The publication of this book on the centennial of the notorious attempt by the Abolitionist John Brown to set up a Negro Republic in the American South sparked controversy at the time. It was opined that the famous French journalist lacked the basic background to undertake the study of the struggle that discredited the movement.
More serious commentators, however, observed that Fall possessed objectivity — he was not dedicated to any faction in the yet still contentious debate. He also wrenched the discussion away from its solely domestic focus, due in part to his discovery of the memoir of Lieutenant Beauchamp Conder, the heretofore anonymous British advisor to Brown, whose brutally honest judgments add to our understanding of the many personalities, both Negro and white, who participated in the tragic events of 1859.
The picture Fall paints is of an international movement — the contributions of the British Anti-Slavery Society to Brown’s “Armed Struggle” were not only ideological and financial, but military. The capture of a dozen British anti-slavery activists after the surrender of Brown’s stronghold DAVID in the smoking ruins of the town severely harmed relations between the two countries. Other international contingents, from the German states in particular, played significant parts in the defense of the fortress, though it should be noted that the Prussian Karl Marx was present as a reporter and not a fighter. Fall reprints several of Marx’s lurid broadsheets that were distributed to keep up the morale of the garrison. It will be recalled that the distribution of first of these to the American press after the capture of stronghold ABSALOM by the Virginia Militia under Major Jackson did much to discredit the movement.
However, it should be noted that the organization of the revolt was apparently well done. The Federal and state authorities had no advance notice of the movement of Irish immigrants, foreign adventurers, and free Negroes into the area of northern Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania as prelude to the strike. His analysis of the final records of the “Secret Six”, Brown’s financial backers, is not as thorough as it might be, though it should be considered that the rioting lynchers also burned down their houses, destroying many records.
Fall also quotes extensively from the memoirs of Sir Garnet Wolesley, who observed the last half the siege as a British observer in General Lee’s entourage. Wolesley was known as having some expertise himself as an organizer and notes how the Federal and state authorities mobilized, organized supply, and assembled a ramshackle yet heavily-armed army. “These may be an armed mob, but they are an extraordinarily well-armed mob,” Sir Garnet said.
The principal error made by Brown, informed military opinion agrees, is his decision to remain in the valley, instead of withdrawing to the heights surrounding Harper’s Ferry. Had he fortified in the hills, even the skeptical German observer Helmuth von Moltke agreed, the rebels would have been only defeated at a far greater cost in blood and iron. As it was, the strongholds, with their grandiose Biblical names, were laid out around the edge of the town, fortifed at much cost in labor. Brown had at least sufficient labor to dig extensively.
Nevertheless, it was a fatal error. When Major Sherman got his batteries in place and began to bombard the strongholds, Brown’s artillery advisor, former French major Charles Piroth, killed himself with an explosive shell. Surprisingly, morale in the artillery stronghold ISAAC remained high, and in fact that was the final stronghold to surrender.
Brown had staked his hopes on inspiring rebellions by first slaves, then poor whites, in the Southern plantations and Northern industries. These were not forthcoming, due to the many atrocities committed by Brown and his Avengers, the secret police of the Rebellion, during the course of the uprising. While several runaway slaves and free blacks (some led by the martyred Underground Railroad courier Sojourner Truth, whose hanging inspired the maudlin poem by New England poet Emily Dickinson) did manage to infiltrate through the government lines, as did a handful of Fenians under the self-styled “General” Henry Dempsey, and other white misfits, there was no general uprising. Indeed, the most notorious lynching that occurred during the siege was organized in New York City by the infamous gang leader Bill the Butcher, who oversaw the murder of a dozen free Negroes there.
In a manner that has been denounced as lurid, Fall describes the macabre atmosphere that prevailed in the “fortress” as the Federal and state forces reduced the strongpoints one by one, yet if anything he seems to have understated his case. It should be noted that, far from the description of the libertarian socialist ideal republic that has been presented by writers such as Proudhon, Radomilsky, Bisson, and Rosenberg (whose work The Myth of the Nineteenth Century: The Rise of Mercantile Oppression was the principal theoretical work of the notorious anti-Semitic German Workers’ Party under Anton Drexler, whose similar attempt to stage an uprising against Kaiser Wilhelm III in 1946 led to his beheading), Brown’s Free Republic was a strict and heavy-handed theocracy. As Conder comments, “Every Sunday he would have them round up all the niggers and preach to them at length about how all God’s Laws had been handed down to him and it was their duty to obey. Pointing out how this left them no better than they had been under old Massa was a sure one-way trip to an interview with the Avengers, so I didn’t.” [quoted Page 172].
The final fall of the fortress, with the surrender of Brown to Lieutenant James Stuart and West Point cadet George Custer, has been well recounted in other sources, as has been the subsequent Trial of the Abolitionist Conspirators. Sparing the reputation of American jurisprudence, Fall has summarized the notorious prosecution summary by special prosecutor States-Rights Gist, leaving out his repeated imprecation “I demand that these mad dogs be shot!” He does bring to light the bizarre defense strategy of Abolitionist Lysander Spooner, which was an assertion that as he had not signed the Constitution, he was not bound by it. Before condemning him to death the court labeled this “the legal argument of an idiot.”
The executions of forty-seven high-ranking members of the rebels, which included many well-known Abolitionists, Negro leaders, and foreigners, is generally regarded as having broken the Abolitionist movement in the United States. One of the results of the rebellion was the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment on local sovereignty, as a result of which slavery was entrenched in the American polity. The administration of President Breckinridge saw a growing diplomatic isolation which led to such missed opportunities as the possible acquisition from the Russians of what is now the Canadian province of Alaska.
Fall ends his book with a listing of many possible actions that might have led to a better or worse ending. Personally, I find that his thesis that a even less successful rising might have done more to enhance the status of the Negro to be hopelessly optimistic. Nevertheless, Hell In a Very Small Place has deservedly become the standard work on the John Brown Uprising.