Eyewitness At Harpers Ferry (February 1975 | Volume: 26, Issue: 2)

Eyewitness At Harpers Ferry

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Authors: Edward White

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February 1975 | Volume 26, Issue 2

Shortly before he died, Edward White decided to put down on paper a fascinating story, which he entitled “A Personal Reminiscence of John Brown.” It is a graphic eyewitness account of Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry (1859), his capture and interrogation. White, a native of Fredericksburg, Virginia, was then nineteen years old. Nearing death almost three decades later, he began writing his report of those momentous events in a flourishing script. But he was ill and the effort was too much, so he dictated instead to his teen-age daughter Margaret. White’s account, which has never before been published, is reprinted here with the kind permission of his grand-daughter, Mrs. Murray Longley Griffiths, of Balboa Island, California. Spelling and punctuation follow the original document.

 

Not long since, I went from St. Louis to New York, by the Baltimore and Ohio R.R. route. I had been on the way about thirty hours, and late in the afternoon of a dull, gloomy, drizzly day, I was lying back, dozing, on the velvet cushions of a Pullman Car, when the shrill whistle of the engine partially roused me to the fact that we were entering a station. Languidly, raising my head, in that semi conscious state, between sleeping and waking, with which all are familiar; I glanced through the window at my right, when an object presented itself, which instantly roused me to a state of excited wakefulness.

We were just pulling into a station, on an elevated trestle work. On the left ran the Potomac river many feet below; on the right was a long enclosure, filled with dilapidated brick buildings, and immediately in front of me, as I looked from the window, was a small building, fallen into a state of decay, on the front of which, just over the door, were inscribed the words “John Brown’s Fort.”

I realized at once that I was at Harper’s Ferry and that the ruined building before me was the place where that misguided man John Brown had made his last stand. In an instant time was annihilated and there came vividly before my mind a like, dark, gloomy and drizzly day, twenty eight years ago, when I was in the same town of Harper’s Ferry, and when this strange man John Brown was holding this little fort against the incensed people of Virginia.

 

At the time of what is popularly known as the “John Brown raid” I was a boy of nineteen, but had been engaged for several months in teaching a private school at Harper’s Ferry. I was boarding at the “Wager Hotel,” which stood at the Baltimore and Ohio R.R. depot, and within a few feet of the bridge over the Potomac river. It is well known that Harper’s Ferry is situated at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, and that the business portion of the town lies at the foot of the immense hills (even mountains), which rise near the banks of