Civil War Chronicles: The Secret Six

(Library of Congress.)

ON OCTOBER 17, 1909, a small group of former abolitionists quietly gathered in an imposing brick house in Concord, Massachusetts, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of John Brown’s historic raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, then a part of Virginia. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Franklin B. Sanborn, and Julia Ward Howe, widow of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, did not want their meeting to attract attention despite the fact that Brown and his compatriots were being celebrated across the country. The two old men, along with Samuel Howe and three other long-dead comrades, had once formed an abolitionist cabal known as the Secret Six who supplied Brown and his men with money and weapons as he prepared for the assault. Those six ardent abolitionists had, in effect, been planning treason against the United States.

Katherine Mayo, the young reporter who brought them together, was seeking momentous revelations. “Why do you want to know of us?” Higginson had written to Mayo. “Did any historian ever bother to write down the name of the man who bought the donkey on which Christ rode into Jerusalem? We of the Six were as unimportant and incidental to the real story of John Brown as that ancient Judean is to the story of our Lord. . . . We do not deserve remembering. Although there was no Judas among us, there were six Peters, all who denied John Brown at least once through some word or act before the cock crowed.”

Higginson’s self-effacement, while perhaps genuine, was incorrect. The story of these six avid enemies of slavery- writers, preachers, businessmen is not just an obscure tale about the would-be financiers of a revolution; it is also the story of pacifists turned radicals, of hope for slavery’s extinction being shattered by deep societal and economic currents, and of inspired citizens planning a stand against fundamental evil only to flee the country and deny their involvement after Brown’s failure.

The Secret Six were not hardscrabble ruffians or ex-slaves but men of culture, education, and fortune, and, as such, an especial threat to the slave- holding plutocracy Five of the six were from Boston: Higginson a preacher and a writer; Sanborn a young

writer, teacher, and protégé of Ralph Waldo Emerson; Howe a world- renowned physician who worked with the blind and deaf; Theodore Parker a well-known abolitionist and Unitarian preacher; and George L. Stearns a prosperous manufacturer. The sixth member, Gerrit Smith, was a rich upstate New York businessman and philanthropist.

These men had known Brown for years through their abolitionist and Underground Railroad connections. He, in fact, at one time lived in Timbucto, a free black enclave created by Smith in the Adirondacks. Except for Higginson, the six men had generally followed a nonviolent ideology and vented their outrage in words. But unfolding events would challenge their assumptions.

The new Fugitive Slave Act--part of the Compromise of 1850 legislation required U.S. citizens to assist in the recovery of fugitives to whom it denied jury trial, and overall it made the recovery process easier for slave owners. Northern abolitionists were outraged. Parker was so upset that his sermons took on a decidedly more violent tone.

The arrest (or, as abolitionists saw it, kidnapping) of former slaves Thomas Sims in 1851 and Anthony Burns in 1854 from Boston and repatriation to their owners in Virginia set off riots and profoundly influenced Higginson and Howe. The arrest of Jerry McHenry in Syracuse in 1852 likewise aroused Smith. Similar to the impressment of sailors by the British that had led to the War of 1812, the government-sanctioned “kidnapping” of Massachusetts citizens began to make many in Boston believe that such actions could only be answered by violence. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the subsequent bloodletting between pro- and anti-slavery factions in what came to be called “Bleeding Kansas” further inflamed the situation.

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The events out west led to the formation of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee, with the object of supporting the armed opponents of slavery in the territory. All of the Secret Six were members or supporters of this committee. They repeatedly met with Brown in Boston and furnished him with money and weapons. He ultimately became a merciless guerrilla of the plains, infamous for his massacre of Kansas civilians at Pottawatomie.

By 1858 Brown wanted to take the fight to the South. The fiery Higginson agreed that, as slavery had begun in blood, so it must end: “Never in history was there an oppressed people who were set free by others.” Some of the six still hoped that the violence in Kansas would move Washington against the spreading evil and prevent further fighting. But over time, Brown’s magnetic personality persuaded them.

He began to lay his plans to spearhead a southern slave insurrection in February 1858, when he wrote to Parker, Stearns, Sanborn, and Higginson in search of $ 1,000 for “the most important undertaking of my whole life,” which he characterized as “[Underground] Railroad business on a somewhat extended scale.” Sanborn later wrote that the secret committee was officially formed in March 1858 to raise the money in New England. Brown, supported by Higginson, wanted to begin attacking slaveholders in the South later that year, but the other five persuaded him to delay until 1859.

The outcome is famous some would say infamous. Brown led a band of whites and blacks, including former slaves and some of his own sons, to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Most of the raiders were killed. Brown himself was captured, tried, and executed for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia. After Brown’s arrest, his document- packed carpetbag, containing letters revealing his relationship with the Secret Six, came to glaring light. Sanborn, Howe, and Stearns immediately fled to Canada. Parker was already in Europe for health reasons. Gerrit Smith “conveniently went mad,” noted Stephen Vincent Benet in his famous poem John Brown’s Body, committing himself to a Utica, New York, asylum. Only Higginson refused to run. He stayed in Boston, openly daring the federal government to arrest him.

In December 1859, Sen. James Mason of Virginia formed a Senate committee to investigate the raid, seeking evidence of Northern abolitionist complicity. Howe and Stearns were called to testify; while both admitted helping Brown in Kansas, they denied knowledge of his plan to arm slaves and invade Virginia. Sanborn too was called, but he refused the summons and even forcibly resisted an attempt to arrest him. Higginson, standing defiant in Boston, was never called to Washington. Historian James McPherson believes that Mason wanted to deny Higginson a national platform for his antislavery cause.

After much hard talk about a Northern abolitionist cabal by Mason and his committee colleague Sen. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, the committee found no proof of Northern complicity “It would be hard to conceive of a lamer or more impotent conclusion than that to which the whole affair has come,” the New York Times observed in June 1860.

In later years, various of the six wrote a good many reminiscences, biographies, and collections of letters. While they proudly proclaimed their support of the antislavery cause and Brown’s deeds in Kansas, they continued to deny their involvement in his ultimate act. Even Higginson did so, though he had accused his accomplices of saving themselves and leaving Brown to the gallows “Is there no honor among confederates?” he chided Sanborn in particular.

For the rest of his life, Higginson believed it was that year’s delay from 1858 to 1859 that doomed Brown. He also believed that only he and Brown did not realize that it would be a suicide mission the others saw it as a necessary martyrdom for the cause. In 1909 Higginson revealed to journalist Oswald Garrison Villard that he despised the entire secret committee himself included for their “betrayal” of Brown. Higginson’s own “crime” was his fevered naïveté in believing that Brown could raise the South.

There can be little doubt that Harpers Ferry intensified the already tense sectional strife and was one of the sparks that detonated the Civil War. The Secret Six influential abolitionists who had lost faith in political gradualism and saw hope only in armed conflict therefore have a certain place in history. Without their material support, the mad strike on the arsenal would never have had its astounding impact. As Victor Hugo wrote in 1859, the hangman of Brown was neither the judge nor jury, but the entire American Republic; and Brown’s death would, as indeed it did, “open a latent fissure that will finally split the Union asunder.”

—Jason Emerson is a frequent contributor to American Heritage Magazine.