Perot” political figure of that era was a former Millerite millennialist: Gerrit Smith. In this American’s mansion outside Syracuse, New York, standing in the center of his study, was an ornate mahogany desk. Rumor had it that this had once been the desk of the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte himself. The millennium of William Miller not having arrived on schedule, Smith had become determined to, as he put it, “make himself a colored man” –he desired to explore his inner blackness– and thus he befriended Frederick Douglass (Smith would be Douglass’s friend, that is, up to the point at which he would discover that black Americans were inherently racially inferior to white Americans and thus unworthy of consideration). He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six” fully grasped from the earliest moment that the probable result of their attempt to incite a servile insurrection of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies, in order to disrupt relations between Northern and Southern white Americans, toward the generation of a sectional civil war.

Stephen Smith

Stephen Smith, lumber dealer of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Lysander Spooner HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

The anarchist Boston attorney Lysander Spooner, who was well aware of John Brown’s plans for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, wrote to Gerrit Smith in January 1859 warning that Brown had neither the men nor the resources to succeed. After the raid he would plot the kidnapping of Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the idea being to take him at pistol point aboard a tug and hold him off the Atlantic coast, at threat of execution should Brown be executed.

George Luther Stearns

George Luther Stearns, a Boston manufacturer of lead pipe and the secretary of the Boston Emancipation League, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and Gerrit Smith of the Secret “Six,” fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in servile insurrection in order to foment a sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans.

Aaron Dwight Stevens Yes Badly Yes Captain 28 white wounded

Aaron Dwight Stevens, John Brown’s drillmaster, born in Lisbon, Connecticut on March 15, 1831, had run away from home in 1847 at the age of 16 to serve with a Massachusetts volunteer regiment in Mexico. He made himself proficient with the sword. At Taos in May 1855, he received a sentence of death for “mutiny, engaging in a drunken riot, and assaulting Major George A.H. Blake” of the 1st US Dragoons. This was commuted by President Franklin Pierce to 3 years hard labor but he escaped from Fort Leavenworth in 1856, 1st finding refuge with the Delaware tribe and then joining the Kansas Free State militia of James Lane under the name “Whipple.” He became Colonel of the 2d Kansas Militia and met Brown on August 7, 1856 at the Nebraska line when Lane’s Army of the North marched into “Bleeding Kansas”. He became a devoted follower. He was a spiritualist. At Harpers Ferry, when Brown sent this middleaged man out along with his son Watson Brown to negotiate under a flag of truce, he received four bullets and was taken alive. The never-married Stevens was of old Puritan stock, and his great- grandfather had been a captain in the Revolutionary army. Because of a relationship with Rebecca B. Spring of the Eagleswood social experiment near Perth Amboy, New Jersey, after his execution on March 16th he would be buried there alongside Albert Hazlett. According to George B. Gill, writing after his death, “Stevens — how gloriously he sang! His was the noblest soul I ever knew. Though owing to his rash, hasty way, I often found occasion to quarrel with him more so than with any of the others, and though I liked [John Henry Kagi] better than any man I ever knew, our temperaments being adapted to each other, yet I can truly say that Stevens was the most noble man that I ever knew.”

Stewart Taylor Yes Yes Private 23 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Stewart Taylor was born on October 29, 1836 at Uxbridge in Canada. He became a wagonmaker and in 1853 went to Iowa, where in 1858 he became acquainted with Captain Brown through George B. Gill. He was a spiritualist. He signed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Ontario, Canada West per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. A relative, Jacob L. Taylor of Pine Orchard, Canada West, wrote to Richard J. Hinton on April 23, 1860 that he had been “heart and soul in the anti-slavery cause. An excellent debater and very fond of studying history. He stayed at home, in Canada, for the winter of 1858-1859, and then went to Chicago, thence to Bloomington, Illinois, and thence to Harper’s [sic] Ferry. He was a very good phonographer [stenographer], rapid and accurate. He was overcome with distress when, getting out of communication with the John Brown movement, he thought for a time that he was to be left out.”

Eli Thayer No

Eli Thayer, an entrepreneur who believed in “doing well by doing good,” formed the New England Emigrant Aid Company, to purchase land in the new territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas” and encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there by providing information, cheapening transportation, and setting up saw mills and flour mills to give work and incomes to such “decent antislavery” homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior. Thayer would comment in retrospect, about the antebellum abolitionists with whom he had been affiliated, that they had constituted “a mutual admiration society possessed by an unusual malignity towards those who did not belong to it.” He would instance that there was never “any diffidence or modesty in sounding their own praises.”

Dauphin Adolphus Thompson Yes Yes Lieutenant < 30 white

Dauphin Adolphus Thompson, brother of William Thompson and a North Elba neighbor of the family of John Brown, was born April 17, 1838. He was “very quiet, with fair, thoughtful face, curly blonde hair, and baby-blue eyes.” His sister Isabella M. Thompson married Watson Brown and his elder brother Henry Thompson married Captain Brown’s daughter Ruth. The two brothers were shot dead at Harpers Ferry.

William Thompson Yes Yes Captain? < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

William Thompson was born in New Hampshire in August 1833, the son of Roswell Thompson. In Fall 1858 he married a Mary Brown who was not related to the family of John Brown. His sister Isabella M. Thompson married Watson Brown; his elder brother Henry Thompson married Captain Brown’s daughter Ruth. He had started for “Bleeding Kansas” in 1856 but upon meeting the Brown sons returned with them to North Elba. Along with his brother Dauphin Adolphus Thompson, he took part in the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and the two of them were shot dead. When Captain Brown sent him out from the engine house to negotiate under flag of truce, the mob of citizens placed him under arrest, took him to the local hotel barroom, discussed what to do, dragged him into the street, executed him by shooting him in the head, and dumped his body into the Potomac River.

Henry David Thoreau No white

When, in 1844, Waldo Emerson, acting as an agent provocateur, recommended to Frederick Douglass’s face that, modeling himself upon the leader of the successful Haitian revolution of the turn of the century, Toussaint Louverture, he fashion himself into the liberator of his people and initiate on the North American continent a servile insurrection or race war, it was Henry Thoreau who after the lecture rushed this information right down to Boston, and had a pamphlet printed up, after which there was no way to dissimulate about the provocation that had been made — and so all Emerson was able to do was pretend that Douglass hadn’t been present. (We, of course, have credited Emerson’s cover story, not because there is any corroboration for it but because ... well, he’s Mr. Emerson and wouldn’t lie to us.)

Charles Plummer Tidd Yes No No Captain 25 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Charles Plummer Tidd was born in Palermo, Maine in 1834 and had emigrated to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1856 with the party of Dr. Calvin Cutter of Worcester in search of excitement. After joining John Brown’s party at Mount Tabor, Iowa in 1857 he became one of the followers of “Shubel Morgan” who returned in 1858 to raid into Missouri. During the Winter 1857/1858 encampment of the Brown forces in Springdale, Iowa, he “ruined” a Quaker girl and the other members of the team had to sneak him away during the night. Nevertheless, the group obtained some recruits not overly impressed with the Peace Testimony of George Fox from among the residents of this town, such as the brothers Barclay Coppoc and Edwin Coppoc. He and John E. Cook were particularly warm friends. He signed, as “Charles P. Tidd,” the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Canada per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. He opposed the attack on Harpers Ferry but nevertheless took part both in the raid on the planter Washington’s home and on the federal arsenal itself, escaped, and made his way on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. He and John Brown’s son Owen Brown would find work and safety, under assumed names, on an oil well in the vicinity of Crawford County PA. He visited Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Canada and took part in the planning for the rescue of Aaron D. Stevens and Albert Hazlett while the Mason Commission of the Congress was presuming that he had been killed in the fighting at Harpers Ferry. On July 19, 1861 he was able to enlist under the name “Charles Plummer” and would become a 1st Sergeant of the 21st Massachusetts Volunteers. On February 8, 1862 he died of fever aboard the transport Northerner during the battle of Roanoke Island. (This was a battle he had particularly wished to take part in because ex-Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the nemesis of the Harpers Ferry raiders, was in command of the Confederates.) Charles Plummer Tidd’s grave is #40 in the National Cemetery in New Berne, North Carolina. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

Harriet Tubman No of color

Harriet Tubman was negotiated with by John Brown for participation in the raid on the federal arsenal. She mistrusted these men and had persistent dreams in which Brown and his sons appeared as serpents. The attack had been scheduled to occur on the 4th of July, symbolic of national birth. At the last moment she alleged she was ill, and for this reason as well as delays in the deliveries of supplies, the attack needed to be postponed for months. On the day of the actual attack at Harpers Ferry she had a premonition that it would fail.

Henry Watson No of color

Henry Watson, barber of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania involved both with John Brown and with Frederick Douglass.

etc. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1816

July 21, Sunday: Thaddeus Hyatt was born in Rahway, New Jersey to Benjamin Hyatt (1783-1862) and an unknown mother (his older brother Theodore Hyatt had been born in New Jersey a couple of years earlier).

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 21st of 7 M / Our Meeting this forenoon was well attended & divers were present whose countenances looked interesting — An Appearance In the ministry & in Supplication, judgement of which I leave. —- In the Afternoon we were Silent - After tea, took John & walked to the Beach. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1834

Asa Green (1789-1838) wrote a novel, anonymous, about the Manhattan business district of New-York, entitled THE PERILS OF PEARL STREET, INCLUDING A TASTE OF THE DANGERS OF WALL STREET, BY A LATE MERCHANT (New York: Betts and Anstice, and Peter Hill). In this novel he proclaimed an entirely spurious and groundless statistic: that 97 out of 100 new businesses fail. This spurious statistic would generate an urban legend which would make its way even into the pages of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS:

WALDEN: What has been said of the merchants, that a very large PEOPLE OF majority, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is WALDEN equally true of the farmers. With regard to the merchants, however, one of them says pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures, but merely failures to fulfil their engagements, because it is inconvenient; that is, it is the moral character that breaks down. But this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter, and suggests, beside, that probably not even the other three succeed in saving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense than they who fail honestly.

