Finally, one night Father climbs up to our attic with his lamp in one hand and a fat packet of papers and maps in the other, and taking his customary seat at the center of the group, he spreads the contents of his packet at his feet. As he begins to speak, he raises one of the maps from the pile — we see at once that it is the now-familiar drawing of the streets and buildings of Harpers Ferry, made by Cook — and, as usual, he shows it to us and allows it to be passed amongst us, so that, while Father sets out the plan, each man can better visualize what he is to do and where he shall stand when he does it. This time, however, when he has gone through, once again, step by step, the taking of Harpers Ferry, he retrieves and sets aside Cook’s map and is silent and looks somberly at his clasped hands, as if in prayer. After a long moment, without looking up, he abruptly declares that tonight he has decided to reveal to us that we will not be conducting the sort of raid that most of us still believe we have come here for. This is not to be merely a larger, more dangerous and dramatic, slave-running expedition than any of us has ever undertaken before. There is instead a much larger task before us, a greater thing than we have yet dared imagine.
Kagi has long known of this grand, about-to-be-revealed scheme, as have I, of course, and a few of the others, Cook, Stevens, and Anderson, and we have argued privately amongst ourselves as to its feasibility and have agreed, after much disputation, that it can be done and must be attempted; but my brothers Watson and Oliver have not heard it before, nor my brothers-in-law Will and Dauphin Thompson, nor has Father until now trusted any of the recent arrivals with this vision, for it is truly a vision and not so much a plan, and to see it as he does, we must first for a long time not have seen or heard much else. Our long confinement together and our isolation from the world outside have finally made us all visionaries, capable at last of seeing what Father sees and of believing his words as if they were true prophecy.
Here, men, I want you to examine these maps, he says, and he picks up and flaps at us a set of cambric-cloth squares onto which he has pasted the states of Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and the Carolinas — eight squares, and one state to a square. In the margin of each map, he has written numerals: 491,000, for the number of slaves in Virginia, he explains, 87,000 in Maryland, and so on, which comes to a total of 1,996,366 slaves, he pronounces, looking up at us. But he does not see us, his twenty followers, unshaven, unwashed, gaunt, and sober-faced, all of us young men and a few of us mere boys: instead, his gray eyes gleam with excitement at the sight of a spreading black wave of mutinous slaves, nearly two million strong, as all across the South they flee their cabins and shops and barns and rise from the cotton and tobacco and sugarcane fields and take up pitchforks, axes, machetes, and the thousands of Sharps rifles that will come flowing down the Alleghenies from the North; he sees them, first hundreds, then thousands, and finally hundreds of thousands of black men, women, and children, flowing down the country roads and highways, meeting in town squares and on city streets and merging into the largest army ever seen in this land, an army with but one purpose, and that is to take back from the slaveholders what for a quarter of a millennium has been stolen from them — their freedom, their American birthrights, their very lives. This raid will establish no Underground Railroad operation, he tells us, for regardless of scale, it is no mere slave raid. This will be an act of an entirely different order. Yes, after we have taken Harpers Ferry, we will make our appointed rendezvous with Mr. Douglass in the Allegheny foothills west of here, as planned, but then we will not, as some of us believed, hole up in small forts and siphon escaped slaves into the North. Instead, we shall divide our forces into two portions, the Defenders, under Mr. Douglass’s command, and the Liberators, under Father’s, and whilst the Defenders protect and hurry into the North those women, children, elderly, and infirm slaves who wish to resettle there, the Liberators will commence to march rapidly southward along the densely wooded north-south mountain passes, making lightning-like strikes against the plantations on the plains lower down, seizing armories and arsenals and supplies as they go, building a cavalry, like Toussaint L’Ouverture, and even seizing artillery, like the Maroons of Jamaica, destroying railroads and fortifications. When the Shenandoah Valley goes, the plantations along the James River will quickly fall, and then the Tidewater tobacco farms, and when Virginia goes, the rest of the Southern states will nearly conquer themselves, there being down there, as in Haiti and Jamaica, such a disproportionate number of Negroes to whites. And there will be thousands of non-slaveholding whites, too, God-fearing, decent Southerners, who will come running to our side, once they understand that our true intentions are not to slay white men and women in their beds or to overthrow their state or federal government or to dissolve the Union, but merely to end American slavery. To end it now, here, in these years. Look, look! he says, excitedly showing us the map of Alabama, where with X’she has marked, county by county, the heaviest concentrations of slaves. When we emerge from the Tennessee hills here in Augusta County, the slaves will rise up spontaneously in adjacent Montgomery County, and in a week or perhaps two, when the news has arrived there, the same will occur in Macon and Russell Counties, and the flames of rebellion will leap like a wildfire from one district to the next, straight across into Georgia, whence the fire will roar all the way east to the Sea Isles, causing it to curl back north into the Carolinas, until we have ignited a great, encircling conflagration, which cannot be extinguished until it has burnt the ancient sin and scourge of slavery entirely away, from one end of the South to the other, from Maryland to Louisiana, until at last nothing remains of the Slavocracy but a smoldering pile of char!
The Old Man’s peroration ends and is met with soft silence. At first, Kagi, Cook, Stevens, and Anderson look slowly around the dim, shadowy room, as if searching the faces of the others for a sign that their collective silence indicates collective skepticism, which was Kagi’s early reaction to Father’s vision, or dismay, Cook’s and Stevens’s first response, or simple awe, Anderson’s. I myself look to my brothers’ eyes, Watson and Oliver, seeking there a clarifying version of my own thoughts and feelings, for in my earlier disputations with Kagi, Cook, and Stevens, I defended the logic of Father’s grand plan with no other desire than to defeat their objections to it, my old role, and in winning them over have not made my own private position strong to myself or even clear. But it is too late. Watson and Oliver and the Thompsons, my brothers and brothers-in-law, all of the men, wear on their faces a single expression, the expression worn also by Kagi, Cook, Stevens, and Anderson, and no doubt by me, too: it is the hungry look of a follower, of a true believer. There is no Thomas the Doubter in this room, no sober skeptic, no ironist, no dark materialist. We have all been confined here in this isolated place for too many weeks and months to have any mentality left that is not a piece of a single mind, and that mind is shaped and filled by Father alone.
But, yes, much of what you have expected will be met, he continues, calmer now, comforted by our silence. He again holds out Cook’s large, detailed map of the streets and buildings of Harpers Ferry and says that we shall indeed, as we have intended all along, soon attack and seize the town. That has not changed. It will be our first formally declared act of war against the slaveholders, the first act of our mighty drama. And when we have seized the town, we shall, as planned, take control of the arms stored in three buildings there — the government armory, where the muskets are made, the Hall rifle works, and the arsenal. As we all know, there are no federal troops presently posted in the town and only a few private guards protecting these stores of weapons and munitions, so we will not be much opposed, and if we strike quickly and under cover of night, it will be done before we are even noticed by the townspeople. We shall nevertheless take hostages and hold them, probably in the armory yard, to protect us against the local militias, should they be roused, whilst we await the first reinforcing arrival of mutinous slaves from the surrounding countryside, and then, in a matter of hours, we shall have flown back up into the mountain fastness south and west of the town, whence shall come our Republic’s salvation.