John G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of Rebellion

If the evacuation of Harper's Ferry was a mystery to Patterson, it was a plain and common-sense necessity to the rebel commander. Occasionally an idea finds a tenacious and almost ineradicable lodgment in the public mind, without a shadow of reason or truth to justify it. Because the fanatic John Brown selected Harper's Ferry as the scene of his wild exploit, the public mind jumped to the conclusion that that spot was a natural stronghold, a Gibraltar, a Thermopylae. Now, the single mountain-line called the Blue Ridge, crossing the Potomac River at Harper's Ferry, is as far from being a mountain stronghold as a straight line of picketfence across a brook is from being a block-house. John Brown was as unsound in war as in politics. But it would seem that, even in highly civilized nations, there lingers a remnant of the savage superstition that insanity is inspiration; for strong minds caught at the suggestion that he had recognized in Harper's Ferry a negro Thermopylae.

This was apparently the light in which the rebel authorities regarded the place, and its occupancy and retention was made a prime object at the beginning. Jefferson Davis himself sent Johnston, one of his best officers, to command it. “My conversations with General Lee, in Richmond,” says Johnston, “and the President's [Jefferson Davis] oral instructions to me in Montgomery, had informed me distinctly that they regarded Harper's Ferry as a natural fortress, commanding the entrance into the Valley of Virginia from Pennsylvania and Maryland, and that it was occupied in that idea, and my command not that of a military district and active army, but of a fortress and its garrison.”

When Johnston arrived, however, and made a personal in-