ASA GREEN

Edward Rockwell of E. & S. S. Rockwell Company in New-York devised a “Patent Vault Light” single-lens sidewalk window that could be installed in the vaulted ceiling of an under-sidewalk basement space. Two of these would be installed in the sidewalk in front of “The Exchange,” and others would be installed in the sidewalk in front of the Gazette. This design, which was a round iron plate with a single mammoth bulls-eye lens, would prove, however, to be unsafe to walk on because the glass might shatter. Rockwell’s patent vault lights. 192 Broadway. The great usefulness of the above lights, not only for vaults intended for safety of goods in case of fire, and for the deposit of coal, &c., but by giving so much light, and at the same time excluding all wet, dust and frost, they make an underground apartment (when judiciously constructed and made white) a valuable place for business. Persons wishing to introduce them in other cities would do well to apply as above.

(This design would be superseded in 1845 by the superior design of Thaddeus Hyatt, which would make him rich.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1840

At a house on Lorain Street in Oberlin, Ohio, two slave catchers from Kentucky captured two escaped slaves — a man and a woman. They attempted to leave the Oberlin area with the slaves but word of their actions had spread to the town where some residents were at a chapel meeting. The churchgoers rushed out to pursue the slavecatchers and caught them about three miles from the village. The slavecatchers appealed to the court in Elyria, Ohio but were themselves arrested on a charge of house-breaking. The runaway slaves were put into jail while the slavecatchers were released on bail. But before the slave catchers could go on trial one died. The other one was released when it turned out that the two runaway slaves, who had been in jail, had themselves escaped to freedom. (Or so we now hear. The problem is, there are any number of stories using this sort of scenario — and in all likelihood some of these stories amount merely to half-remembered variants of others.)

John Brown had removed from Pennsylvania to Ohio in 1836 but his family had done no better there. In this year he surveyed land in western Virginia belonging to Oberlin College, seemingly with some scheme to create a colony in that area for free Americans of color.

Thaddeus Hyatt et al. secured Patent No. 1,867 “Manufacture of Splints or Sticks for Friction and Other Matches.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1841

Thaddeus Hyatt et al. secured Patents No. 2,402 and 2,403 for “Improvement in the Composition of Matter for the Manufacture of Friction-Matches.”

Alexander Bryan Johnson’s THE PHILOSOPHICAL EMPEROR, A POLITICAL EXPERIMENT, OR, THE PROGRESS OF A FALSE POSITION: DEDICATED TO THE WHIGS, CONSERVATIVES, DEMOCRATS, LOCO FOCOS, INDIVIDUALLY AND COLLECTIVELY OF THE UNITED STATES (Harper). HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1845

Anton von Schrötter discovered a compound, known as red phosphorus, which was nontoxic and did not spontaneously combust. But since any sort of friction to the luciferous head could instantly set these matches ablaze, it was necessary to be extremely careful with them in carrying them around in one’s pocket. This would lead in the direction of the development of a safety match the head of which would consist of two separate chemicals, a red one containing the combustion ingredient tipped with a small amount of a white one containing the ignition ingredient: what we now refer to as “the kitchen match.”1

Thaddeus Hyatt, inventor of a type of friction match that had not rendered him wealthy and famous, secured Patent No. 4,266 for an “Illuminating Vault Cover,” an iron plate set with numerous small, tough bulls-eye lenses, protected with protruding iron knobs, a kind of “sidewalk light” that could be installed in the vaulted ceiling of an under-sidewalk basement space that would correct some problems that proprietors of under- sidewalk spaces had encountered with Edward Rockwell’s single-giant-lens design of 1834. For instance, Rockwell’s sidewalk window had proven unsafe to walk because the glass might shatter, but Hyatt’s sidewalk window was safe even if the glasses were broken out. Also, the glasses of Hyatt’s sidewalk window were protected from scratching by raised bumps on their surrounding ironwork, and were inset in bands of softer metal that protected them from shock and isolated them from expansions and contractions of the ironwork frame. Hyatt may have been inspired by Christy’s 1841 coal-plate design, that he had inspected during a visit to London, that used several intermediate-size round glass lenses. Hyatt’s invention would languish for years before Hyatt’s Patent Extension Case of 1859, that would render the Hyatt Lights profitable. When they would catch on this would be enough to make him wealthy and famous — or, at least, wealthy.

1. The red part and the white part no longer contain the same chemicals they once contained, although the general appearance has been retained because it has become traditional. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1850

By this year Thaddeus Hyatt was married to Emeline or Emmeline Winans (1815-1870), who would bear him no children.

The mechanization of agriculture began. Mechanical reapers, and later the internal combustion engine (and consequently the tractor) altered the face of the world — and the growth and increasing urbanization of the world population. Between 1860 and 1920, about 1,000,000,000 acres of new land were brought under cultivation, with another 1,000,000,000 acres coming into production during the following six decades. Improvements in shipping, refrigeration, and processing further industrialized this process. Today’s American farmer receives 4% of the price of chicken in the store and 12% of the price of a can of corn.

During this decade Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution, exploiting the popularity of the writings of Humboldt in an utterly typical and enviably wrongheaded manner, would be espousing a novel and dangerous notion: in this best of all possible worlds, rain follows the plow. All we need to do, therefore, in this best of all possible worlds, to transform the arid high grasslands of the center of the North American continent into an edenic paradise, is determinedly to turn that arid sod and till that arid soil. As in baseball’s field of dreams, if you build it they will come! “They,” in this case, would turn out to be the vast black clouds of dust and despair of the 1930s: the Dustbowl. Ecology will not be mocked. By this point fully half of the native-born Vermonters had abandoned its rocky soil for points west. Sometimes entire towns moved as groups. Herman Melville would comment after a tour during the 1850s, that “Some of these mountain townships … look like countries depopulated by plague and war. Every mile or two a house is passed untenanted.” Horace Greeley would embrace this wish-fulfillment fantasy: “Go West, Young Man!” The rolling plains of Illinois would turn out to possess singular advantages not only in terms of a more fertile soil but also in terms of a scale more appropriate to the emergence of labor-saving farm machinery. The dry plateaus of Oklahoma, the Kansas Territory, Colorado, and the Texas panhandle would prove to be another, no less rocky, disappointment. And when they did turn the land into an ecological disaster, where would be Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian to say that “he was sure sorry”; where would be the federal government to make up for its poor imperial advice by the rendering of assistance to the distressed? HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1854

Amos A. Lawrence, co-founder of the emigration company concept, has a town in the Kansas Territory named after him; after Kansas would become “Bleeding Kansas” these emigration companies would be supplying arms and ammunition to their anti-slavery settlers.

The city of Topeka was founded in the Kansas Territory by 5 antislavery activists.

Five of John Brown’s sons went to the Kansas Territory, taking with them 2 small shotguns and a revolver and staking claims 8 or 10 miles from Osawatomie.

The beginning of publication of the Leavenworth Herald, 1st newspaper in the Kansas Territory.

Thaddeus Hyatt became actively involved in the abolitionist movement after Congress passed the Kansas- Nebraska Act. The law, which mandated that the question of legalizing slavery in the Kansas Territory be settled by the territory’s voters, would spark a race between proslavery and antislavery factions to move to Kansas and tip the ballot boxes. These factions would clash in what would come to be regarded as “Bleeding Kansas.” Several state-level committees would be formed to provide aid to antislavery settlers, including the New York Kansas League of which Hyatt was president (during this year, also, he would be awarded Patent No. 11,695 for a “Vault-Light”). Hyatt and William Barnes simultaneously but separately embarked on efforts to organize counties in upstate New York to participate in packing the Kansas Territory with antislavery voters. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1855

Thaddeus Hyatt received Patent No. 12,595 for “Illuminating Vault-Covers” (this would help him pay for his antislavery activities in the Kansas Territory).

The New-York law clerk John E. Cook became a member of Charles Lenhart’s guerrilla force operated out of Lawrence in the Kansas Territory. He would make himself into an excellent shot. He would be dispatched by John Brown to Harpers Ferry more than a year before the raid to work out the details on the ground, and would secure employment in the area as a lock tender on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, as a schoolteacher, and as a bookseller. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Oliver Brown went with his father John Brown to the Kansas Territory, meeting there 4 other of Brown’s sons who had already arrived, and settled at Osawatomie. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

(Oliver would return to North Elba in October 1856, where he would marry with Martha Evelyn Brewster (Martha Brewster Brown) in 1858. She would be sent back north just before the raid on Harpers Ferry.)

A man who was converted to a life of violence by the violence of the Thomas Simms (Sims) case was the Reverend Daniel Foster, the Concord minister who had attracted notice by praying on the dock in 1851 as Simms was being extradited from Boston to Savannah, Georgia. Leaving the Concord church, Foster would become Chaplain of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1857 and would be in attendance when John Brown spoke before a committee of the House and Senate about the Kansas troubles. Almost immediately afterward Foster would quit his Chaplaincy, “convinced that our cause must receive a baptism of blood before it can be victorious,” and move to Kansas.

I expect to serve in Capt. John Brown’s company in the next Kansas war, which I hope is inevitable & near at hand. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1856

July: The USS Constellation was dispatched to protect American lives and property at Malaga during a revolution in Spain.

A force of white vigilantes defeated the Wala Walas and the Cayuses in the valley of the Grande Ronde, and the native American tribes began to sue for an end to the Yakima War. Along with well-known abolitionists such as Andrew Reeder, Gerrit Smith, and Eli Thayer, Thaddeus Hyatt organized the National Kansas Committee and was elected president of the organization. Their committee purportedly collected around $100,000 to sponsor 2,000 new settlers. Of this amount, around $10,000 was disbursed for weaponry. Instead of leading the recruited 84 men toward Lawrence where they might be in immediate hot water, he sponsored the settlement of a “Hyattville” or “Hyatt” on the South fork of Pottawatomie Creek in Anderson County. Thaddeus Hyatt and William Arny, general agent of the National Kansas Committee, would persuade the Kansas State Central Committee to allow them to change how funds from the National Committee were dispersed by the State Central Committee, redirecting the funds and resources to their settlement venture, and because of this they would come to be suspected of attempting to turn a profit on this namesake settlement. Hyatt would insist that such claims were sponsored by a “slanderer.” William Hutchinson, reporting the incident to the National Kansas Committee, primarily derogated Arny. This settlement known as “Hyattville” or “Hyatt” no longer exists, its settlers moving on to establish another settlement, on Pike’s Peak.

George Frisbie Hoar and Eli Thayer went off to a Free Kansas Convention in Buffalo, New York. “BLEEDING KANSAS” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

December 18, Thursday: The following advertisement appeared in the Farmer’s Cabinet, a newspaper serving the Amherst, New Hampshire area:

AMHERST LYCEUM! Lecture Dec 18th, by HENRY D. THOREAU, Esq., of Concord, Mass—SUBJECT, “Getting a Living.”

