Radio Script #390

Little Talks on Common Things

October 19, 1958

Tonight I want to tell you about the part played by two Maine men in one of the most dramatic and spectacular events in American history, an event that occurred just 99 years ago yesterday, on October 18, 1859. Yes, October 18, next year, will be the hundredth anniversary of that prelude to the Civil War, John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry.

Most of you know the story — how John Brown, with three of his sons and a little band of 18 other men, captured the U.S. Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, took leading citizens as hostages, and held the town in terror for two days, until U.S. troops, commanded by a lieutenant colonel, aided by volunteer militia companies and even by the cadets from Virginia Military Institute — a force nearly 2,000 strong — surrounded the half dozen survivors of Brown’s company, barricaded in the fire station at Harpers Ferry, and forced their surrender.

That story everyone knows. But not as well known is the fact that many prominent Northerners supported John Brown’s plan, knew that he intended to take some Southern towns by force, free their slaves, and thus show the slaveholders that the abolitionists were doers as well as talkers. Among John Brown’s backers were Henry Ward Beecher, Samuel Howe (husband of Julia Ward Howe), Horace Greely, Thomas Wentworth Higginson,Wendell Phillips, and Charles Sumner.

Men who would later achieve fame in the Confederate Army were also among the armed forces that ended John Brown’s famous raid. The colonel in supreme command was Robert E. Lee and his aide was Jeb Stuart, later declared to be the greatest leader of cavalry that our nation ever produced. And in command of those VMI cadets was Thomas Jefferson Jackson, whom historians would one day proclaim as the most ingenious of Southern generals, Stonewall Jackson.

In John Brown’s band of determined men, all haters of the institution of slavery, were many lesser men, but men of strong conviction and unquestioned courage, men who were ready to die, if necessary, to help old John Brown free the black man from bondage.

What we are interested in tonight is that two of those men originally came from Maine. They were Charles Plummer Tidd, a lumber worker from Readfield, and William Leeman, who had left his home Monmouth at the age of 14. Let us turn first to Leeman.

The youngest member of John Brown’s band, William Leeman, after leaving his Maine home at 14, had worked as a factory hand in Haverhill, Massachusetts for two years, then had joined one of those companies, financed by New England anti-slavery societies, to go to bloody Kansas to offset the influx of pro-slavery immigrants into that territory. Somehow, before his 18th birthday, he had become a jayhawker, the name which Southerners gave to men who hid runaway slaves and raided slave owners in Kansas. So he was with John Brown in the fighting at Osawatomie and was eager to join the dynamic abolitionist when Brown set off on his adventure at Harpers Ferry.

Posing as a newcomer who simply wanted a farm, Brown succeeded in buying what local people called the Kennedy farm, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, a few miles north of Harpers Ferry. There a part of the band hid out, while others lurked nearby, until Brown was ready for his raid. Whenever visitors came to the farm, Brown’s followers hid in the attic. Such confinement, allowing them to go out only at night, was especially trying for a twenty-year-old like Bill Leeman. He constantly complained about being caged up. Only slightly older than Leeman were two youths from Ohio, named Thompson and Coppoc, both doomed to be hanged with old John Brown in the prison yard at Charlestown. Both looked so young that Bill Leeman, who was actually younger than they, chided them with, “you look more like girls than you do like soldiers”.

To Leeman John Brown’s caution seemed only indecision. Why didn’t the old man get going? What had they come for? Surely not to lie idle in a Maryland farmhouse. At last the old man did move. And with glee young Leeman joined in the capture of the arsenal. He saw two of the band die, he saw the first troops arrive, and finally saw that Brown must soon give up his hold on the arsenal. He saw Brown send out a man with a flag of truce, in an attempt to negotiate terms that would let his party get away. He saw that white flag fired upon by armed citizens of Harpers Ferry.

As the day wore on, and more and more men took up arms against the invaders, Leeman’s impatience increased. He decided to try to escape. He moved swiftly through the rearmost buildings in the arsenal enclosure until he reached the structure nearest to the Potomac River. He climbed the fence, dashed across the railroad tracks, and plunged into the stream. But before he could reach the Maryland shore, someone spotted him. Soon the water was being peppered with bullets. Not yet wounded, but fearing that he might at any moment be hit, Leeman took refuge on a flat rock out in the stream. Cautiously three citizens made their way to the rock. One of them put a pistol to the boy’s head and pulled the trigger.

This gay, handsome, reckless boy, who had known no home since the beginning of his teens, but who still had the character and the courage to raise his hand against slavery, fell backward, his body half in the water, half on the rock.

Then what happened only reveals the savagery of a mob aroused. This is the way a reporter for the Baltimore Sun told it: “About the middle of the Potomac lies the body of one of the immigrants named William Leeman, who was shot on Monday, while attempting to make his escape from the town. His black hair may just be seen floating upon the surface of the water. All day today citizens have been using that body for a target, saluting it with showers of bullets, for no sensible reason at all.”

