I have taken possession of the United States armory, the old man calmly continues. And if the citizens of the town interfere with me and my men, we must burn the town and have blood.
Father now proceeds to dispatch his men so as to take control of the remaining arms supplies and defenses of the town. Under guard by Dauphin Thompson and Lewis Leary, the two hostages are shut into the firehouse, while Oliver and Will Thompson are sent three blocks south on Shenandoah Street to take command of the bridge that crosses the Shenandoah River into town. The tollbooth proves to be empty and the bridge unguarded. Hazlett and Edwin Coppoc take over the arsenal, also unguarded, just off the main square and in sight of the hotel, where they will wait for further orders and a wagon to empty it. Stevens, Kagi, and Copeland are ordered to the rifle factory, which is located a short ways further down Shenandoah Street at Lower Hall’s Island, a long, narrow rise of land in the Shendandoah River that is separated from the shore by a canal. Once more, a single watchman is surprised by the raiders and, when captured, is marched by Stevens back to the firehouse, leaving Kagi and Copeland behind to hold the rifle works. On his return to the firehouse, Stevens comes upon three half-drunk, unarmed young men, carousers straggling home late from the Wager Hotel, and he swiftly puts them under his gun and brings them in with the watchman.
It is not yet midnight, and both bridges into town, the armory, the arsenal, and the rifle factory have been brought under the control of the raiders. Six men have been taken hostage and locked into the firehouse. Unknown to the rest of its citizens, unknown to the world, Harpers Ferry, Virginia, belongs to Osawatomie Brown. Around this time, the rain lets up, and the clouds slowly pull away and open the starry sky to view. Soon the dog-tooth moon breaks the dark horizon above the Maryland Heights north of town, where, just before one A.M., as Father expected, a fourth watchman, Patrick Higgins, comes down the moonlit footpath from his home in Sandy Hook to relieve Williams at the Maryland side of the Potomac bridge. As he enters the covered bridge, Watson and Stewart Taylor, Father’s rear guard, step from the shadows and capture the man. In silence, dutifully following the plan, they direct their prisoner to the bridge and commence marching him over to the firehouse, when suddenly Higgins turns and swats Watson on the forehead and races ahead of them into the darkness. Before Watson can stay his hand, Taylor raises his rifle and fires, his bullet slightly grazing the forehead of the escaping man, who is able nonetheless to get safely to the end of the bridge and into the Wager Hotel, where he is the first to raise the alarm, although he cannot say who has shot at him or why.
This is an eventuality that Father has anticipated, a part of his overall plan, and so long as it happens after the bridges and the arms stores have been captured and hostages have been taken, it does not much concern him that sometime in the night a shot or two will be fired, alerting the citizens that a violent action is under way. By daylight, they will know of it, anyhow, and will be told by him then of its purpose, and soon the whole country will begin to apprehend its scale. After all, this raid is meant to be a public act, not a private one, he has reminded us, and if our aims are to be met, we must actually invite a certain hue-and-cry and, so long as we are in control of events and not they us, welcome it. Still, the echoing sound of the first shot shocks the men, and Watson’s and Taylor’s breathless report that their prisoner has escaped into the hotel frightens them. Father, however, is calm as ice.
At this moment, he is mainly concerned with Aaron Stevens’s mission into the countryside. He has sent Stevens with Tidd and Cook and three of the Negro men, Anderson, Leary, and Green, five miles west of Harpers Ferry to Halltown, where resides the wealthy planter Colonel Lewis Washington, a man who is a direct descendant of General George Washington and, for that, something of a local celebrity and politician, an aide to Virginia’s Governor Wise. Further, he is known to have inherited from his incomparable ancestor an elaborately engraved pistol presented to the General after the Revolution by the Marquis de Lafayette and a ceremonial sword given him by King Frederick the Great of Prussia. The Old Man wants Colonel Lewis Washington as a hostage, and he wants to free the Colonel’s half-dozen slaves, but most of all, to help place his own acts into their proper context, he wants General George Washington’s pistol and his sword.
With a rail pulled from the fence by the meadow in front of the house, Stevens and his men batter down the Colonel’s door and roust him and his terrified family from their beds. When the Colonel has dressed and has delivered over to the raiders his ancestor’s famous weapons, Stevens formally places him under arrest and, leaving the man’s wife and young children behind, seats him next to Tidd in a two-horse carriage appropriated from the barn. Behind them, Anderson, Leary, and Green have hitched the Colonel’s four remaining horses to a farm wagon and have placed into it three liberated slaves, two men and a young woman — all they could find in the house and barn, or maybe they’re the only Negroes on the place not too frightened to show themselves, Anderson explains to Stevens, for these poor people can’t know for sure yet that we are who we say we are. Stevens agrees, and they start back along the Charles Town Turnpike towards Harpers Ferry.
A mile west of Bolivar Heights, still following Father’s orders, they draw the wagons up before a large farm owned by John Allstadt, after Colonel Washington the wealthiest planter in the region and, like him, a slaveholder — the owner, in fact, of the young woman who was sold off into the Deep South and her young husband who a week ago hung himself because of it. A second time, Stevens and his men break down a front door and enter a stranger’s home unopposed. They quickly make hostages of the man of the house, Mr. Allstadt, and his eighteen-year-old son, and unceremoniously liberate Allstadt’s four remaining slaves, who are added to the group in the farm wagon. As instructed, Stevens and the other raiders are scrupulously polite to their prisoners and to the women and children, just as they were at Colonel Washington’s, and they try not to frighten them overmuch and take pains to cause no unnecessary damage to the house or personal property, other than that of converting the slaves into free men and women. They state clearly to the whites their sole reason for breaking into their homes in the middle of the night and making prisoners of the husbands and sons — which is strictly to end slavery. If we are not opposed, Stevens says, no blood will be spilt. The husbands and sons, like the wagons and horses, will eventually be returned to them, but their slaves are no longer owned by them, he says. The slaves of Virginia are owned henceforth by themselves and cannot be returned to any man.
In the meantime, back at Harpers Ferry, at 1:25 A.M., precisely as scheduled, the Baltimore-bound B & O passenger train rolls in, and when it has hissed to a noisy stop at the station, the night clerk from the hotel next door skitters low from the door of the railroad station, and before the conductor can step down from the train to the platform, the man has leapt aboard, bearing the startling news that gunmen are out on the Potomac bridge and have shot a watchman, who lies bleeding inside the hotel! Worse, the other three town watchmen are nowhere about and may even have been murdered! And here’s something else: when the clerk slipped unseen into the station by a rear window adjacent to the hotel, he tried to telegraph the stationmaster in Charles Town and discovered that the wires had been cut. There is something very strange, something dangerous, happening, and until now, with no idea of how many gunmen might be out there or where they may be hiding, no one but the night clerk has dared to leave the hotel or been able to raise a general alarm.