On that Thursday evening, in the vestry of the Congregational Church at Amherst, New Hampshire, Henry Thoreau presumably delivered his sermon “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT”, which for the lyceum circuit he customarily referred to as “Getting a Living” in order to avoid scaring people off, for the seventh and final time, for that evening he wrote in his journal:

At my lecture, the audience attended to me closely, and I was satisfied; that is all I ask or expect generally. Not one spoke to me afterward, nor needed they. I have no doubt that they liked it, in the main, though few of them would have dared say so, provided they were conscious of it. Generally, if I can only get the ears of an audience, I do not care whether they say they like my lecture or not. I think I know as well as they can tell. At any rate, it is none of my business, and it would be impertinent for me to inquire. The stupidity of most of these country towns, not to include the cities, is in its innocence infantile. Lectured in the basement (vestry) of the orthodox church, and I trust helped to undermine it.

In Lawrence in “Bleeding Kansas,” Thaddeus Hyatt and W.F.M. Arny initiated a colony for the all-white settling of Anderson County. About 80 men who had just been discharged from a Territorial militia company signed onto this project. They selected the north half of the southeast quarter, and the northeast quarter of Section 10 of Township 21, Range 19 east. Only three white families had preceded them in the western part of the county. Claims were made to plots along Cedar Creek and South Pottawatomie Creek. While in a tent camp that severe winter they would prepare timbers and built a hotel, store and blacksmith shop on the town site, which they would name Hyatt. After living out the winter in tents, they would relocate to their claims. Refer to George A. Root’s “The Free State Colony Established by Thaddeus Hyatt,” Lawrence Herald of Freedom, Nov. 22, 1856-Aug. 8, 1857.

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR DECEMBER 18th] HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1857

During this year and the following one Thaddeus Hyatt would become so interested in the possibilities of human flight that he would offer “a reward of $1,000 to any inventor able to produce an actual flying machine.”

The Lecompton Constitution was written by a pro-slave convention in the Kansas Territory. A free-state- dominated territorial legislature would be chosen in the fall elections. Emporia and Abilene were founded.

Christian Sharps finally began to manufacture the breech-loading rifle in quantity, which he had invented back in 1848.

After they would take Captain John Brown’s Sharps rifle away from him at Harpers Ferry, they would allow this little Southern boy to pose with it. — Grow up, son, and be a Christian like us: kill people, own slaves.

The National Kansas Committee would meet with John Brown early in this year and indirectly provide him with 200 of these Sharps rifles, which he would take to Harpers Ferry (but the Committee would then run out of money and largely renege on its promise of $5,000). HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Here is how Harpers Ferry was being depicted, in this year, in Edward Beyer’s ALBUM ON VIRGINIA:

January 12, Monday: The National Kansas Committee active in the Free-State cause had held its one meeting. Among the items to be delivered to settlers would be 100 tons of seeds the cost of which would be underwritten by the organization’s president, Thaddeus Hyatt. He purchased a shallow-draft steamboat, the Lightfoot.

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR JANUARY 12th] HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

February 11, Wednesday: Documentation of the international slave trade, per W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: “Slave Trade: Letter from the Secretary of State, asking an appropriation for the suppression of the slave trade, etc.” –HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 34 Cong. 3 sess. IX. No. 70.

A correspondent to the Worcester Daily Spy, probably H.G.O. Blake, wrote:

Last week I had the privilege of hearing at Fitchburg, a very remarkable lecture from Henry D. Thoreau of Concord, Mass. Mr. Thoreau will, by invitation, repeat this lecture at Brinley Hall [in Worcester] next Friday evening. His subject is ‘The Wild.’ (page 2, column 2)

Thaddeus Hyatt wrote from New-York to H.B. Hurd, secretary of the Kansas National committee, explaining that he would be in Cincinnati about March 1st. “I have purchased a steamer (the Lightfoot of Quindaro) to run on the Kansas river. She will leave Cin. March 1-10th passage $20.00 from Cin. to Quindaro, $3.00 from Quindaro to Lawrence.” “BLEEDING KANSAS”

Feb. 1l. Wednesday. The meadows, flooded by the thaw of the last half of last week and Sunday, are now frozen hard enough to bear, and it is excellent skating. Near the other swamp white oak on Shattuck’s piece I found another caterpillar on the ice. From its position I thought it possible that it had been washed from its winter quarters by the freshet, and so left on top of the ice. It was not frozen in, and may have been blown from the oak. It was of a different species from that of January 5th, about one and one tenth inches long, with but little fuzziness, black with three longitudinal buff stripes, the two lateral quite pale, and a black head; the foremost feet black, the others lighter colored. It was frozen quite stiffly, as many tested, being curled up like the other, and I did not dare to bend it hard for fear of breaking it, even after I took it out in the house. But being placed on the mantelpiece it soon became relaxed, and in fifteen minutes began to crawl.

March 11, Wednesday: Thaddeus Hyatt wrote to H.B. Hurd: “I must rush into Kansas in time to meet my Boat which started from Cincinnati Tuesday morning 10th inst....” “BLEEDING KANSAS”

March 11. I see and talk with Rice, sawing off the ends of clapboards which he has planed, to make them square, for an addition to his house. He has got a fire in his shop, and plays at house-building there. His life is poetic. He does the work himself. He combines several qualities and talents rarely combined. Though lie owns houses in the city, whose repair lie attends to, finds tenants for them, and collects the rent, he also has his Sudbury farm and bean-fields. Though he lived in a city, he would still be natural and related to primitive nature around him. Though he owned all Beacon Street, you might find that his mittens were made of the slain of a woodchuck that had ravaged his bean-field, which he had cured. I noticed a woodchuck’s skin tacked up to the inside of his shop. He said it had fatted on his beans, and William had killed [it] and expected to get another to make a pair of mittens of, one not being quite large enough. It was excellent for mittens. You could hardly wear it out. Spoke of the cuckoo, which was afraid of the birds, was easily beaten; would dive right into the middle of a poplar, then come out on to some bare twig and look round for a nest to rob of young or eggs. Had noticed a pigeon woodpecker go repeatedly in a straight line from his nest in an apple tree to a distant brook-side in a meadow, dive down there, and in a few minutes return. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

March 19, Thursday: Sir George Back was promoted to rear-admiral on the reserve list. Until the end of his life he would participate actively in the Royal Geographical Society, of which he would be a member in council, and for seven years vice-president.

Thaddeus Hyatt wrote to H.B. Hurd that the low-water steamboat Lightfoot had reached St. Louis. “BLEEDING KANSAS”

March 19. Heavy rain in the night and to-day, i.e. A.M. This, as usual, rapidly settles the ways, for, taking the frost out, the water that stood on the surface is soaked up, so that it is even drier and better walking before this heavy rain is over than it was yesterday before it began. It is April weather. I observed yesterday a dead shiner by the riverside, and to-day the first sucker.

Spring: The settlers of Hyatt, Kansas erected a sawmill, to which in the next fall a grist mill would be attached.Ellery “BLEEDING KANSAS”

Channing vacationed in Concord for at least a dozen days.

April 2, Thursday: Thaddeus Hyatt’s shallow-water steamboat Lightfoot arrived in Kansas City, Missouri. Two days later the Kansas City Enterprise, a weekly newspaper, printed the following notice: STEAMER LIGHTFOOT.—A neat little steamer with the above name arrived at out wharf on Thursday under the command of our old friend Capt. Mott Morrison. She is intended for a Kansas River Packet.... This makes the fourth boat for the Kansas River the present season.... “BLEEDING KANSAS”

April 2: Go to New Bedford. A great change in the weather. I set out apple trees yesterday, but in the night it was very cold, with snow, which is now several inches deep. On the sidewalk in Cambridge I see a toad, which apparently hopped out from under a fence last evening, frozen quite hard in a sitting posture. Carried it into Boston in my pocket, but could not thaw it into life. The other day as I came to the front of the house I caught sight of a genuine wayfaring man, an oldish countryman, with a frock and a bundle strapped to his back, who was speaking to the butcher, just then driving off in his cart. He was a gaunt man with a flashing eye, as if half crazy with travel, and was complaining, “You see it shakes me so, I would rather travel the common road.” I supposed that lie referred to the rail-road, which the butcher had recommended for shortness. I was touched with compassion on observing the butcher’s apparent indifference, as, jumping to his seat, he drove away before the traveller had finished his sentence, and the latter fell at once into the regular wayfarer’s gait, bending under his pack and holding the middle of the road with a teetering gait. On my way to New Bedford, see within a couple of rods of the railroad, in some country town, a boy's box trap set for some muskrat or mink by the side of a little pond. The lid was raised, and I could see the bait on its point. A black snake was seen yesterday in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Quaker burying-ground here.

NEW BEDFORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

April 7, Tuesday: Thaddeus Hyatt’s shallow-water steamboat Lightfoot arrived at Lawrence, Kansas. “BLEEDING KANSAS”

William Cooper Nell became the manager of Boston’s recently formed Histrionic Club.

Henry Thoreau was making a journal entry which he would later use a half a paragraph from, in one of his few alterations of the CAPE COD manuscript, in Chapter 6 (JOURNAL IX:321 ). No journal materials subsequent to this entry appear in the book, even though he would visit the cape again two months later and make many lively and appropriate observations that he might well have added (JOURNAL IX:413-55). ROSS/ADAMS COMMENTARY

April 7. Tuesday. Went to walk in the woods. When I had got half a mile or more away in the woods alone, and was sitting on a rock, was surprised to be joined by R’s large Newfoundland dog Ranger, who had smelled me out and so tracked me. Would that I could add his woodcraft to my own! He would trot along DOG before me as far as the winding wood-path allowed me to see him, and then, with the shortest possible glance over his shoulder, ascertain if I was following. At a fork in the road he would pause, look back at me, and deliberate which course I would take. At sundown I went out to gather bayberries to make tallow of. Holding a basket beneath, I rubbed them off into it between my hands, and so got about a quart, to which were added enough to make about three pints. They are interesting little gray berries clustered close about the short bare twigs, just below the last year’s growth. The berries have little prominences, like those of an orange, encased with tallow, the tallow also filling the interstices, down to the nut. They require a great deal of boiling to get out all the tallow. The outmost case soon melted off, but the most part I did not get even after many hours of boiling. The oily part rose to the top, making it look like a savory black broth, which smelled just like balm or other herb tea. I got about a quarter of a pound by weight from these say three pints of berries, and some yet remained. Boil a great while, let it cool, then skim off the tallow from the surface; melt again and strain it. What I got was more yellow than what I have seen in the shops. A small portion cooled in the form of small corns (nuggets I called them when I picked them out from amid the berries), flat hemispherical, of a very pure lemon yellow, and these needed no straining. The berries were left black and massed together by the remaining tallow. Cat-briar (Smilax) they call here “the devil’s wrapping yarn.” I see several emperor moth cocoons, with small eggs on the back, apparently of the ichneumon fly, that has destroyed the nymph.