Of this 20 year old son of Maine another writer wrote this obituary: “Poor William Leeman. He died less than two days after John Brown had commissioned him a captain in that mythical army of the Lord. He never got to wear a uniform nor any insignia of his captain’s rank. He died in a plain woolen suit, baggy at the knees and patched at the elbows — died that the volunteer soldiers from Virginia towns might use his body for target practice.”

But what of the other Maine man who was in John Brown’s party? What about Charles Plummer Tidd? Historians of the Brown raid call this man a lumberman from Maine. About his origin we know little except that he came from Readfield and that he had worked in lumber mills in that region.

Tidd was about twice the age of Leeman, being close to his fortieth birthday. But, like leeman, he was deeply attached to 59 year old John Brown and had been induced to be one of four New Englanders to come straight from Boston to join Brown’s force at the farmhouse rendezvous in Maryland. Those four New Englanders had been the result of active recruiting by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Wendell Phillips.

When the day came for John Brown to stage his raid, Charles Plummer Tidd was one of two men given the honor of leading the march from the Kennedy farm to the bridge at Harpers Ferry. When the reconnoitering Tidd found the bridge unguarded, he waved for Brown, on the wagon loaded with guns and supplies, to come on. The wagon creaked as Brown slapped the horses with the reins and the little procession moved on to the covered bridge. Tidd climbed a pole and cut the telegraph wires.

When the arsenal had been taken, Brown turned his attention to the seizing of citizen hostages. His most wanted prize was Col. Lewis Washington, great-grandnephew of the nation’s first president and present owner of the jeweled sword given to George Washington by Frederick the Great of Prussia. So Brown sent Tidd and three other men to capture Lewis Washington and especially to get the cherished sword.

Lewis Washington was no coward, but he knew when it didn’t pay to resist. Surprised in his sleep by the raiders, he obeyed their command to get up and dress, which he did even to the meticulous donning of a pair of kid gloves. Reluctantly but with dignity he handed over the jeweled sword. Tidd and his posse marched the colonel off to the arsenal, where he was soon joined by other prisoners. Brown soon saw that rifles, ammunition and pikes stored at the Kennedy farmhouse must be brought quickly to the Harpers Ferry arsenal. So off he sent the wagon, driven by Tidd, and accompanied by two other men, to bring the needed arms. At the Kennedy farmhouse Tidd soon loaded guns, ammunition, and the long sharp-pointed pikes designed for use of the rising Negroes whom Brown was so sure would join his band. Then Tidd turned the team back toward Harpers Ferry.

About halfway to the town stood a little one-room schoolhouse, where some thirty children were reciting to a Scotch schoolmaster named Lindon Currie. Tidd told the startled teacher that the school must be used for a storehouse. The Scotsman dismissed the school and Tidd’s men took over. Brown and his followers in the Harpers Ferry armory had then no inkling that they would have to battle their way through their adventure with only the arms they already had. But such was the case. Not one pistol, musket or pike of all the hundreds in that Maryland schoolhouse ever got across the river. Before the arms could again be moved, all entrance to Harpers Ferry was closed by militia and regular troops.

There was no way now by which Tidd and his companions could even themselves get back to the arsenal to stand siege with old John Brown. Tidd had spent valuable hours shifting arms from the Kennedy farmhouse to the schoolhouse. He might as well have left them in the farmhouse, or even in New England where they were manufactured. Those arms had been paid for out of the savings of hundreds of New Englanders who wanted slavery abolished, even if it meant bloodshed. Not one bullet was ever fired from those guns in John Brown’s bold stroke for human liberty.

Finally Tidd learned that Brown’s situation was hopeless, that many of the band had already been killed and that hundreds of troops now surrounded the arsenal. So three men of John Brown’s original band, among them Charles Plummer Tidd, the lumberman from Maine, filled their pockets with hard biscuits from a barrel in the schoolhouse corner, took all the ammunition they could carry, and prepared to head north. They could hear the distant sound of firing. Charles Tidd knew it was the sound of doom for his hero, John Brown. But even then, Tidd wouldn’t run away. He hid on the hilltop near the Ferry until he was sure the battle was over. The firing had ceased, and that meant old John Brown was either dead or a prisoner. Only then did Tidd start the perilous journey toward safety in Pennsylvania. The hard biscuits soon gave out and hunger gnawed at his vitals. When he ventured toward a house to seek food, dogs drove him away. He could only root for leftover vegetables in the fields. He tightened his belt, ate chestnuts shaken from the mountain trees, and struggled on, putting mile after mile between himself and the Mason and Dixon line. At last he crossed into Pennsylvania, where friendly hands made him welcome and helped him on his way back to New England.

When war broke out 15 months later, Charles Plummer Tidd immediately enlisted and was killed in battle in 1862.

Such is the story of two men from Maine, men who were to have a conspicuous part in the fanatical action of the man about whom the marching legions of the Union armies were to sing, “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on”.

Year: 1958