Watson Brown (abolitionist)

His body, one of the many victims lying in the road in Harpers Ferry,[5] was taken by students and faculty of the Winchester Medical College, in Winchester, Virginia. However, instead of using it for dissection and anatomy study, which was the fate of the other three bodies they also helped themselves to, it was prepared as a medical specimen or exhibit. Using techniques that were innovative at the time, a doctor at the College, presumably its head and anatomy professor Hugh Holmes McGuire, stained the arteries, drained of blood, with red dye, treated the muscles so they resembled wood, and preserved the nerves with varnish. The skin, half of the skull, and the brain were removed. It became a teaching exhibit in the College's one-room museum. This took place almost immediately after his death (there was of course no refrigeration).[6]

From papers found in a pocket they found that he was a son of John Brown, but they never learned which one. Nevertheless, the body was used as a means of showing the pro-slavery, secessionist city and College's attitude toward abolitionists. The exhibit was labelled "John Brown's son—thus always with Abolitionists".[7][8] The lips were "purposely distorted in disrespect."[9][10]

The skin was used to make moccasins. Small pieces of the skin were held by doctors and others locally as souvenirs. Four of the finger joints on one hand and all the toes on one foot had also been taken by souvenir hunters.[11]

In retaliation for this insult to the great Union icon and to their cause, Union forces burned the College just before leaving Winchester. It never reopened.

At the outbreak of the Civil War the College closed, as both students and professors were occupied in the war effort. (Dr. Hunter McGuire, Hugh's son and also a professor, was the personal physician of Stonewall Jackson.) The College was used as a hospital, although it was evacuated when Confederate troops withdrew in advance of the Union troops.

When Union troops under Gen. Nathaniel Banks entered Winchester in March 1862, Banks turned over management of the hospitals in the city to an Army doctor from Indiana, Jarvis J. Johnson. Johnson found the exhibited body, which he called "one of the most beautiful specimens he ever saw".[12] "A number of prominent citizens of Winchester called upon me at the hospital, and each and all declared that it was the remains of a son of John Brown."[13]

One of the professors of the said college [presumably Hugh McGuire] also called upon me in person, and demanded that I return the specimen. He then gave me all the details of the manner in which the body had been prepared, and said that he did it himself. He told me that after young Brown was killed at Harper's Ferry, that he had the body sent to Winchester, and that upon consultation with the other professors of the college, it was decided to prepare the body of young Brown that it might be preserved in the museum of the college as a specimen, and as an object of interest and note.

The professor strongly appealed to me in the name of my profession, and in the interest of the same, and as a friend of science to return to him the said body. ...He cited the fact that the sons of John Brown had been killed while engaged with their father in the attempt to overthrow Virginia's cherished institution of slavery, and hence Virginia was entitled to the body as an object of warning and curiosity.

In answer to the demand and appeals of the professor I said that the memory of John Brown and his sons, and their heroic battle at Harper's Ferry for the freedom of the slave, were held in too high esteem for me to leave the body upon the slave soil of Virginia. (italics added)[13]

What to do with the body, how to rescue it from this dishonor, was a problem for Dr. Johnson. If it had been buried in Virginia, which Virginians did not want, it would have been dug up immediately by the doctor or his agent. In theory the body could have been sent to Watson's mother at her home in North Elba, New York, but he said he felt this would just add to her sorrows. So he shipped it to his home in Indiana, and kept it there.[13]

As reports on the Harpers Ferry raid began to appear, it was determined that this body had to be either Oliver or Watson Brown, John's two sons killed during the raid. But no one knew which.

Twenty years later, in 1882, Johnson read in a newspaper that Brown's widow was visiting Chicago.[14] Through an intermediary he wrote her, saying that he had the body of one of her sons and that he wanted to turn it over to her for burial. He emphasized that he was not selling the body and would not accept any reward or other compensation.[15][13]

At Mrs. Brown's request, her son John, Jr., traveled to the doctor's home in Martinsville, Indiana, accompanied by Indiana State Geologist John Collett, an expert in phrenology.[16] (John Jr. "traveled for a time as a lecturer on phrenology";[17] this may be how they knew each other.) From the pictures and the bullet hole, they both concluded the body was Watson and not Oliver.[15][13][18]

Watson's body accompanied Mrs. Brown back to her home. She buried Watson next to his father's grave at the John Brown Farm in October 1882, 23 years after his death.[19][20]

The body of Oliver Brown, and those of 7 others who also died immediately during the raid, were thrown in packing crates and buried in a pit in an obscure place (so it would be forgotten), without ceremony, clergy, or marker. Forty years later, in 1899, a scholar studying Brown located the man who had been paid $5 to bury the crates, and he led him to the spot.[21] While the identitues of those buried there were known, the remains could not be clearly distinguished, and they were all reburied in a single casket next to the graves of John and Watson Brown.[22]

• Burning of Winchester Medical College
• John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry
• John Brown's raiders