May 30, Saturday: Thaddeus Hyatt wrote to H.B. Hurd of “a series of untoward events and misfortunes connected with my boat,” the low-water steamboat Lightfoot. During the greater part of its first and only journey on the Kanzas River it had hung up on sandbar after sandbar. “BLEEDING KANSAS”

May 30. P.M.— To chestnut oaks. I think that there are many chestnut-sided warblers this season. They are pretty tame. One sits within six feet of me, though not still. He is much painted up. Blue-stemmed goldenrod is already a foot high. I see the geranium and two-leaved Solomon’s-seal out, the last abundant. The red pyrus by the path, not yet, but probably the same elsewhere. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

The young black oak leafets are dark red or reddish, thick and downy; the scarlet oak also are somewhat reddish, thick and downy, or thin and green and little downy, like red oak, but rather more deeply cut; the red oak broad, thin, green and not downy; the white pink-red. Was it not a whip-poor-will I scared up at the base of a bush in the woods to-day, that went off with a clumsy flight? By the path near the northeast shore of Flint’s Pond, just before reaching the wall by the brook, I see what I take to be an uncommonly large Uvularia sessilifolia flower, but, looking again, am surprised to find it the Uvularia perfoliata, which I have not found hereabouts before. It is a taller and much more erect plant than the other, with a larger flower, methinks. It is considerably past its prime and probably began with the other. Chestnut oak not yet in bloom, though the black and scarlet are well out in ordinary places. Its young leaves have a reddish-brown tinge. All the large trees are cut down. The white oak is not out. It is remarkable that many beach and chestnut oak leaves, which so recently expanded, have already attained their full size! How they launch themselves forth to the light! How suddenly Nature spreads her umbrellas! How little delay in expanding leaves! They seem to expand before our eyes, like the wings of moths just fallen from the cocoon. Buttercups thickly spot the churchyard. Perhaps I could write meditations under a rock in a shower. When first I had sheltered myself under the rock, I began at once to look out on the pond with new eyes, as from my house. I was at Lee’s Cliff as I had never been there before, had taken up my residence there, as it were. Ordinarily we make haste away from all opportunities to be where we have instinctively endeavored to get. When the storm was over where I was, and only a few thin drops were falling around me, I plainly saw the rear of the rain withdrawing over the Lincoln woods south of the pond, and, above all, heard the grand rushing sound made by the rain falling on the freshly green forest, a very different sound when thus heard at a distance from what it is when we are in the midst of it. In the latter case we are soothed by a gentle pattering and do not suspect the noise which a rain-storm makes. This Cliff thus became my house. I inhabited it. When, at length, it cleared up, it was unexpectedly early and light, and even the sun came out and shone warm on my back as I went home. Large puddles occupied the cart-paths and rose above the grass in the fields. In the midst of the shower, though it was not raining very hard, a black and white creeper came and inspected the limbs of a tree before my rock, in his usual zigzag, prying way, head downward often, and when it thundered loudest, heeded it not. Birds appear to be but little incommoded by the rain. Yet they do not often sing in it. The blue sky is never more celestial to our eyes than when it is first seen here and there between the clouds at the end of a storm,—a sign of speedy fair weather. I saw clear blue patches for twenty minutes or more in the southwest before I could leave my covert, for still I saw successive fine showers falling between me and the thick glaucous white pine beneath. I think that such a projection as this, or a cave, is the only effectual protection that nature affords us against the storm. I sang “Tom Bowling” there in the midst of the rain, and the dampness seemed to be favorable to my voice. There was a slight rainbow on my way home. Met Conant riding home, who had been caught in town and detained, though he had an umbrella. Already a spider or other insect had drawn together the just expanded leaves of a hickory before my door with its web within them, making a close tent. This twig extended under my rocky roof and was quite dry. Probably a portion of the Cliff, being undermined by rain, had anciently fallen out and left this rocky roof above.

May 30. P.M.— To chestnut oaks. I think that there are many chestnut-sided warblers this season. They are pretty tame. One sits within six feet of me, though not still. He is much painted up. Blue-stemmed goldenrod is already a foot high. I see the geranium and two-leaved Solomon’s-seal out, the last abundant. The red pyrus by the path, not yet, but probably the same elsewhere. The young black oak leafets are dark red or reddish, thick and downy; the scarlet oak also are somewhat reddish, thick and downy, or thin and green and little downy, like red oak, but rather more deeply cut; the red oak broad, thin, green and not downy; the white pink-red. Was it not a whip-poor-will I scared up at the base of a bush in the woods to-day, that went off with a clumsy flight? By the path near the northeast shore of Flint’s Pond, just before reaching the wall by the brook, I see what I take to be an uncommonly large Uvularia sessilifolia flower, but, looking again, am surprised to find it the Uvularia perfoliata, which I have not found hereabouts before. It is a taller and much more erect plant than the other, with a larger flower, methinks. It is considerably past its prime and probably began with the other. Chestnut oak not yet in bloom, though the black and scarlet are well out in ordinary places. Its young leaves have a reddish-brown tinge. All the large trees are cut down. The white oak is not out. It is remarkable that many beach and chestnut oak leaves, which so recently expanded, have already attained HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

their full size! How they launch themselves forth to the light! How suddenly Nature spreads her umbrellas! How little delay in expanding leaves! They seem to expand before our eyes, like the wings of moths just fallen from the cocoon. Buttercups thickly spot the churchyard. Perhaps I could write meditations under a rock in a shower. When first I had sheltered myself under the rock, I began at once to look out on the pond with new eyes, as from my house. I was at Lee’s Cliff as I had never been there before, had taken up my residence there, as it were. Ordinarily we make haste away from all opportunities to be where we have instinctively endeavored to get. When the storm was over where I was, and only a few thin drops were falling around me, I plainly saw the rear of the rain withdrawing over the Lincoln woods south of the pond, and, above all, heard the grand rushing sound made by the rain falling on the freshly green forest, a very different sound when thus heard at a distance from what it is when we are in the midst of it. In the latter case we are soothed by a gentle pattering and do not suspect the noise which a rain-storm makes. This Cliff thus became my house. I inhabited it. When, at length, it cleared up, it was unexpectedly early and light, and even the sun came out and shone warm on my back as I went home. Large puddles occupied the cart-paths and rose above the grass in the fields. In the midst of the shower, though it was not raining very hard, a black and white creeper [Black-and-white Warbler Mniotilta varia] came and inspected the limbs of a tree before my rock, in his usual zigzag, prying way, head downward often, and when it thundered loudest, heeded it not. Birds appear to be but little incommoded by the rain. Yet they do not often sing in it. The blue sky is never more celestial to our eyes than when it is first seen here and there between the clouds at the end of a storm,—a sign of speedy fair weather. I saw clear blue patches for twenty minutes or more in the southwest before I could leave my covert, for still I saw successive fine showers falling between me and the thick glaucous white pine beneath. I think that such a projection as this, or a cave, is the only effectual protection that nature affords us against the storm. I sang “Tom Bowling” there in the midst of the rain, and the dampness seemed to be favorable to my voice. There was a slight rainbow on my way home. Met Conant riding home, who had been caught in town and detained, though he had an umbrella. Already a spider or other insect had drawn together the just expanded leaves of a hickory before my door with its web within them, making a close tent. This twig extended under my rocky roof and was quite dry. Probably a portion of the Cliff, being undermined by rain, had anciently fallen out and left this rocky roof above.

