“Lieutenant Kagi, you disappoint me,” the Old Man said. “I has thought this matter through carefully. For years, I have studied the successful opposition of the Spanish chieftains when Spain was a Roman province. With ten thousand men, divided into small companies, acting simultaneously yet separately, they withstood the whole consolidated power of the Roman Empire for years! I have studied the successful warfare of the Circassian chief Schamyl against the Russians. I have lingered over the accounts of the wars of Toussaint-Louverture on the Haitian islands in the 1790s. You think I have not considered all these things? Land! Land, men! Land is fortification! In the mountains, a small group of men, trained as soldiers, in a series of delays, ambushes, escapes, and surprises, can hold off an enemy for years. They can hold off thousands. It is has been done. Many times.”
Well, that didn’t flatten them fellers out. The warm words become hard words and rose to chirping and near shouts. No matter what he said, they weren’t listening. Several announced they was leaving, and one, Richardson, a colored who just joined a few weeks previous—bellowing and trumpeting ’bout how he was itching to fight slavery—suddenly remembered he had cows to milk at a nearby farm where he was working. He hopped a horse, spurred that thing to a high trot, and was gone.
The Old Man watched him go.
“Anyone who wants to can leave with him,” he said.
There was no takers, but still, they jawed at him some more for the better part of three hours. The Old Man listened to them all, standing at the doorway of his cabin with his hands in his pockets, the dirty canvas cover of the doorway flapping behind him in the breeze, giving his words extra punch as it slapped and knocked against the door while he spoke against their fears. He had practiced this in his mind for many years, he said, and for each worry they come up with, he had a response.
“It’s an armory. It’s guarded!”
“By two night watchmen only.”
“How we gonna sneak out a hundred thousand guns? In a boxcar? We need ten boxcars!”
“We don’t need all of ’em. Just five thousand will do.”
“How we gonna get out the area?”
“We won’t. We slip into the nearby mountains. The slaves will hive with us once they know where we are. They will join and fight with us.”
“We don’t know the routes! Are there rivers about? Roads? Trails?”
“I know the land,” the Old Man said. “I have drawn it for you. Come inside and see.”
They reluctantly followed him and crowded into his cabin, where he unfurled a huge, canvas map on the table, the giant map I’d seen him secreting in his jacket and scrawling at and chewing the edges on from the first day I’d met him. Atop the map, labeled Harpers Ferry, were dozens of lines which showed the armory, nearby plantations, roads, trails, mountain ranges, and even the number of slaved Negroes living on nearby plantations. He’d done a lot of work, and the men were impressed.
He held the candle over the map so the men could see it, and after they looked at it for a few moments, he pointed to it and began to speak.
“This,” he said, pointing with his pencil, “is the Ferry. It is guarded by a single night watchman on either end of it. With the element of surprise, we will take them easily. Once we take them, we cut the telegraph wires here, and take the guardhouse easily, right here. The railroad tracks and the gunnery factory we hold till we load our weapons. It’s that easy. We can take the whole place in the middle of the night and be done in three hours and be gone. We gather our weapons and slip into the line of mountains”—here he pointed to his map—“that surround it. These mountains pass through Maryland, Virginia, down into Tennessee and Alabama. They’re thin passes. Too narrow for cannons, too tight for wide columns of troops to pass.”
He put the candle down.
“I surveyed these places several times. I know them like the back of my hand. I have studied them for years, before any of you were born. Once we establish ourselves in those passes, we can easily defend against any hostile action. From there, the slaves will flock to our stead, and we can attack plantations in the plains on both sides from our mountain posts.”
“Why would they join us?” Kagi asked.
The Old Man looked at him as if he’d just pulled out his teeth.
