In about an hour, a pair of men — one of whom I did not know and figured was a hostage, the other being Will Thompson, my brother-inlaw — emerged from the firehouse bearing a white flag, the signal to parley. There was by now an emboldened crowd of armed townspeople in the square and on the porch of the hotel and the platform of the railroad station, and when they saw the two men come forward from the firehouse, the crowd rushed them and seized and beat Will, dragging him into the hotel. The other man they made much of and slapped him on the shoulders and offered him pulls from their bottles, for many of them were by now freely drinking.
A few moments later, my brother Watson and the dark-browed Aaron Stevens and a third man, another hostage, I assumed, came out of the firehouse and walked into the cobbled square with a white flag. Suddenly, there was a barrage of gunfire from the crowd, and Watson fell, and Stevens fell, both bleeding from the face and torso. The hostage ran towards the crowd, but Watson pulled himself to his knees and dragged his gut-shot body back inside the armory grounds to the safety of the firehouse. Stevens lay writhing in pain, shot four or more times and unable to lift himself from the pavement, when, strange to see, one of the hostages came out of the firehouse, picked him up, and lugged him across the square and into the hotel. Shortly afterwards, the same man walked from the hotel and returned to the firehouse, a hostage again, but choosing it this time, which made me think that Father must be close to surrendering, if for no other reason than to get medical attention for Watson, who had looked to be seriously wounded.
More time passed, while the crowd at the hotel and railroad station and in the town square grew larger by the minute and more courageous and raucous with drink and rage, when I spotted a man climbing from the rear window of the firehouse into the armory yard. It was not a hostage escaping, I suddenly realized, it was young Willie Leeman, our wild and pretty boy from Maine, skittering across the yard away from the front gate to the rear. A slender lad, barely twenty years old, he slipped between the bars of the wall, dashed across the railroad tracks, and made for the Potomac. I was not surprised to see him abandon the others. He had come up the hard way — Poor Willie, we called him. Sent to work in a Haverhill shoe factory at fourteen, he had run off at seventeen to join Father’s volunteers in Kansas, where he had been difficult for us to control, a lonely, uneducated boy who liked his drink and when drunk shouted his principles to anyone who would listen.
Just as he reached the river, which ran fairly shallow there, and waded in, someone in the crowd spotted him, and a batch of men up on the railroad station platform commenced firing at him, while he swam frantically for the Maryland side. With bullets splashing all around, he managed to get no more than fifty feet from shore before he was hit. Unable to swim any further, he turned back and hauled himself onto a tiny mudflat and collapsed. Several men ran along the tracks and down to the shore, and one of them waded out to the islet where Willie lay bleeding, put his revolver to the boy’s head, and shot him dead. The man returned to his comrades and they raced back to the station platform and joined the crowd, making from there a target of Willie’s body, shooting into it over and over, as if it were a sack of wet grain.
By midday, the youngest of the raiders, Will Leeman, was dead; and the oldest, Dangerfield Newby. Inside the firehouse, and inside the hotel across the way, my brother Watson and Aaron Stevens lay wounded, perhaps mortally, and my brother-in-law Will Thompson, brutally beaten, sat in the hotel under armed guard. I was sure that Barclay Coppoc and Frank Meriam had by now fled into the woods, and there may well have been others among the raiders who, to save themselves, had abandoned Father — John Cook, who was clever and knew the streets and alleys of the town better than any of us and had friends and even family amongst the townspeople, he was one; and Charlie Tidd was another. I had seen neither of them all morning; nor Albert Hazlett and Osborn Anderson, who had been stationed alone at the arsenal. The small brick building on Shenandoah Street was close to the town square, and the militiamen, with guards posted at the doors, were now treating it as if they had taken it back.
At one point, I noticed a fellow walking exposed on the railroad loading-trestle that bordered the armory buildings, and when he neared the firehouse, he dropped to one knee and peered around the water tower from an angle that would have given him an easy rifle-shot into the firehouse, except that he did not appear to be armed. Even so, when the door to the firehouse opened, and I saw Edwin Coppoc and my brother Oliver standing there, I feared that the man on the trestle would shoot them, for they were exposed and unsuspecting. But, no, Coppoc spotted the fellow, raised his rifle, and fired, dropping him like a stone, at which point a second man, who had been following a few yards behind the first, shot straight down into the engine house and caught Oliver full-bore in the chest, knocking him backwards inside.
Coppocs having killed an apparently unarmed man seemed to fuel the crowd’s drunken rage. In minutes, they were dragging their prisoner Will Thompson from the hotel, pummeling and screaming wildly at him. They set him out on the edge of the B & O bridge, stepped a few feet away, and shot him many times, after which they tossed his body into the river, where the current carried it against a thicket of driftwood. It caught there, and as they had with Willie Leeman, the townsmen made a target of my brother-in-law and shot into his dead body for a long while.
About mid-afternoon, I noticed a significant number of gun-toting townsmen separate themselves from the mob and in an organized way move up Shenandoah Street in the direction of the rifle works, where it appeared that Kagi, Lewis Leary, and John Copeland were still successfully holding off the militia — thanks to the deep, fast-running, twenty-foot-wide channel that cut between the mainland and the island on which the factory was situated. A footbridge led from the shore to the island, but the walls of the factory came right to the water’s edge, as if to a moat, and up to now the militiamen had been hesitant about rushing it and had contented themselves with keeping the three raiders inside under siege. Now, however, encouraged by the arrival of a crowd of heavily armed townsmen, they put up a protective shield of steady gunfire at the factory windows, whilst a gang of men ran against the timbered gate with a battering-ram and smashed it in. Then the entire combined force of militiamen and townspeople charged into the factory.
A hundred yards downriver, from my treetop aerie high above the further shore, I watched three figures — a white man, whom I knew to be Kagi, and two Negro men, Leary and Copeland — climb out one of the large windows that faced the river. The three men hung from the sill above the churning water for a second and then dropped. In seconds, fifty riflemen were firing down at them from the upper-storey windows, killing John Kagi, who sank beneath the water almost at once, and hitting Lewis Leary numerous times but not killing him outright, for he managed to struggle back to shore downstream a ways, where a contingent of militiamen pulled him limp and bleeding up the embankment into custody. Copeland made it to a large, flat rock in mid-river, where he was immediately spotted by some Jefferson Guards posted on the further shore, who began shooting at him. Caught hopelessly in a cross-fire, he raised his hands in the air, and a few minutes later, a pair of fellows rowed out, made him their prisoner, and saved him from Willie Leeman’s and Will Thompson’s fate for another.