This mention of a “pumpkin pine,” above, requires some explanation: “Men derive very various nutriment from the same nature, their common habitat, like plants. Some derive, as it were directly from the soil, a brawny body, and their cheeks bulge out like pumpkin sweetings. They seem more thoroughly naturalized here, and the elements are kinder to them. They have more of the wind and rain and meadow muck in their composition. They flourish in the swampy soil like vegetables and do not fear toothache or neuralgia. Some grow like a pumpkin pine, at least. They fish and hunt and get the meadow-hay. Compared with ordinary men, they grow like a Rohan potato beside a Lady’s-Finger. Their system has great power of assimilation. The soil is native to them. As different elements go to the composition of two human bodies as the thoughts that occupy their brains are different. How much more readily one nature assimilates to beef and potatoes and makes itself a brawny body of them, than another.” And in 1853 Henry Thoreau had written in his journal something that would get into his WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS manuscript, “Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we walk and whittle them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine.” So — what the halibut is a pumpkin pine? Explanation follows: The Mystery of the Pumpkin Pine, by Ed Nizalowski On September 7, 1997, an article written by Rick Marsi entitled “The Great Pumpkin Mystery” appeared in the Press and Sun-Bulletin. Rick had visited with Harry Hagelberg of Windsor NY, whose entire home was made of wood which had been referred to as “pumpkin pine.” The wood in question is a type of white pine which has an especially bright and unusual coloring. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Hagelberg first became aware of this in 1955 while in the process of remodeling his home. He contacted a variety of foresters for information. They ventured a theory that the boards had come from virgin pine which might be several hundred years old. When these trees were able to grow for this length of time, the oxidation of sugars inside the tree caused the heartwood to take on this “dark pumpkin-colored patina.” Hagelberg’s home had been built prior to the Civil War and was very likely built from the trees of the primeval forest. It was also surmised that the home might have come from one single tree. I found this article very intriguing and fascinating, but I could not buy into the theory that the pumpkin pine was simply a characteristic of old growth. I felt that there was some other factor or factors which came into play. Learning about the character and nature of the primeval forest that existed in the Southern Tier has become another one of my quests, but it has been difficult to find much specific information. Since I don’t know of any logging much earlier than the 1790’s, this entire area was one large primeval forest. In one the histories written about Tioga County back in the 1880’s, it mentions that there were instances of white pine in the Town of Candor that were 5’ in diameter and 175’ high. White pine of this type could probably be found throughout the Southern Tier. In the book TIMBER FRAME CONSTRUCTION by Jack Sobon and Roger Schroeder, they state that the dense heartwood of old growth white pine became reddish brown, but that would normally not apply to the entire log. They also gave the dimensions used for masts back in the colonial period: a 100 footer, squared to 3X3 at the butt and 2 feet square at the top and a 120 footer, 4 feet square at the butt and 30 inches at the top. The original masts on a ship like the USS Constitution were single trees, but it was discovered that laminating the masts made them withstand greater cannon fire. A letter by John Pochis which appeared in the Press and Sun-Bulletin on September 15 provided further information. According to John, Norm Abram of the PBS series NEW YANKEE WORKSHOP referred to pumpkin pine as the heartwood of mature eastern white pine trees. It was a favorite of colonial furniture makers because of its color and uniform consistency. Many described the workability of the wood like cutting into a pumpkin. Pochis also mentioned that there were many accounts of pumpkin pine exceeding 200’ in height and 8’ in diameter. Although much of the old growth was gone by the period that Mr. Hagelberg’s house was being built (1840-1850), some stands still existed. However, it is not likely that you would build your entire house from a single tree, regardless of the size. You might obtain most of your boards from a single tree, but for the frame you would select specimens that would be more in the range of 2 feet in diameter and perhaps 100 feet tall. This kind of tree is much easier to hand hew. An internet search pulled up 58 references to pumpkin pine. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Almost all of them were in New England: country inns, bed and breakfasts and real estate agencies. It also included a reference from WALDEN by Henry David Thoreau. A fellow in Branford, Connecticut, will make you a pumpkin pine table from 5’ to 9’ long ranging in price from $1,095 to $1,695. An Aged Woods outlet in York, Pennsylvania sells “antique distressed” white pine which has a wine stain color. I spoke with Ellis Bradley who runs a shop in Connecticut and he said that the term was coined by Pennsylvania woodcrafters and then was subsequently adopted by New Englanders. He said that the old growth white pine would have a much greater percentage of heartwood. Not only would the initial color be different, but this would change once it had contact with the air and would change with subsequent working of the wood. I contacted Mr. Hagelberg by phone and was able to pay him a visit on November 17th. Hagelberg, it turns out, was of Finnish origin and had moved to Windsor from Brooklyn in the early 1950’s. He gave me a tour of the house which exhibited the typical construction of homes from the early to mid-1800s. I had a chance to view the flattened logs which served as floor joists in the cellar and the 45’ plates which ran the full length of the attic. His pumpkin pine boards shown in their brilliance in his living room although I would describe their color as more of a light brown with a yellowish-golden cast which seems to hover just over the surface. It was a remarkable tour given by a remarkable man. In spite of being born in 1901, he was still in pursuit of understanding more about this remarkable wood which had sheltered him and his family for so many years. He appreciated my interest, my research and my visit. In my estimation the pumpkin pine is still a mystery. It is more wide spread than I had imagined, but it still seems to be unique. If it were simply a function of old growth, primeval forest, then it should be fairly common because most everything built prior to the Civil War came from an old growth forest that stretched from Maine to Michigan. I speculate that it might be something in the soil which is taken up by the pine or perhaps large pine stands eventually change something in the soil after tons and tons of needles, limbs and logs have dropped over the years. One point that helps support this theory is that the original article of September 7th mentioned that a 10’ trunk of white pine was near Hagelberg’s home. The shavings indicate that it is pumpkin pine, but this is not likely a tree from 150 years ago. This stump cannot be that old since white pine stumps do not last that long. And if the frame (plates, posts and purlins) were from moderately sized trees, these might still be quite old but certainly not ancient and the percentage of heartwood would not be that great. Be that as it may, the mystery and wonder of the pumpkin pine is one of the historical oddities that help keep the neurons of your mind from lapsing into complacency. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

I will end this pumpkin pine missive with Thoreau’s reference which comes from the chapter “Winter Visitors.” He mentions one particular visitor with whom Thoreau spent many an evening: “A blue-robed man, whose fittest roof is the overarching sky which reflects his serenity.” In a wonderful analogy combining philosophy, intellect and nature, Thoreau pays homage to the white pine which he loved so much: “Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

June: In the new town of Hyatt, Kansas, a post-office was established. W.F.M. Arny would serve as postmaster.In a “BLEEDING KANSAS”

New-York newspaper this newly formed political party, the “Black Republicans,” was depicted as an opera singer effusing his admiration for two repulsively sturdy female figures — one a Negro woman, the other an Irish woman:

Henry Thoreau wrote two letters that have not been preserved (one of them presumably to John Langdon Sibley). HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Summer: Ottilie Assing was living with the Douglasses in Rochester, New York. For the following period of 22 years she would shuttle back and forth from summers with Frederick Douglass to winters in her rooms at Hoboken, New Jersey — rooms which Frederick frequently would be visiting.

In the new town of Hyatt, Kansas, B.F. Allen opened a store. That summer there was much sickness and a number of deaths. By this point the National Kansas Committee of Thaddeus Hyatt had dispersed its supplies and depleted its funds, and so the activities of his organization would begin to wind down. “BLEEDING KANSAS” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1858

In the new town of Hyattville Hyatt in the Kansas Territory, a school was established with Miss Josephine Ramsey as the teacher.

Thaddeus Hyatt was issued Patent No. 21,050 for “Illuminating-Glass for Vault-Covers.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1859

The Kansas Territory’s 4th constitutional convention convened at Wyandotte, and the Wyandotte Constitution was written. The new town of Hyatt was virtually abandoned at this point, with many of its settlers moving on to Pikes Peak — nothing now remains.

“BLEEDING KANSAS” The firebrand Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson headed west, to aid in the Kansas free-state movement. There he would become involved again with John Brown. In this year the following revealing comment HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

appeared in a Kansas newspaper:

We believe it to our interest to discourage the settlement of free negroes in Kansas. The two races never have, and never can associate together on terms of equality. But at the same time, if we have got to have them here, we would have them educated; we are opposed to ignorance in every shape.

— Samuel Newitt Wood, in the Kansas Press, 1859, as quoted on page 418 of William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth (a deep map) [Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1991].

January 11, Tuesday: The New-York Times ran an advertisement: HYATT’S PATENT LIGHTS

A CARD HAVING BEEN ISSUED TO THE PUBLIC By parties who frankly confess that they do not pay me for my invention, I avail myself of the opportunity to advertise the names of those who do. The following persons, only, are licensed under my patents in this City:

George R. Jackson & Co. J. B. & W. W. Cornell & Co. S. B. Althause & Co. Ingalls & Case. Theodore Hyatt.

The law is that a person who purchases or uses a patented article is equally liable for infringement with the maker of it. The “makers” having fairly notified “users” of their intention not to pay, the “users” have only themselves to blame if I collect my tariff of them—as I shall certainly do.

Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, perhaps in the initial volume of COLLECTIONS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY (Boston: Munroe & Francis, 1806), the Reverend Francis Higginson’s NEW-ENGLANDS PLANTATION. OR, A SHORT AND TRVE DESCRIPTION OF THE COMMODITIES AND DISCOMMODITIES OF THAT COUNTREY (1631), a volume from which he would copy into his Indian Notebook #12: A sup of New England’s air is better than a whole draft of old England’s ale. NEW--ENGLANDS PLANTATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Thoreau also checked out Captain Samuel de Champlain’s DES SAVVAGES OV VOYAGE DE SAMVEL CHAMPLAIN, DE BROVAGE, FAIT EN LA FRANCE NOUVELLE, L’AN MIL SIX CENTS TROIS: CONTENANT LES MOEURS, FA Ç ON DE VIVRE, GUERRES ET HABITATIONS DES SAUVAGES DU CANADA. DE LA DÉCOUVERTE DE PLUS DE 450 LIEUES DANS LE PAY S DES SAUVAGES. QUELS PEUPLES Y HABITENT; DES ANIMAUX QUI S’Y TROUVENT: DES RIVIÈRES, LACS, ISLES ET TERRES, ET QUELS ARBRES ET FRUITS ELLES PRODUISENT. DE LA CÔTE D’ACADIE, DES TERRES QUE L’ON Y A DÉCOUVERTES, ET DE PLUSIEURS MINES QUI Y SONT, SELON LE RAPPORT DES SAUVAGES (1603, 1604).

SAMVEL CHAMPLAIN

(He would place his notes on this reading in his Indian Notebook #12.)

“There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away” — Emily Dickinson HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

January 11: At 6 A.M. –22 and how much more I know not, ours having gone into the bulb; but that is said to be the lowest. Going to Boston to-day, I find that the cracking of the ground last night is the subject of conversation in the cars, and that it was quite general. I see many cracks in Cambridge and Concord. It would appear then that the ground cracks on the advent of very severe cold weather. I had not heard it before, this winter. It was so when I went to Amherst a winter or two ago. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1860

Barclay Coppoc, who had escaped from the raid on Harpers Ferry through Pennsylvania and Ohio into Canada, had at this point ventured back into Iowa with Virginia agents in close pursuit — and had eluded them and gone on to “Bleeding Kansas”.

At this point, in Kansas, he was helping to run off some Missouri slaves, and nearly lost his life. (On July 24, 1861 he would become a 1st Lieutenant in Colonel Montgomery’s regiment, the 3d Kansas Infantry. Soon he would be killed by the fall of a train into the Platte river from a trestle 40 feet high, the supports of which had been burned away by Confederates.)

Thaddeus Hyatt came under suspicion after John Brown’s unsuccessful raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia because he had supported Brown’s ideology of militant abolitionism and had provided Brown with financial support, and because Brown was known to have frequented the Hyatt home in New-York. In the course of this year he would submit a 23-page argument that the federal Senate investigative committee lacked subpoena power to compel his testimony. He would decorate his cell in order to entertain visitors in style. The committee would only be able to hold him, however, for about 3 months before it would dissolve. Eventually the federal Supreme Court would affirm the Congress’s right to summon witnesses but long before that Hyatt would have been cut loose. When released he would telegraph to New-York “Have been kicked out. Will be home to-morrow.” The 1860 US Census, under “Products of Industry,” records “Thaddeus Hyatt, Patent Vault Lights. Real capital worth $1,000, raw materials worth $4,900 (20,000 pounds of glass @ $2,400 and other articles @ $2,500). Employees average 30 hands, $900 average monthly wages. Previous year’s production 7,000 feet of vault lights valued at $40,000.”

This year marked the culmination of a devastating drought in Kansas, and Hyatt would travel there to meet with starving settlers and direct his newly formed Kansas Relief Committee’s aid. Hyatt would become outraged by the inattention of national newspapers and the federal government consumed by the prospect of civil war. In a 70-page pamphlet he would petition outgoing President James Buchanan JAMES BUCHANAN to provide enough federal aid to halt foreclosures on homesteads. The President would veto the Homestead Act of 1860, which might have delayed such environmental-disaster foreclosures. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

January 24, Tuesday: A Senate committee tasked with probing the causes of the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia discovered that Hyatt was mentioned several times in John Brown’s personal papers and subpoenaed him to testify (Hyatt would equivocate for a month as to whether or not he would agree to testify).

The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson spoke in Concord in opposition to Henry Thoreau’s “prejudice for Adamhood.”

After the lecture, the Reverend Higginson and Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott and Anna Maria Whiting, walked home with Waldo Emerson to continue the discussion. Higginson’s emphasis was on the making of a contrast between a state of barbarism and a state of civilization, but Thoreau’s was on the use of the figure of the Indian to provide needed continuity between the human of civilization and the idea of nature. It was disjunctors vs conjunctors that night. Bronson Alcott’s record of the conversation amounts to the following: “My wife accompanies me to the Lyceum this evening, and we hear Higginson lecture on Barbarism and Civilization. He defends civilization against Thoreau’s prejudice for Adamhood, and celebrates its advantages — of health chiefly, among the rest. After the lecture Thoreau and I go to Emerson’s and talk further on it. Anna Whiting is there. I ask if civilization is not the ascendency of sentiment over brute force, the sway of ideas over animalism, of mind over matter. The more animated the brain, the higher is the man or creature on the scale of intelligence. The barbarian has no society; this begins in sympathy, the perception and sentiment of personality HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

binding the general in one. Thoreau defends the Indian from the doctrine of being lost or exterminated, and thinks he holds a place between civilized man and nature, and must hold it. I say that he goes along with the woods and the beasts, who retreat before and are superseded by man and the planting of orchards and gardens. The savage succumbs to the superiority of the white man. No civilized man as yet, nor refined nations, for all are brute largely still. Man’s victory over nature and himself is to overcome! the brute beast in him.”

Elizabeth Buffum Chace wrote in a letter that “Last night, Wendell Phillips lectured at Lonsdale, & he came here, and we carried him up, and then he returned with us, and spent the night. We had a nice time. He told us about his visit to North Elba, when he went with the body of John Brown; relating many little incidents which were not published in the papers.”

January 24: 2 P.M.— To Tarbell, river, via railroad. Thermometer 46. Sky thinly overcast, growing thicker at last as if it would rain. Wind northwest. See a large flock of lesser redpolls, eating the seeds of the birch (and perhaps alder [Vide the 29th]) in Dennis Swamp by railroad. They are distinct enough from the goldfinch, their note more shelly and general as they fly, and they are whiter, without the black wings, beside that some have the crimson head or head and breast. They alight on the birches, then swarm on the snow beneath, busily picking up the seed in the copse. The Assabet is open above Derby’s Bridge as far as I go or see, probably to the factory, and I know not how far below Derby’s. It opens up here sooner than below the Assabet Bath to its mouth. The blue vervain stands stiffly and abundant in one place, with much rather large brown seed in it. It is in good HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

condition. Scare a shrike from an apple tree. He flies low over the meadow, somewhat like a woodpecker, and alights near the top twig of another apple tree. See a hawk sail over meadow and woods; not a hen-hawk; possibly a marsh hawk. A grasshopper on the snow. The droppings of a skunk left on a rock, perhaps at the beginning of winter, were full of grasshoppers’ legs. As I stand at the south end of J.P.B.’s moraine, I watch six tree sparrows, which come from the wood and alight and feed on the ground, which is there bare. They are only two or three rods from me, and are incessantly picking and eating an abundance of the fine grass (short-cropped pasture grass) on that knoll, as a hen or goose does. I see the stubble an inch or two long in their bills, and how they stuff it down. Perhaps they select chiefly the green parts. So they vary their fare and there is no danger of their starving. These six hopped round for five minutes over a space a rod square before I put them to flight, and then I noticed, in a space only some four feet square in that rod, at least eighteen droppings (white at one end, the rest more slate-colored). So wonderfully active are they in their movements, both external and internal. They do not suffer for want of a good digestion, surely. NO doubt they eat some earth or gravel too. So do partridges eat a great deal. These birds, though they have bright brown and huff backs, hop about amid the little inequalities of the pasture almost unnoticed, such is their color and so humble are they. Solomon thus describes the return of Spring (Song of Solomon, ii, 10-12):— “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. “For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; “The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.”

February:In a course of lectures on the “Social Destiny of Man” delivered at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, Dr. Albert T. Bledsoe, professor of mathematics at the University of Virginia and a published proslavery ideologue, critiqued the excessive individualism of abolitionists as constituting a threat to the Union and projected that secession might be expected as the result of their efforts.

At about this time John Brown, Jr., James Redpath, Thaddeus Hyatt, and Lewis Hayden were being summoned before Senator James Mason’s special investigatory committee of the US Senate to be interrogated about the details of the Harpers Ferry conspiracy, and Brown, Jr., in hiding in Ohio, was refusing to respond. When the committee was made aware that they had summoned a person of color to incriminate himself before them, they backtracked and rescinded their warrant on Hayden,2 and warrants were made out only in the names of Brown, Jr., Redpath, and Hyatt. Of these, only Hyatt would actually come before the committee in chains, and he, upon refusing to testify, would be remanded to the District of Columbia’s prison.

John C. Rutherfoord, a legislator from Virginia, ventured to mention the explicit linkage which was being made between the Secret “Six” supporters of Northern white abolitionists such as John Brown and the supporters of Southern white abolitionist racists such as Hinton Rowan Helper, by referring to them in a pot category “admirers of Brown and endorsers of Helper.” The author of the incendiary THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT, which offered a commonality of interest between the poor white man of the North and the poor white man of the South against the interests of the rich white man of the South with his substantial investment in his African chattels, was perhaps the most dangerous man, from their point of view, in our nation — more dangerous by far than any mere deluded idealist such as Brown could ever hope to become.

Helper had, of course, fled his native South to avoid assassination by indignant rich white men, seeking the shelter afforded by New-York.

2. This would count as another of the many evidences that the business of the committee was the suppression of information as to the nature of the conspiracy, rather than any public disclosure of its real extent or purpose. Had they been intent on finding out anything, when they discovered that Hayden was a black man they would have had him tortured to death! HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Henry Thoreau’s “A Plea for Captain John Brown” and “The Martyrdom of John Brown” were published in James Redpath, ed., ECHOES OF HARPER’S FERRY. Clearly, Henry was attempting to find some way to spin the treason situation by reconstructing Captain Brown as a sort of hero of civil disobedience along the lines of Sir Thomas More or Friend Mary Dyer: HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

As a person who reprocesses Thoreau materials, and as a Quaker adherent of the Peace Testimony, I am frequently asked how it is that I am able to pardon Henry for his defense of Brown. I've needed to give that issue long and hard thought, because I really do think of people such as Captain Brown, and Lord Protector Cromwell, as having been Al-Queda types, which is to say, pure and simple, that they had been terrorists. And nevertheless I really do look up to Henry David Thoreau, and admire his attitudes as well as his work product.

The answer I have found that satisfies me, lies in a careful consideration of the situation in which the white abolitionists found themselves after the raid on the federal arsenal. Proslavery Americans were of course in a fury, and were in the process of taking their vengeance upon the survivors of the action. It was a moment in which the entire American antislavery movement was at risk of being generally considered to be in disgrace – is this, this, what “being antislavery” amounts to? –Are these people willing to risk servile insurrection, and butchery? –Is an abolitionist the same as a fool? –Is an abolitionist the same as a terrorist? That 1859 situation cried out for spin control, which was, I suggest, what Thoreau, in his “A Plea for Captain Brown,” attempted to provide. His was a salvage operation, but it was not an attempt to salvage terrorism but an attempt to salvage an upright cause: it was a continuation of the righteous attempt to bring the peculiar institution of race slavery in the United States of America to its quietus.

After Captain John Brown had gone off on this raid of his, it hadn’t been a perfect situation — and, in an imperfect situation, none of the alternative attitudes which a concerned individual can embrace are going to be perfect ones. However, the most imperfect attitude of all would have been an attitude of surrender to the righteousness of proslavery — surrender to the righteousness of proslavery was the one thing that the abolitionists simply could not and would not and should not commit — and that was the condition under which our Henry stepped to the fore.

ONE COULD BE ELSEWHERE, AS ELSEWHERE DOES EXIST. ONE CANNOT BE ELSEWHEN SINCE ELSEWHEN DOES NOT. (TO THE WILLING MANY THINGS CAN BE EXPLAINED, THAT FOR THE UNWILLING WILL REMAIN FOREVER MYSTERIOUS.)

Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

March 6, Tuesday: Senator James Mason, chairman of the special Harpers Ferry / Secret “Six” committee, lost patience and had Thaddeus Hyatt arrested by the Senate Sergeant at Arms and brought before the body of the Senate. The Senate demanded to know why Hyatt had ignored the subpoena and whether Hyatt would now submit to the special committee.

Presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln spoke on slavery in New Haven, Connecticut. In the course of this speech, always eager to display his humble roots to the American voters, the tall candidate posed a rhetorical question “What is the true condition of the laborer?” which enabled him to indulge in this penchant: “When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor for his whole life.” Maybe he was merely someone else’s hired laborer “this year” but he could look forward to being his own boss “the next” and, eventually, due to our remarkable system of initiative, obtain persons of lesser initiative “to work for him.” This pyramid scheme the goal of which is alienating oneself from labor he presented as “the true system” for the generation of wealth. For, whether we will or not, the question of Slavery is the question, the all absorbing topic of the day. It is true that all of us - and by that I mean, not the Republican party alone, but the whole American people, here and elsewhere - all of us wish this question settled - wish it out of the way. It stands in the way, and prevents the adjustment, and the giving of necessary attention to other questions of national house-keeping. The people of the whole nation agree that this question ought to be settled, and yet it is not settled. And the reason is that they are not yet agreed how it shall be settled. All wish it done, but some wish one way and some another, and some a third, or fourth, or fifth; different bodies are pulling in different directions, and none of them having a decided majority, are able to accomplish the common object.... If Slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and Constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality - its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension - its enlargement. All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought Slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this?

March 6. 3 P. M. 44°. Fair and springlike, i. e. rather still for March, with some raw wind. Pleasant in sun. Going by Messer’s, I hear the well-known note and see a flock of F. hyemalis flitting in a lively manner about trees, weeds, walls, and ground, by the roadside, showing their two white tail-feathers. They are more fearless than the song sparrow. These attract notice by their numbers and incessant twittering in a social manner. The linarias have been the most numerous birds the past winter. Mr. Stacy tells me that the flies buzzed about him as he was splitting wood in his yard to-day. I can scarcely see a heel of a snow-drift from my window. Jonas Melvin says he saw hundreds of “speckled” turtles out on the banks to-day in a voyage to Billerica for musquash. Also saw gulls. Sheldrakes and black ducks are the only ones he has seen this year. They are fishing on Flint’s Pond to-day, but find it hard to get on and off. C. hears the nuthatch. Jonas Melvin says that he shot a sheldrake in the river late last December. A still and mild moonlight night and people walking about the streets. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

March 9, Friday: Thaddeus Hyatt submitted a 20-page document in which his lawyers contended that the Senate investigation constituted a judicial trial; therefore, the legislative body had overstepped its powers under the federal Constitution, as it only had judicial power in the cases of evaluating the qualifications of its members, expelling Senators, and conducting impeachment trials. The document argued that “to compel witnesses to attend before a committee to give information in regard to proposed legislation, is not a power given by the Constitution.” The New-York Times reported that due to its sheer length (it needed to be read aloud on the Senate floor) a couple of Senate clerks had become exhausted. Anyway, most of the Senators made themselves scarce during this required oral reading. Then the Senate voted to confine Hyatt to the Washington DC jail until he agreed to testify. The prisoner would decline to petition the Supreme Court for habeas corpus.

March 9. Snows this forenoon, whitening the ground again.

2 and 3 P. M.—Thermometer 41°. I have seen three or four pieces of coral in the fields of Concord, and Mr. Pratt has found three or four on his farm. How shall they be accounted for? Who brought them here? and when? These barns shelter more beasts than oxen and horses. If you stand awhile in one of them now, especially where grain is piled, you will hear ever and anon a rustling in it made by the mice, which take the barn to be their home, as much as the house is yours. As I recall it, February began cold, with some dry and fine driving snow, making those shell-shaped drifts behind walls, and some days after were some wild but low drifts on the meadow ice. I walked admiring the winter sky and clouds. After the first week, methinks, it was much milder, and I noticed that some sounds, like the tinkling of railroad rails, etc., were springlike. Indeed, the rest of the month was earine, river breaking up a part and closing again, and but little snow. About 8th and 12th, the beauty of the ice on the meadows, partly or slightly rotted, was noticeable, with the curious figures in it, and, in the coolest evenings, the green ice and rosy isles of flat drifts. About the 9th, noticed the very black water of some open reaches, in a high wind and cold. About the middle of the month was a moist, lodging snow, and the 18th a fine granular one, making about a foot,—the last. Then sudden warm weather and rain come and dissolve it all at once, and the ruts, flowing with melted snow, shone in the sun, and the little sleighing was all gone. And from the 25th to 27th the river generally broke up. March began warm, and I admired the ripples made by the gusts on the dark-blue meadow flood, and the light- tawny color of the earth, and was on the alert for several days to hear the first birds. For a few days past it has been generally colder and rawer, and the ground has been whitened with snow two or three times, but it has all been windy. You incline to walk now along the south side of hills which will shelter you from the blustering northwest and north winds. The sidewalks are wet in the morning from the frost coming out. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

June 2, Saturday: Thaddeus Hyatt sent a note from the Washington DC lockup:

June 2. Saturday. The past has been Anniversary Week in Boston, and there have been several rainy or cloudy days, as the 30th, afternoon and especially night, and 31st, and night of June 1st. Cleared up at noon to-day. This Anniversary Week is said to be commonly rainy.

P.M.— To river behind Hubbard’s Grove. Red clover first seen. A boy brought me yesterday a nest with two Maryland yellow-throats’ eggs and two cowbirds’ eggs in it, and said that they were all found together. Saw a pigeon yesterday; a turtle dove to-day. You see now, in suitable shallow and warm places where there is a sandy bottom, the nests of the bream begun,—circular hollows recently excavated, weeds, confervæ, and other rubbish neatly removed, and many whitish root-fibres of weeds left bare and exposed. There is a lively and washing northwest wind after the rain, it having cleared up at noon. The waves are breaking on this shore with such a swash that sometimes I cannot distinguish the bream poised over her nest within ten feet of me. The air is cleansed and clear, and therefore the waves, as I look toward the sun, sparkle with so bright and white a light,—so peculiarly fresh and bright. The impurities have all come down out of the air. The yellow Bethlehem-star is pretty common now. The poison-dogwood is so late, and has such a proportion of thick gray stems, that at a little distance they look like dead trees amid the green birches and alders.

8 P.M.— Up Assabet. The river is four inches above summer level. A cool evening. A cold, white twilight sky after the air has been cleared by rain, and now the trees are seen very HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

distinctly against it,—not yet heavy masses of verdure, but a light openwork, the leaves being few and small yet, as regularly open as a sieve. Cool as it is, the air is full of the ringing of toads, peeping of hylodes, and purring of (probably) Rana palustris. The last is especially like the snoring of the river. In the morning, when the light is similar, you will not hear a peeper, I think, and scarcely a toad. Bats go over, and a kingbird, very late. Mosquitoes are pretty common. Ever and anon we hear the stake-driver from a distance. There is more distinct sound from animals than by day, and an occasional bullfrog’s trump is heard. Turning the island, I hear a very faint and slight screwing or working sound once, and suspect a screech owl, which I after see on an oak. I soon hear its mournful scream, probably to its mate, not loud now, but, though within twenty or thirty rods, sounding a mile off. I hear it louder from my bed in the night. Water-bugs dimple the surface now quite across the river, in the moonlight, for it is a full moon. The evergreens are very dark and heavy. Hear the sound of Barrett’s sawmill, at first like a drum, then like a train of cars. The water has been raised a little by the rain after the long drought, and so he [is] obliged to saw by night, in order to finish his jobs before the sun steals it from him again.

June 15, Friday: At the end of 3 months of dicey attempts to interrogate key witnesses behind John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, the special Senate investigative committee dissolved and Thaddeus Hyatt was released from his jail cell in the Old Capitol Prison of Washington DC.

Ellery Channing wrote Mrs. Benjamin Marston Watson (Mary Russell Watson) about Henry Thoreau, condescendingly echoing a typical Emerson condescension (With friends like this had Thoreau any need of enemies?): H.T. has been reading Aristotle and found that it is good, a fact which Mr. E says, has been the property of every schoolboy for two thousand years. — Henry you know thought he had discovered Aristotle, the good creature (I mean H.).

“What a gump!...On the whole, he is but little better than an idiot. He should have been whipt often and soundly in his boyhood; and as he escaped such wholesome discipline then, it might be well to bestow it now.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne, about Ellery Channing HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

June 22, Friday: President James Buchanan JAMES BUCHANAN vetoed the initial version of homestead legislation for places such as Kansas to be enacted by the federal Congress, saying that he anticipated that setting a price of 25 cents per acre (rather than bestowing the land for free) might not so much benefit small farmers as fuel land speculation, and also that he was not certain that such disposing of federal land was a constitutional act.

October 29, Monday: “The prayer of Thaddeus Hyatt to James Buchanan, President of the United States, in behalf of Kansas, asking for a Postponement of all the Land Sales in that Territory, and for other relief; together with correspondence and other documents setting forth its deplorable destitution from the drought and famine: submitted under oath, October 29, 1860” (Washington: Henry Polkinhorn, Printer). ... IN BEHALF OF KANSAS ...

October 29: P.M.– To Eb. Hubbard’s old black birch hill. HENRY L. SHATTUCK Henry Shattuck’s is a new pitch pine wood, say thirty years old. The western, or greater, part contains not a single seed-bearing white pine. It is a remarkable proof of my theory, for it contains thousands of little white pines but scarcely one little pitch pine. It is also well stocked with minute oak seedlings. It is a dense wood, say a dozen rods wide by three or four times as long, running east and west, with an oak wood on the north, from which the squirrels brought the acorns. A strip of nearly the same width of the pitch pine was cut apparently within a year on the south (a part of the above), and has just been harrowed and sown with rye, and still it is all dotted over with the little oak seedlings between the [STUMPS], which are perhaps unnoticed by Shattuck, but if he would keep his plow and fire out he would still have a pretty green patch there by next fall. A thousand little red flags (changed oak leaves) already wave over the green rye amid the stumps. The farmer stumbles over these in his walk, and sweats while he endeavors to clear the land of them, and yet wonders how oaks ever succeed to pines, as if he did not consider what these are. Where these pines are dense they are slender and tall. On the edge or in open land they are more stout and spreading. Again, as-day before yesterday, sitting on the edge of a pine wood, I see a jay fly to a white oak half a dozen rods off in the pasture, and, gathering an acorn from the ground, hammer away at it under its foot on a limb of the oak, with an awkward and rapid seesaw or teetering motion, it has to lift its head so high to acquire the requisite momentum. The jays scold about almost every white oak tree, since we hinder their coming to it. At some of the white oaks visited on the 11th, where the acorns were so thick on the ground and trees, I now find them perhaps nearly half picked up, yet perhaps little more than two thirds spoiled. The good appear to be all sprouted now. There are certainly many more sound ones here than at Beck Stow’s and Hubbard’s Grove, and it looks as if the injury had been done by frost, but perhaps some of it was done by the very heavy rains of September alone. Yesterday and to-day I have walked rapidly through extensive chestnut woods without seeing what I thought was a seedling chestnut, yet I can soon find them in our Concord pines a quarter or half a mile from the chestnut woods. Several have expressed their surprise to me that they cannot find a seedling chestnut to transplant. I think that [IT] is with them precisely as with the oaks; not only a seedling is more difficult to distinguish in a chestnut wood, but it is really far more rare there than in the adjacent pine, mixed, and oak woods. After considerable experience in searching for these and seedling oaks, I have learned to neglect the chestnut and oak woods and go only to the neighboring woods of a different species for them. Only that course will pay. On the side of E. Hubbard’s hill I see an old chestnut stump some two feet in diameter and nearly two feet high, and its outside and form well kept, yet all the inside gone; and from this shot up four sprouts in a square around it, which were cut down seven or eight years ago. Their rings number forty-six, and they are quite sound, so that the old stump was cut some fifty-three years ago. This is the oldest stump of whose age I am certain. Hence I have no doubt that there are many stumps left in this town which were cut in the last century. I am surprised to find on this hill (cut some seven or eight years ago) many remarkably old stumps wonderfully preserved, especially on the north side the hill,–walnuts, white oak and other oaks, and black birch. One white oak is eighteen and a half inches in diameter and has one hundred and forty-three rings. This is very one-sided in its growth, the centre being just four inches from the north side, or thirty-six rings to an inch. Of course I counted the other side. Another, close by, gave one hundred and forty-one rings, another white oak fifteen and a half inches in diameter had one hundred and fifty-five rings. It has so smooth (sawed off) and solid, almost a HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

polished or marble-like, surface that I could not at first tell what kind of wood it was. [Was it not a walnut?] Another white oak the same as last in rings, i. e. one hundred and fifty-five, twenty-four inches [IN] diameter. All these were sound to the very core, so that I could see the first circles, and I suspect that they were seedlings. The smaller, but oldest ones had grown very slowly at first, and yet more slowly at last, but after some sixty- five years they had then grown much faster for about fifteen years, and then grew slower and slower to the last. The rings were exceedingly close together near the outside, yet not proportionably difficult to count. For aught that appeared, they might have continued to grow a century longer. The stumps are far apart, so that this formed an open grove, and that probably made the wood sounder and more durable. On the south slope many white pines had been cut about forty-six years ago, or when the chestnut was, amid the oaks. I suppose that these were seedlings, and perhaps the hill was cleared soon after the settlement of the town, and after a while pines sprang up in the open land, and seedling oaks under the pines, and, the latter being cut near the end of the seventeenth century, those oaks sprang up, with or without pines, but all but these were cut down when they were about sixty years old. If these are seedlings, then seedlings make much the best timber. I should say that the pasture oaks generally must be seedlings on account of their age, being part of the primitive wood. I suspect that sprouts, like the chestnut, for example, may grow very rapidly, and make large trees in comparatively few years, but they will be decaying [?] as fast at the core as they are growing, at the circumference. The stumps of chestnuts, especially sprouts, are very shaky. It is with men as with trees; you must grow slowly to last long. The oldest of these oaks began their existence about 1697. I doubt if there were any as old trees in our primitive wood as stood in this town fifty years ago. The healthiest of the primitive wood, having at length more room, light, and air, probably grew larger than its ancestors. Some of the black birch stumps gave about one hundred rings. The pasture oak which Sted Buttrick cut some seven or eight years ago, northeast of this, was, as near as I could tell,–one third was calculation,–some one hundred years old only, though larger than any of these. The fine chips which are left on the centre of a large stump preserve it moist there, and rapidly hasten its decay. The site of the last-named pasture oak was easily discovered, by a very large open grass-sward where no sweet- fern, lambkill, huckleberry, and brakes grew, as they did almost everywhere else. This may be because of the cattle assembling under the oak, and so killing the bushes and at the same time manuring the ground for grass. There is more chestnut in the northern part of the town than I was aware of. The first large wood north of Ponkawtasset is oak and chestnut. East of my house. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1861

In Boston, Mary Ann Shadd Cary published A VOICE FROM HARPER’S FERRY: A NARRATIVE OF EVENTS AT HARPER’S FERRY; WITH INCIDENTS PRIOR AND SUBSEQUENT TO ITS CAPTURE BY CAPTAIN BROWN AND HIS MEN, BY OSBORN P. ANDERSON.

There is evidence that she began a “fancy goods” store in Boston in about this period, a store that would be in existence at least until 1871.

By this point, or at this point, Thaddeus Hyatt remarried, with Elizabeth Adelaide Lake (1836-1928). The couple would produce 5 children.

The problem of flooding at Harpers Ferry was becoming more and more chronic, but of course no one as yet HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

had any notion that the problem was human-caused, or that it was going to become more and more persistent: HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

To destroy an invasion route between South and North, the bridge at Harpers Ferry was blown up and burned: HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1862

Bessie Lake Hyatt was born in La Rochelle, France, 1st child of Thaddeus Hyatt with Elizabeth Adelaide Lake Hyatt. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1864

Thaddeus Pomeroy Hyatt was born in the US as a 2d child to Thaddeus Hyatt and Elizabeth Adelaide Lake Hyatt. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1866

November 4, Sunday: Clotilde Sumner Hyatt was born in Paris as a 3d child to Thaddeus Hyatt and Elizabeth Adelaide Lake Hyatt.

By the Treaty of Vienna of October 12th and the plebiscite of October 21st, Venice and all Venetia (Venezia Euganea) that had been ceded by the Austrian Empire to the French Empire, was made part of the Kingdom of Italy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1867

Thaddeus Hyatt obtained Patent No. 68,332 “Improvement in Illuminating-Roofs and Roof-Pavements.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1869

James H.L. Hyatt was born in Cornwall, England as a 4th child to Thaddeus Hyatt and Elizabeth Adelaide Lake Hyatt. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1871

Annie Forrester Hyatt was born in London as a 5th child to Thaddeus Hyatt and Elizabeth Adelaide Lake Hyatt. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1872

Thaddeus Hyatt secured Patent No. 133,032 “Improvement in Vault-Lights.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1873

TROW’S CITY DIRECTORIES FOR NEW YORK, NEW YORK had a listing for “Hyatt Theodore, patent vault lights, 6 Wooster & pres. 61 Park pl. h 46 Morton.”

Thaddeus Hyatt secured Patent No. 135,120 “Improvement in Vault-Lights” (there would be many more such patents during this year and the following one). HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1874

WILSON’S NEW YORK CITY PARTNERSHIP DIRECTORY had a listing for “Hyatt Brothers (Thaddeus & Theodore) 25 Waverly pl.” The Illuminating Roofing Tile, Represented by the cuts, is intended to take the place of the rough plate-glass sky-lights heretofore in general use, and will relieve of the constant annoyance from leakage and the danger from breaking experienced in the use of sheet-glass. Our new Tile is suitable for Dwelling- houses, Stores, Arcades, Railroad Depots, &c., &c., and can be laid in either iron or wooden frames. The cheapest and best sky- light made. Send for descriptive and illustrated pamphlet. Hyatt Brothers. 25 Waverly Place, cor. Greene St. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1877

GOULDING’S NEW YORK CITY DIRECTORY had a listing for “Hyatt Brothers, vault-lights, 25 Waverly pl.” in addition to separate listings for “Hyatt Thaddeus” and “Hyatt Theodore.”

Thaddeus Hyatt prepared “An Account of Some Experiments with PORTLAND-CEMENT-CONCRETE Combined with Iron, as a Building Material, with Reference to Economy of Metal in Construction, and for Security against Fire in the Making of Roofs, Floors, and Walking Surfaces” (London: Chiswick Press). PORTLAND-CEMENT-CONCRETE HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1878

Thaddeus Hyatt secured patent No. 206,112 for construction using reinforced concrete. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1882

Beatrice Marguerite “Daisy” Hyatt was born as a 6th child to Thaddeus Hyatt and Elizabeth Adelaide Lake Hyatt. In this year Hyatt prepared a treatise on human flight, THE DRAGON-FLY, OR REACTIVE PASSIVE LOCOMOTION. A VACUUM THEORY OF AERIAL NAVIGATION, BASED ON THE PRINCIPLE OF THE FAN-BLOWER. TO WHICH IS APPENDED SOME REMARKS ON WATER AND ITS NAVIGATION. BY A DISCIPLE OF BACON (London: C. Whittingham and Co.). THE DRAGON-FLY, OR ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1892

Thaddeus Hyatt’s LOVE’S SEASONS, OR, TIDES OF THE HEART. IN NINE BOOKS (New York: Fowler & Wells Company). LOVE’S SEASONS, OR, TIDES... HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1901

July 25, Thursday: Thaddeus Hyatt died at the age of 85 in his summer residence at Sandown on the Isle of Wight.

July 27, Saturday: The New York Times provided an obituary of Thaddeus Hyatt, whose body would be placed in plot 137 of Section 9 of Christ Churchyard on the Isle of Wight. THADDEUS HYATT DEAD. End Came to the New Jersey Inventor and Friend of John Brown on the Isle of Wight. Thaddeus Hyatt, an inventor, and who at the time of the anti-slavery agitation in this country was an ardent abolitionist and close friend of John Brown, died Thursday, at Sandown, Isle of Wight, England. He was born eighty-five years ago, in Rahway, N.J. Mr. Hyatt invented the bullseye glass lens, used as a means of increasing the light in vaults under street sidewalks, and his invention made him wealthy. In the fifties, when the anti-slavery agitation began to assume definite form, Mr. Hyatt associated himself with the leaders in the movement and gave his means for the advancement of the doctrine of universal freedom. He became a close friend of John Brown, who whenever he came to New York made his headquarters at Mr. Hyatt’s Morton Street house. After the execution of John Brown Mr. Hyatt was summoned to appear before the United States Senate to give evidence regarding the movements leading up to the Harper’s [sic] Ferry demonstration. He refused and was committed to the Old Capitol Prison in Washington. Instead of taking his imprisonment seriously he had his prison room decorated and furnished and then issued invitations to his friends. He never lacked visitors. During this incarceration he arranged mass meetings at Cooper Union, New York, the first in the series being called the “John Brown meeting.” This meeting was addressed by Wendell Phillips and other prominent abolitionist orators. From the prison Mr. Hyatt wrote home to the newspapers and kept up a fearless agitation of the question. Those who were opposed to him saw the error of their course, and on motion of the Senator who had caused his imprisonment he was ordered to leave the prison. He promptly telegraphed to New York: “Have been kicked out. Will be home to-morrow.” When the famine, resulting from the failure of crops, HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

came to Kansas shortly after the election of Abraham Lincoln Mr. Hyatt materially assisted in the organization of the Kansas Relief Committee. He went to Kansas and personally superintended the distribution of money, clothing and food and remained there until the work was complete.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2016. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: September 18, 2016 HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.